With God against Napoleon: Military Mobilisation and Patriotic Preaching in Prussia during the Spring Campaign of 1813

Abstract This article focuses on the religiously motivated mass mobilisation in Prussia during the Spring Campaign of 1813. At the centre of attention are a series of political sermons preached by Protestant pastors with the aim of motivating the Prussian population to take part in the hostilities against Napoleonic France. Acting on behalf of the Prussian state, these preachers declared that participation in the war against Napoleon was a patriotic and religious obligation for every Christian. Imagined as the true leader of the anti-French coalition, God was thus directly involved in earthly politics. From the clergy’s point of view, the war of 1813 could be justified by the fact that it was waged both for universal human values as well as for the freedom of a specific political community, the Prussian state. The Protestant clergy actively advocated the mass mobilisation of the Prussian population and propagandised in their sermons for a ‘total’ war against the enemy which at the same time was restricted and humanised by Christian ethics. The Prussian authorities found this first religiously motivated mass mobilisation highly successful and decided to extend it for the whole period of the Liberation Wars of 1813–15 and onwards. Mass mobilisation was undoubtedly a modern phenomenon, and the Prussian example shows that religion and the church played a significant role in the process of European modernisation in the nineteenth century.