The Plundering of Lübeck

A glimpse into research

During their fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, the researchers work on a project of their own choice related to the Kolleg’s topic. Sometimes a single source is at the centre of these projects, sometimes there are hundreds, and it is not always classical historical source material. That is why we have asked our fellows to present a source that is central to their research project, that is particularly meaningful or that simply reads like a thriller – their absolute favourite source, so to speak.

We publish these continuously on the weekends during Advent, allowing us to look back on the year once again.

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Gundula Gahlen

Project: Violence in the French and Austrian armies in the context of military penal law, the law of war and the customs of war during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815)

Source: Charles de Villers, Villers Brief an die Gräfinn Fanny von Beauharnois enthaltend eine Nachricht von den Begebenheiten, die zu Lübeck an dem Tage, Donnerstag den 6ten November 1806 und folgenden vorgefallen sind, 3.  Aufl., Amsterdam 1808 [Erstauflage 1807]

The letter is both bill of indictment and petition. It refers to the fact that, in November 1806, the neutral city of Lübeck, where the French author Charles de Villers lived, was first occupied by Prussian troops before being plundered by French troops for three days.

Villers’ letter was an attempt to intervene on behalf of the people of Lübeck by appealing to Napoleon through Countess de Beauharnais, a relative of Napoleon’s wife and Villers’ friend. Villers wanted to tell Napoleon about the brutal events that were happening, and urge him to pay reparations to the city of Lübeck. This did not have the desired effect. So Villers addressed the enlightened public by publishing the letter in French and German, where he called for the war to be conducted in a civilised manner.

What is interesting about this source is that Villers cites various systems of norms as arguments: morality, law in the sense of natural law, international law, the law of war in the sense of raison de guerre, and the law of war in the sense of military custom. He evaluates almost all legal arguments in moral terms and regards morality as the supreme guide.

France and Germany treated the letter completely differently. In France, the letter went largely unnoticed; and, where notice was taken of it, then Villers was perceived as impertinent or even as a traitor to the fatherland. In contrast, in Germany, the letter was seen as a historical report and as one of the most important appeals of the time for the civilian population to be protected in war.

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Zitieren als:
Gahlen, Gundula, The Plundering of Lübeck. The Plundering of Lübeck. A glimpse into research, EViR Blog, 19.12.2025, https://www.evir.uni-muenster.blog/en/the-plundering-of-lubeck/.

Lizenz:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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