From Collaboration to Resistance: Politics, Experience, and Memory of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Southern Germany

Abstract

Travelers strolling through Stuttgart's Old Town who pause before Württemberg's royal residence can hardly fail to notice the Victory Column. Thirty meters high, it towers over the square and proclaims Crown Prince Wilhelm's victories against the armies of Napoleon in 1814. Erected in 1841, the Victory Column marked the Silver Jubilee of Wilhelm's reign, by that time a much-loved regent. Eight years earlier, at the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, the Bavarian king Ludwig I dedicated a memorial to the dead of the Russian Campaign. Evidently cast from the metal of French cannons, the massive obelisk dominates a crossroads in Munich—roads named after victorious battles fought during the Wars of Liberation. With their military campaigns engraved in stone, the two monarchies, Württemberg and Bavaria, demonstrated their zealous opposition to the French Emperor.