La Bataille de Prusse 1809

Doctor Reeves Chronicles The World of Austerlitz & Jena

Dr. Henry Reeves was an English physician trained at the University of Edinburgh where he took his medical degree in 1803. That famous institute of higher learning was at that time the center of much of the English-speaking world’s scientific and literary activity. Reeves, not unlike the many of this generation who studied at Edinburgh, were caught up in the beehive of intellectual hub-bub then occurring in the United Kingdom. His letters reveal one day a meeting with the elder Disraeli, father of the future prime minister; and then meeting the great poet Samuel Coleridge the next. He was also a close friend of the famed English chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, and an acquaintance of the famed botanist and champion of Australia, Sir Joseph Banks. Rather than take up the scalpel, Reeves decided to travel to Central Europe to study the culture; history and science of that time. He spent the first few months of his journey in Neuchatel to study his French. He was in Neuchatel shortly before that small state was plucked from the Prussians to create a principality for Napoleon’s Chief of Staff, Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier. This would be just one of the many grievances the Prussians would let fester in the deteriorating relationship with the French which would lead to war in the following fall.

Now French was the language of choice throughout Europe for the upper classes. Boning up on his French in what was then the Prussian principality of Neuchatel was a necessary deviation. So if Reeve wanted to communicate with Prussians; Russians; Austrians or any German for that matter, then he

better perfect his French. In his journal, Reeve discusses a dinner party he attended in Vienna with people from several nations in attendance. The only German he heard was a rough version of the Teutonic language spoken to the servants by the Austrian hosts. The rest of conversation in the Hapsburg capitol was French. After he left Neuchatel, Dr. Reeve’s arrived in the Bavarian city of Ratisbon---aka Regensburg---on September 30, 1805, just three weeks before Ulm surrenders to Napoleon, was an opportune event for historians. Reeve was in central Germany just as the Prussians became enraged with French Marshal Bernadotte’s violation of the neutrality of the Prussian principality of Anspach on October 3. This relatively minor

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