French invasion of Russia

The French invasion of Russia, known in Russia as the Patriotic War of 1812, was Napoleon's attempt in 1812 to force Tsar Alexander I back into line with his blockade of Britain. Between June and December a multinational army of well over 400,000 men marched to Moscow and back, and almost all of it was destroyed. The disaster ended the myth of Napoleon's invincibility and opened the way to his fall.

After defeating Russia in 1807, Napoleon made peace with Alexander I at Tilsit, and Russia joined the Continental System, the French ban on trade with the United Kingdom. The blockade hurt Russia's economy, and on 31 December 1810 the tsar stepped away from it. Other quarrels added to the tension, including Napoleon's enlargement of the Duchy of Warsaw on Russia's western border. Napoleon assembled a huge army drawn from France and from allied and subject states such as Poland, Italy, the German states, Austria and Prussia. He called the campaign the "Second Polish War" to win Polish support.

On 24 June 1812 the Grande Armée began crossing the Neman River into Russian territory. Its strength at the start is usually estimated at more than 450,000 men, with later contingents bringing the total who entered Russia to around 600,000 by some counts. Facing them were Russian armies of perhaps 180,000 to 220,000 under Michael Barclay de Tolly and Pyotr Bagration. The Russians fell back rather than risk being destroyed, and the French, marching quickly through heat and dust, lost huge numbers to disease, desertion and hunger long before any major battle. In August Napoleon took Smolensk after two days of fighting, but the Russian armies escaped. Alexander then gave the supreme command to the veteran general Mikhail Kutuzov.

On 7 September 1812 Kutuzov stood and fought at Borodino, about 110 kilometres west of Moscow. In the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars, involving more than 250,000 troops, at least 70,000 men were killed or wounded. The French took the main Russian positions, but Napoleon held back his Guard and the Russian army withdrew intact. At a council at Fili, Kutuzov decided to give up Moscow without a fight to save the army. Napoleon entered the largely deserted city on 14 September. Within two days fires, attributed to arson ordered by the Russian governor Fyodor Rostopchin, had burned around three quarters of it.

Napoleon waited five weeks for peace terms that never came. On 19 October he left Moscow with about 108,000 men, hoping to retreat through untouched country to the south-west. After the battle of Maloyaroslavets he turned back onto the route of the advance, through land already stripped bare. Cossacks and peasant partisans attacked stragglers and foragers, nearly all the horses died, and guns and wagons were abandoned. Winter set in with a blizzard on 6 November, and the army, still in summer clothing, suffered terribly from cold, hunger and typhus. In late November the remnants fought their way across the Berezina river. On 5 December Napoleon left the army at Smorgonie and hurried back to Paris by sledge.

Exact figures are impossible, and estimates vary widely. Some historians calculate that of roughly 612,000 men who entered Russia, about 112,000 came back, with some 100,000 killed in action, around 200,000 dead of other causes and about 100,000 taken prisoner. The campaign as a whole may have cost around a million lives, soldiers and civilians, divided fairly evenly between the two sides.

Prussia and Austria soon changed sides, and the War of the Sixth Coalition that began in 1813 ended with Napoleon's abdication and exile to Elba. His return in 1815 ended at the Battle of Waterloo. In Russia the victory strengthened national feeling through the nineteenth century. The Patriotic War of 1812 is distinct from the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet name for the war that followed the German invasion of 1941, Operation Barbarossa.

Our 1800 map shows the Russian Empire before the invasion, and the 1815 map shows Europe after the defeat of the First French Empire and the redrawing of borders that followed.