Peter Paret's masterful book on the question how to respond to a dramatic defeat caused by the enemy's innovation in the organization of military, warfare, and society focuses on the Prussian monarchy during and after Napoleon's devastating victory in the battles of Jena and Auerstedt in November 1806. It aims to demonstrate how in one particular historical episode operational analyses together with institutional and political decisions eventually turned defeat to victory. Paret, professor emeritus of modern history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has written widely on the history of war and society and on the relationship of art, society, and politics. He is the author of many important studies, which include Clausewitz and the State (1976) and Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (1997). The book, based on his former work and current scholarship, presents in an expanded form the four Lees Knowles Lectures that Paret gave in 2008 at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. This traditional lecture series on aspects of military science was started in 1912 and included in the last decade scholars such as Hew Strachan (1996), Keith Jeffery (2000), and Antony Beevor (2004).

The structure of the book follows the four lectures. The first chapter, “Two Battles,” outlines the campaign of 1806, the methods of the French army, and the difficulties the Prussians experienced in countering them. It discusses the causes for the Prussian defeat and provides “the raw material, which the succeeding chapters convert into discussions of art and literature, political theory, and the history and analysis of theory” (p. 8). For Paret, Napoleon won because “the French army was the better integrated and mobile force, against which the less flexible and slower Prussians, with their uncertain strategic concepts, would not necessarily lose but were disadvantaged” (p. 28). Poor leadership played a role, but was different for him than for the officers of the historical section of the Prussian, and after 1871, the German General Staff; it was also not the main cause for many conservative Prusso-German historians.

The second chapter, “Violence in Words and Images,” shifts the focus from the history of the campaign to the responses of German artists and writers to the defeat. It analyzes broadsheets by the Saxon artist Christian Gottfried Geissler and the Alsatian genre and battle painter Jacques François Swebach; literature by German authors such as Heinrich Heine, Friedrich von Schiller, and Heinrich von Kleist; and paintings from Caspar David Friedrich that responded to the Prussian-Russian defeat in 1806–1807. Paret interprets these works of art and literature as indicators of popular and elite attitudes toward war, which influenced the conduct of war and the kind and extent of military innovation. For him writers and artists gave voice to more general social and cultural attitudes to war in general and helped to cope with the shocking defeat emotionally and intellectually. In his overview the arts stand “for the rest” because they reflect and document “attitudes of their times, openly or implicitly, favorably or critically” (p. 34). For Paret, the artistic treatment of the war as part of the human experience reached “a new level in Germany at a time in which ideologically, politically, and socially war expands its reach and takes a new form.” War became more than a matter for the military elite and the peasants, serfs, and poor of the rank and file. Nationalism and conscription brought war to everyone, and art and literature reflected and spread this (pp. 69-70). This extension of war to all classes of society created a new environment for policy and theory.

The third chapter, “Responses and Reform,” addresses Prussian political and institutional responses to the defeats. It traces the efforts of the reformers in the state and the military to recover from the defeat and prepare the Prussian monarchy for a new, more successful war of revenge, which they perceived as the only possible way to liberate the truncated state. This chapter summarizes Paret's extensive research on the Prussian military reforms and their political context. At the heart of the aimed-for changes was the attempt to turn “the regular army into an institution more closely linked with all segments of the population,” which meant expanding the obligation of military service to all segments of the society, including the middle classes, and changing the motivation for war. “Service to the nation became the new appeal” (p. 102). For Paret the military reforms of the Prussian state were quite successful. Taken together, they “created an army that in its organization and manner was largely new. It met the operational and tactical challenges posed by the armies of the French republic and institutionalized under Napoleon” (p. 101). The Prussian state did not keep the bargain it had propagated, however: “subjects become citizens; citizens defend their country,” and the constitution the monarch had promised in 1814 was not realized (p. 103). The old authoritarian system remained.

The last chapter, “The Conquest of Reality by Theory,” examines the impact of the defeat on the military thinking of two important but opposing military theorists of the time, Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. Paret's expertise on the subject allows him a skillful brief discussion of the writings of both authors on the war of 1806–1807. For him Clausewitz is the one with the more adequate theoretical approach, because he was an “unusually searching observer of a new phase of European and soon world history” who understood the interconnectedness of war, politics, society, and culture (p. 142).

The same can be said about Peter Paret, who in this book, as in his earlier work, analyzes military and war in their interconnectedness to politics, society, and culture. For sure, experts of the subject and readers of Paret's earlier works will not find many new insights in this short book, but for them and for everybody who is interested in the subject, it offers an excellent and elegantly written overview on Prussia in 1806 and the responses to the defeat of its army.