Such were the issues which controlled the national destiny of Germany in 1801. Napoleon unintentionally gave the impetus to the German resurgence by forcing some vestige of rational organization upon the land. The internal condition of the priest-ruled districts was generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance kept life down to an inert monotony. The free cities, as a rule, were sunk in debt; the management of their affairs had become the perquisite of a few lawyers and privileged families. The new régime centralized administration, strengthened the financial system, and relieved the peasants of the most intolerable of their burdens, and thus gave them a stake in the national welfare. Five years later Napoleon helped matters further by a rule of insolence and national oppression that was intolerable to any educated persons except the ever servile Prussian court. The battle of Jena and the capture of Berlin had thrown all Prussia into French hands, and the court into French alliances. Stein protested and attempted to arouse the people. He met with indifference. Then came more indignities. Forty thousand French soldiers permanently quartered on Prussian soil taught the common people the bitterness of foreign domination. When the Spanish resistance of 1808 showed the weakness of Napoleon a band of statesmen and patriots, including the poet Arndt, the philosopher Fichte and the theologian Schleiermacher, renewed their campaign for national feeling, the only thing that could put into German armies the spirit needful for Napoleon’s overthrow. In all this the House of Hohenzollern and the ministers of the court of Potsdam played a most inglorious rôle. The patriots were frowned upon or openly prosecuted. Schill, a patriotic army officer, who attempted to attack the French on his own account, was denounced from Berlin. Even when Napoleon was returning defeated from Moscow, the jealousies of the court stood out to the last against the spontaneous national uprising. Finally Frederick William, the Prussian king, made a virtue of necessity and entered the field in the name of German unity. But the nationalist movement had become a constitutionalist, even a republican, movement. The German soldiers, returning home victorious after the battle of Leipzig, received the expected promise of a constitution from Frederick William. After two years of delay the promise had been practically withdrawn. Only the examples of Weimar, Bavaria, and Baden, together with the propaganda of the liberals, kept the issue alive and growing, until it came to partial culmination in 1848.