Friedrich Engels 

Prussian Francs-Tireurs 

The Pall Mail Gazette. 
Nr. 1817, 9. Dezember 1870 

Prussian Francs-Tireurs. 

For some time past the reports of village-burning by the Prussians in 
France had pretty nearly disappeared from the press. We began to hope 
that the Prussian authorities had discovered their mistake and stopped 
such proceedings in the interest of their own troops. We were mistaken. 
The papers again teem with news about the shooting of prisoners and the 
destroying of villages. The Berlin Börsen Courier reports, under date Ver- 
sailles, Nov. 20: — 

Yesterday the first wounded and prisoners arrived from the action near 

Dreux on the 17". Short work was made with the francs-tireurs, and an 10 

example was made of them; they were placed in a row, and one after the 
other got a bullet through his head. A general order for the whole army 
has been published forbidding most expressly to bring them in as prison- 
ers, and ordering to shoot them down by drumhead court-martial wher- 

ever they show themselves. Against these disgracefully cowardly brigands 15 

and ragamuffins (Lumpengesindel) such a proceeding has become an 
absolute necessity. 

Again, the Vienna Tagespresse says, under the same date:—"In the 
forest of Villeneuve you could have seen, for the last week, four francs- 
tireurs strung up for shooting at our Uhlans from the woods." 

An official report dated Versailles, the 26 of November, states that 
the country people all around Orleans, instigated to fight by the priests, 
who have been ordered by Bishop Dupanloup to preach a crusade, have 
begun a guerrilla warfare against the Germans; patrols are fired at, offic- 

ers carrying orders shot down by labourers seemingly working in the 25 

field: to avenge which assassinations all non-soldiers carrying arms are 
immediately executed. Not a few priests are now awaiting trial—seven- 
ty-seven. 

Prussian Francs-Tireurs 

These are but a few instances, which might be multiplied almost infi- 
nitely, so that it appears a settled purpose with the Prussians to carry on 
these brutalities up to the end of the war. Under these circumstances, it 
may be as well to call their attention once more to some facts in modern 

5 Prussian history. 

The present King of Prussia can perfectly recollect the time of his 
country's deepest degradation, the Battle of Jena, the long flight to the 
Oder, the successive capitulations of almost the whole of the Prussian 
troops, the retreat of the remainder behind the Vistula, the complete 

10 downbreak of the whole military and political system of the country. 
Then it was that, under the shelter of a Pomeranian coast fortress, pri- 
vate initiative, private patriotism, commenced a new active resistance 
against the enemy. A simple cornet of dragoons, Schill, began at Kolberg 
to form a free corps (Gallice, francs-tireurs), with which, assisted by the 

15 inhabitants, he surprised patrols, detachments, and field-posts, secured 
public moneys, provisions, war matériel, took the French General Victor 
prisoner, prepared a general insurrection of the country in the rear of the 
French and on their line of communication, and generally did all those 
things which are now laid to the charge of the French francs-tireurs, and 

20 which are visited on the part of the Prussians by the titles of brigands and 
ragamuffins, and by a "bullet through the head" of disarmed prisoners. 
But the father of the present King of Prussia sanctioned them expressly 
and promoted Schill. It is well known that this same Schill, in 1809, when 
Prussia was at peace but Austria at war with France, led his regiment out 

25 on a campaign of his own against Napoleon, quite Garibaldi-like; that he 
was killed at Stralsund and his men taken prisoner. Out of these, all of 
whom Napoleon, according to Prussian war rules, had a perfect right to 
shoot, he merely had eleven officers shot at Wesel. Over the graves of 
these eleven francs-tireurs the father ofthe present King of Prussia, much 

30 against his will, but compelled by public feeling in the army and out of it, 
had to erect a memorial in their honour. 

No sooner had there been a practical beginning of freeshooting among 
the Prussians than they, as becomes a nation of thinkers, proceeded to 
bring the thing into a system and work out the theory of it. The theorist 

35 of freeshooting, the great philosophical franc-tireur among them, was no 
other than Anton Neithardt von Gneisenau, some time field marshal in 
the service of his Prussian Majesty. Gneisenau had defended Colberg in 
1807; he had had some of Schilfs francs-tireurs under him; he had been 
assisted vigorously in his defence by the inhabitants of the place, who 

40 could not even lay claim to the title of national guards, mobile or seden- 
tary, and who therefore, according to recent Prussian notions, clearly 

Friedrich Engels 

deserved to be "immediately executed." But Gneisenau was so impressed 
by the greatness of the resources which an invaded country possessed in 
an energetic popular resistance that he made it his study for a series of 
years how this resistance could be best organized. The guerrilla war in 
Spain, the rising of the Russian peasants on the line of the French retreat 5 
from Moscow, gave him fresh examples; and in 1813 he could proceed to 
put his theory in practice. 

In August, 1811, already Gneisenau had formed a plan for the prepa- 
ration of a popular insurrection. A militia is to be organized which is to 
have no uniform but a military cap (Gallice, képi) and black and white 10 
belt, perhaps a military great-coat; in short, as near as can be, the uni- 
form of the present French francs-tireurs. "If the enemy should appear in 
superior strength, the arms, caps, and belt, are hid, and the militiamen 
appear as simple inhabitants of the country." The very thing which the 
Prussians now consider a crime to be punished by a bullet or a rope. 15 
These militia troops are to harass the enemy, to interrupt his communi- 
cations, to take or destroy his convoys of supplies, to avoid regular at- 
tacks, and to retire into woods or bogs before masses of regular soldiers. 
"The clergy of all denominations are to be ordered, as soon as the war 
breaks out, to preach insurrection, to paint French oppression in the 20 
blackest colours, to remind the people of the Jews under the Maccabees, 
and to call upon them to follow their example. ... Every clergyman is to 
administer an oath to his parishioners that they will not surrender any 
provisions, arms, &c, to the enemy until compelled by actual force"—in 
fact, they are to preach the same crusade which the Bishop of Orleans has 25 
ordered his priests to preach, and for which not a few French priests are 
now awaiting their trial. 

Whoever will take up the second volume of Professor Pertz's "Life of 
Gneisenau" will find, facing the title-page of the second volume, a repro- 
duction of part of the above passage as a facsimile of Gneisenau's hand- 30 
writing. Facing it is the facsimile of King Frederick William's marginal 
note to it:—"As soon as one clergyman shall have been shot this will 
come to an end." Evidently the King had no great faith in the heroism of 
his clergy. But this did not prevent him from expressly sanctioning Gnei- 
senau's plans; nor did it prevent, a few years later, when the very men 35 
who had driven out the French were arrested and prosecuted as "dem- 
agogues," one of the intelligent demagogue-hunters of the time, into 
whose hands the original document had fallen, from instituting proceed- 
ings against the unknown author of this attempt to excite people to the 
shooting of the clergy! 40 

Prussian Francs-Tireurs 

Up to 1813 Gneisenau never tired in preparing not only the regular 
army but also popular insurrection as a means to shake off the French 
yoke. When at last the war came, it was at once accompanied by insur- 
rection, peasant resistance, and franc-tireurs. The country between the 

5 Weser and Elbe rose to arms in April; a little later on the people about 
Magdeburg rose; Gneisenau himself wrote to friends in Franconia—the 
letter is published by Pertz—calling on them to rise upon the enemy's line 
of communications. Then at last came the official recognition of this 
popular warfare, the Landsturm-Ordnung of the 21: of April, 1813 (pub- 

10 lished in July only), in which every able-bodied man who is not in the 
ranks of either line or landwehr is called upon to join his landsturm 
battalion, to prepare for the sacred struggle of self-defence which sanc- 
tions every means. The landsturm is to harass both the advance and the 
retreat ofthe enemy, to keep him constantly on the alert, to fall upon his 

15 trains of ammunition and provisions, his couriers, recruits, and hospitals, 
to surprise him at nights, to annihilate his stragglers and detachments, to 
lame and to bring insecurity into his every movement; on the other hand, 
to assist the Prussian army, to escort money, provisions, ammunition, 
prisoners, &c. In fact, this law may be called a complete vade-mecum for 

20 the franc-tireur, and, drawn up as it is by no mean strategist, it is as 
applicable to-day in France as it was at that time in Germany. 

Fortunately for Napoleon, it was but very imperfectly carried out. The 
King was frightened by his own handiwork. To allow the people to fight 
for themselves, without the King's command, was too anti-Prussian. 

25 Thus the landsturm was suspended until the King was to call upon it, 
which he never did. Gneisenau chafed, but managed finally to do without 
the landsturm. If he were alive now, with all his Prussian after-experi- 
ences, perhaps he would see his beau-ideal of popular resistance appro- 
ached, if not realized, in the French francs-tireurs. For Gneisenau was a 

30 man—and a man of genius.