Napoleon’s Russian Campaign

The root cause of the Russian Campaign lay in the Continental System, Napoleon’s attempt to strangle Britain by closing every European port to British trade. The strategy was economically brutal but demanded absolute enforcement: a single defecting power could unravel the blockade and allow British goods to flood the Continent. By 1810, Tsar Alexander I had grown weary of the economic pain the System inflicted on Russia. Russian nobles were losing fortunes as British markets dried up and the rouble collapsed. In December 1810 Alexander opened Russian ports to neutral shipping, a transparent fiction that restored trade with Britain. To Napoleon it was an act of deliberate hostility.

There were other irritants. Napoleon had annexed the Duchy of Oldenburg in northern Germany, whose duke was Alexander’s uncle, without compensation. Russian ambitions in the Ottoman Empire chafed against French interests. The two emperors who had embraced at Tilsit in 1807 as the masters of Europe were now barely concealing their mutual contempt. Napoleon’s calculation was simple in outline: a short, sharp campaign to inflict a decisive defeat near the border, force a treaty, and compel Russian compliance with the System. He had done it to Austria twice and to Prussia once. He expected to do it again.

The fatal miscalculation was to assume that Russia would behave as a western European state. Russia had almost no major cities the loss of which would be strategically decisive, roads that turned to mud in rain and dust in dry weather, and a ruling class that could sustain military humiliation as long as the army survived. Napoleon’s model of war, built on the swift annihilation of the enemy’s field force followed by a peace conference, had no mechanism for dealing with an adversary willing to burn its own capital and keep retreating.

On 24 June 1812 the Grande Armée began crossing the Niemen river near Kaunas. Napoleon stood on the bank watching his columns stream across the pontoon bridges, and reportedly asked a Polish officer whether the river had ever been crossed. The symbolism was deliberate: here was the edge of the old world, and beyond lay conquest. What no one said was that Hannibal had also crossed his Rubicon.

The Russian army, commanded by Barclay de Tolly and subsequently also by Bagration with his separate Second Army, declined to fight. The orders from St Petersburg were ambiguous but the strategic logic was clear enough: the Russian forces were too small individually to confront the Grande Armée and needed to concentrate first. French cavalry repeatedly lunged at the retreating columns only to find that the Russians had slipped away in the night. The pursuit was exhausting and demoralising.

As the French advanced, the scale of the Russian strategy became apparent. Villages were abandoned, crops burned, fodder destroyed, wells poisoned. The army that had lived off the land in Italy, in Germany, and in Poland now found itself crossing a scorched landscape. The supply trains that had set out from Germany were already breaking down on the roads east of the Niemen. Horses were dying from lack of fodder. Men were dying from dysentery, typhus, and the sheer physical attrition of covering fifteen to twenty miles a day in summer heat without adequate food. The campaign was barely two weeks old and the army was already consuming itself.

Barclay de Tolly’s refusal to fight had made him politically untenable in Russia. Under enormous pressure from the Tsar and the nobility, he was replaced in August by Mikhail Kutuzov, the old one-eyed veteran of Austerlitz who was respected by the Russian people if not always by the Tsar. Kutuzov had no intention of fighting an open battle but he understood that he could not abandon Moscow without making some stand. He chose a position near the village of Borodino, on the old post road to Moscow, and ordered his army to entrench.

On 7 September 1812 the two armies fought what remains one of the bloodiest single days in military history. Approximately 250,000 men were engaged and around 70,000 became casualties before nightfall: roughly 35,000 on each side. The French assault, launched against the Russian fortifications, the Great Redoubt and the Bagration flêches on the southern flank, was conducted with extraordinary courage by both sides. The fighting for the Great Redoubt alone cost thousands of lives.

Napoleon’s failure at Borodino was not tactical but strategic. At every crisis in the day his marshals – Ney, Murat, Davout – demanded that he commit the Imperial Guard to deliver the decisive blow. Each time Napoleon refused. He was unwell, uncertain, and unwilling to risk his last reserve so far from France. The Guard stood and watched as lesser regiments broke themselves against Russian cannon. When darkness fell the Russian army was battered but intact, and Kutuzov withdrew it eastward during the night. Napoleon had won the field but not the campaign.

Read the full account of the bloodiest day of the campaign on the dedicated Battle of Borodino page.

Napoleon attempted to return via Kaluga and a different route than the one he had come, hoping to find untouched country. At Maloyaroslavets on 24 October the army fought a furious engagement against Kutuzov’s force for control of the road south. The town changed hands several times and was eventually left a smoking ruin. Kutuzov did not pursue aggressively but positioned his army to block the southern route, and Napoleon, unwilling to risk another engagement with depleted forces, turned onto the Smolensk road: the same road they had already destroyed on the advance.

From that moment the retreat became a catastrophe on a scale that European history had never seen. The autumn rains turned roads to mud, then in early November the temperature fell dramatically, at times below minus thirty degrees Celsius. Men who had already marched hundreds of miles in disintegrating boots now walked through snow without adequate clothing. Horses collapsed and died in their thousands; some froze standing up. Men lay down in the snow and did not get up. Wagons were abandoned. The wounded were left behind. Discipline broke down first in the multi-national contingents and then across the army, collapsing entirely in units that had not eaten for days.

The Cossacks, fast, elusive, and merciless, harried the flanks and rear of the column constantly, cutting off stragglers, destroying detachments, and sowing terror in men too exhausted to fight effectively. The army moved in a long, straggling column of barely controlled misery, the Guard and the remaining organised units at its core, surrounded by tens of thousands of stragglers and civilian followers stumbling through the snow.

The Berezina river crossing in late November 1812 was the nadir. Russian forces had seized the main crossing and threatened to destroy what remained of the army entirely. Napoleon’s engineers, working in freezing water up to their shoulders, built two pontoon bridges under fire in a feat of extraordinary courage and technical skill. For three days the remnants of the Grande Armée crossed while French rearguards fought off Russian attacks on both banks. Thousands were killed in the fighting or drowned when bridges broke under the weight of fugitives. Thousands more were left on the eastern bank when the bridges were finally burned. Those who survived the Berezina still faced hundreds of miles through deepening winter to reach safety.

The Russian Campaign did not immediately end Napoleon’s reign. He returned to Paris, suppressed a coup attempt by General Malet, and within months had assembled a new army from the conscript classes of 1813 and 1814. But it was never the same army. The veterans who had learned their trade in Italy, Egypt, and the great campaigns of 1805 – 1809 were gone, and their irreplaceable experience went with them. The new conscripts were brave enough but they could not yet match the hardened troops of Prussia and Russia in the mobile warfare that Napoleon’s system demanded.

More significantly, the news of the campaign’s catastrophe destroyed the myth of French invincibility that had been the foundation of Napoleon’s political control of Europe. Prussia broke its alliance with France in December 1812 and signed a convention with Russia at Tauroggen. By the spring of 1813 the Sixth Coalition was forming: Russia, Prussia, Austria, Britain, Sweden, and ultimately Spain united against France in a way they had never managed before. The 1813 campaign in Germany, the Battle of Leipzig and the final collapse in 1814, all flowed directly from the catastrophe of 1812. Without Russia, the empire might have endured for decades.

The Russian Campaign also had a profound effect on the subsequent history of European nationalism. Polish soldiers had fought and died in the belief that Napoleon would restore their country; he had used them and could not deliver. The German states that had served France unwillingly now had a common narrative of sacrifice and humiliation around which a national consciousness could form. In Russia itself the campaign produced an outpouring of patriotic feeling that would shape Russian identity for generations. The war that was meant to consolidate Napoleon’s empire instead began its dissolution.

In cultural terms, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, published in the 1860s, remains the greatest literary treatment of the campaign and has shaped the way generations of readers understand it. Modern military historians view the campaign as one of the most catastrophic in history, and largely self-inflicted: the product of Napoleon’s misjudgement of Russian resolve, Russian geography, and the Russian winter.