From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Landsturm was an irregular military unit which were created by a 21 April 1813 edict of Frederick William III of Prussia, and as such published in the preussische Gesetzesammlung (pp.79-89). The 1813 edict called to resistance "by any means" against the Napoleonic invador, and took as explicit example the Spanish Reglamento de Partidas y Cuadrillas of 28 December 1808 and the decree of 17 April 1809, known as Corso Terrestre, during the Peninsula War against Napoleonic troops (in the introduction, and in §8 and 52).

According to this edict, all Prussian citizens had the duty to oppose himself to the invasion of the enemy using any weapons available, axes, pitchfork, scythe or shotgun (§43). All Prussian had the duty not to obey to the order from the enemy and to make him a nuisance by any means possible. This was a clear cut with ordinary jus in bello, which commanded the civilian population to obey to the orders of the occupying power, and the police forces to assist the occupying power in crushing any uprising, qualified not as an insurgency but simply as criminal activity. This edicts explicitatly stated that it was preferable to risk the danger brought about the furies of an armed population than to let the enemy have easy control on the situation, and thus dispose at his will his troops. Legitime defense "justified the use of all means" (§7), including chaos.

The edicts was modified less than three months later, on 17 July 1813, and purified of its subversive content relatively to the laws of war. The war then took place according to the standard rules of conventional warfare. Carl Schmitt qualified it as the "Magna Carta of the partisan." Despite its not being put to practice, the Nazi jurist considered it, in a 1962 lecture in Francoist Spain, to be the "official document of the legitimation of the partisan of national defense" and as the "philosophical discovery of the partisan." ^[1]

• Corso Terrestre (see Francisco Javier Mina Larrea and Francisco Espoz y Mina, guerrilleros of the Peninsula War)
• Home Guard
• Volkssturm
• Levée en masse
• Irregular warfare
• Jus in bello

This military article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.