Peace treaties involve winners and losers, but generally they are intended by all parties to pave the way back to normality. The Treaty of Tilsit, imposed by Napoleon on Prussia in 1807, was different. For, as Sven Prietzel shows in his detailed study, this “peace” settlement was designed as an instrument of control. It was less a treaty than a foundational act for an extended empire. It deprived Prussia of half its territory, but its significance lay more in conceding to the French extensive extraterritorial rights that undermined the sovereignty of the rump Hohenzollern state.

Sovereignty figures prominently in this book, as indicated in the main title. Prietzel provides a brief survey of the concept's evolution before getting into the details of how Tilsit undermined it. Central were the financial obligations made upon Prussia, which went beyond reparation payments to include the provisioning of French occupation forces. These forces enjoyed extensive extraterritorial rights, especially along the military highway connecting the Napoleonic satellites of Saxony and the Duchy of Warsaw. The Napoleonic variety of debt-trap diplomacy not only included making demands that were exorbitantly high, and hence virtually impossible to meet, but also involved an element of intentional vagueness which could then be leveraged to achieve further encroachment. Although Prietzel does not make the claim, this kind of behaviour was typical of Napoleon, as demonstrated previously in the 1801 Concordat, to which he unilaterally appended the Organic Articles, and his “short and vague” constitution of the French state itself. The only really effective restraints on Napoleon's Prussian policy were concern for Russia and, after 1808, the distraction of the Spanish Ulcer.

This is essentially a political history, in contrast to the mass of socially-, culturally-, and institutionally-focused scholarship lavished on Napoleonic Germany in recent decades. The Prussian reforms appear here not as the inevitable product of long-term forces or as a premeditated scheme to transfer power from the king to bureaucrats. Rather, they are shown as responses to dire circumstances that created great popular suffering. Trade liberalisation, for example, was driven less by the ideology of Adam Smith than the desire to preempt attempts to bundle Prussia into Napoleon's “France first” Continental System to the detriment of the kingdom's producers. The sense of permanent crisis of these years is well charted also in those sections dealing with internal divisions within the Prussian elite. Opposition to King Frederick William III's official policy of avoiding an open break with Napoleon after Tilsit went beyond the realm of legitimate channels with the emergence of conspiratorial networks of officials and officers who plotted away in the shadows. That things did not go further was largely due to a general acceptance that the king, whatever his faults, remained a popular and unifying symbol. Also important in challenging royal supremacy were the provincial estates, whose prospects for survival (and hence ability to raise credit) looked at times more promising than the future of the central government. All this provides a useful corrective to general accounts that see this period as a preordained triumph for bureaucratic state absolutism.

Prietzel concludes with some brief reflections on the extent to which the reforms, designed for the short term, nonetheless succeeded in placing Prussia on a more stable footing over the longer term. In the final analysis, the impression left is that they did not succeed in this. Rather, they contributed to a further politicisation of the population without providing an adequate structure to meet the resulting demands for greater participation in decision-making. These pressures would build up in the following decades and explode in 1848.

In the round, Prietzel's book is a convincing account of the early Prussian reforms, when the situation was especially desperate. Though essentially a history of Prussia, this work is also very informative about Napoleon, his wider empire, and the European state system. What comes across from this broader perspective is that whilst Prussia's existence looked at times precarious, the French Grande Empire was doomed for the very reason that it proved so utterly incapable of establishing a stable order based upon legality and moderation. These two qualities, both hallmarks of Frederick William III's kingship, would, in contrast, prove much more durable, even if they also stymied far-reaching reform in the years immediately after Tilsit.