It has been said that fortune can turn on a dime, and up until the summer of 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte’s fortunes had largely been very good indeed.
The now infamous military commander and dictator had seized power in a coup d’etat over a decade before, shrewdly taking advantage of a disillusioned population and government still largely in chaos following the French Revolution. The Napoleonic Wars that followed for the better part of two decades left the man a reputation of being virtually invincible on the battlefield; Napoleon would ultimately control most of Central Europe through a series of conquests and coalitions that further strengthened France against its age-old adversary, Britain.
Napoleon solidified his hold on the continent by basically signing a non-aggression pact with Russia (and later Prussia) in 1807. The two formidable empires agreed to help each other in their primary fights against the United Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire, respectively, while ending their own ongoing dispute that was only weakening their positions.
But one of the principle points of the Treaty of Tilsit was that Russia agreed to join France’s trade blockade of Britain through its ‘Continental System,’ which in turn would significantly damage Russia’s economy down the road. And so Czar Alexander I had no choice but to pull out of the blockade three years later. Needless to say, Napoleon was not impressed.
His response, in typical Napoleonic fashion, was to conduct a massive invasion of the Russian Empire. On June 24, 1812, the Grande Armée crossed the Neman River and began the trek to Moscow. Of the estimated 600,000 French troops and their allies that made that crossing, only 120,000 would return home. Including civilian deaths and Russian losses, an estimated one million people would die during the campaign. An almost unfathomable loss of life for a single military operation that lasted around six months.
The invasion was fairly disastrous right off the hop. The French forces met fierce resistance from a Russian army that was largely in retreat mode, and supply lines were a logistical nightmare as they unsuccessfully attempted to outfit a huge army trying to advance quickly and gain as much territory as possible. If you’ve heard this story before or if it sounds familiar, it’s because Nazi Germany would attempt an eerily similar invasion of the Soviet Union 130 years later, ultimately meeting a similar disastrous fate despite early success.
As if the actual casualty toll from battle wasn’t enough, as the seasons switched from summer to fall, the notorious ‘Rasputitsa’ began. A period of time that occurs in the spring and in this case, the fall, heavy rains turned roads into impassable muddy gulches. And then came the Russian winter.
It’s hard to imagine a worse scenario for a soldier. Napoleon actually succeeded in ‘capturing’ a largely-abandoned Moscow, but by October his army had sustained such staggering losses that retreat back to France was his only option. And so they began the long march back west; amidst plummeting temperatures, attacking Cossack cavalry units, an extremely hostile civilian population supported by local militias, scarce food supplies and next to no horses remaining, tens of thousands more died. Of the estimated 150,000 horses the Grand Armée took with it into Russia, nearly all of them perished.
Typhus and hypothermia were the more effective killers of the French troops in the late stages of the campaign. Russia merely just had to sit back and wait for disease and the minus-40 degree temperatures to take their toll. The header at the top of this piece is a quote from Armand de Caulaincourt, one of Napoleon’s advisers. His memoirs of the Russian invasion painted a horrific scene of the army’s suffering during its retreat, and in particular what he witnessed in terms of hypothermia. Poorly-clothed soldiers trudged countless miles in the bitter cold, thinking of only how nice it would be to simply lay down and sleep. Most that did without the warmth of a nearby fire never got up again.
The Russian invasion of 1812 truly marked the beginning of the end for Napoleon. He was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba in 1814, and after a triumphant return to France less than a year later, he was defeated at his literal Waterloo by British and Prussian forces. He was then exiled a second time to the tiny island of Saint Helena in the middle of the southern Atlantic Ocean, where he would die six years later in 1821.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you back here in a fortnight.
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This is a bi-weekly opinion column; for question or comment contact Dan McNee at dmcnee@midwesternnewspapers.com.
