Karl Von Clausewitz

Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz was a Prussian general and military theorist born on June 1, 1780, in Burg bei Magdeburg, in what was then the Duchy of Magdeburg. The fourth son of a retired Prussian lieutenant whose family's noble status was contested, he entered the Prussian army as a Fahnenjunker at the age of twelve and saw his first combat in the War of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France.

He attended the Kriegsakademie in Berlin from 1801 to 1803, where he came under the influence of military reformer Gerhard von Scharnhorst and graduated at the head of his class. Captured with Prince August at Prenzlau in 1806 during the catastrophic Prussian defeat at Jena-Auerstedt, he spent nearly two years as a French prisoner of war, an experience that hardened his hostility to Napoleon.

After the Treaty of Tilsit he worked with Scharnhorst and August von Gneisenau on the reform of the Prussian army. In 1812, refusing to fight alongside France against Russia, he resigned his Prussian commission and joined the Russian Imperial Army, helping to negotiate the Convention of Tauroggen that began the Prussian defection from Napoleon. Reinstated in Prussian service, he served as chief of staff of III Corps in the 1815 Waterloo campaign.

From 1818 to 1830 he was administrative director of the Kriegsakademie, where he composed the unfinished treatise Vom Kriege, posthumously published in 1832 by his widow Marie von Brühl as On War. Recalled to active duty in 1830, he died of cholera at Breslau on November 16, 1831.

Carl, the German form often spelled Karl, is a masculine Germanic name from the Old High German karl meaning free man, cognate with the English Charles. He carried the masculine name throughout his life.