Russian Campaign

The Continental System was strangling the Russian economy: in December 1810 Alexander reopened his ports to neutrals and taxed French goods. To this were added the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which Saint Petersburg saw as a Poland in the making, and the annexation of the Duchy of Oldenburg, the appanage of a brother-in-law of the tsar. The two empires armed for eighteen months.

The Grande Armée that crossed the Niemen on 24-25 June 1812 was the largest ever assembled in Europe: some six hundred thousand men, fewer than half of them French — Poles, Italians, Germans of the Confederation, Swiss, Croats. The Russians refused battle and withdrew, burning the land behind them; Smolensk went up in flames in August.

Kutuzov, appointed under pressure from opinion, finally gave battle at Borodino on 7 September: seventy thousand killed and wounded in a single day, the bloodiest of the Napoleonic wars, without destroying the enemy.

On 14 September the army entered a city emptied of its inhabitants; the fire lit on Rostopchin's orders destroyed two thirds of Moscow in four days. Napoleon waited five weeks for a peace that never came: Alexander answered none of his letters.

The retreat began on 19 October. Cold, hunger, Cossacks and the crossing of the Berezina at the end of November finished the army: only a few tens of thousands recrossed the Niemen. The Empire had lost its cavalry, its artillery and its prestige; Europe understood that it could be beaten.