By 1811 the bright sunlight of Austerlitz was beginning to fade. Tensions were building up between France and Russia, as both countries remained rivals on the continent. Both Napoléon and Alexander were megalomaniacs, both possessed distinct and antagonist ambitions, each saw himself as the greatest man on Earth, under the protection of a special “destiny.” In order to perpetuate a Napoleonic Europe, it was essential to reduce Russia’s power, and the entente agreed at Tilsit and Erfurt in 1808 was only a temporary truce concluded to win time and consolidate positions. Czar Alexander was under strong pressure from the Russian nobility and military staff to break off the alliance. The first clear sign the alliance was deteriorating was the relaxation of the Continental System in Russia, which angered the French Emperor. By 1812, advisers to Alexander suggested the possibility of the recapture of Poland and an invasion of the French Empire. For this purpose, Russia deployed large numbers of troops on the Polish borders. On receipt of intelligence reports on Russia’s war preparations, Napoléon expanded his Grande Armée, and ignoring repeated advice against an invasion of the vast Russian heartland, prepared for an offensive campaign. Despite the Spanish drain on the French army, Napoléon managed to concentrate some 600,000 soldiers by calling on the vassal and allied states.
On June 23, 1812, the invasion of Russia was launched. It was a considerably dangerous gamble, which turned out to a major blunder and a determining factor in the fall of Napoléon, as it had not occurred to him that in addition to the Russian army, the French force would have to fight the Russian people and the Russian climate and immensity. In an attempt to gain increased support from Polish nationalists and patriots, Napoléon termed the operation the “Second Polish War”—the first Polish war was the Bar Confederation uprising by Polish nobles against Russia. Napoléon’s objective was a decisive engagement, but the Russians had by now learned valuable lessons about Napoleonic warfare. Instead of fighting a pitched battle, they retreated ever deeper into Russia, implementing a scorched-earth policy, leaving little or nothing behind them for the invaders to live on. In the vast empty Russian spaces in the pre-railway age, the lumbering French army soon outstripped its supply trains. It was not long before the route into Russia became a via dolorosa. Pillaging, indiscipline and desertion soon became rife on an unprecedented scale, while diseases, exhaustion, exposure, hunger and constant harassments by partisans and Cossacks inflicted the first casualties.
A brief attempt at resistance was made at Smolensk in the middle of August. The Russians were eventually defeated in a series of battles (notably at Borodino outside Moscow on September 7, 1812), but this was less of a defeat and more of a stalemate, for the Russian army withdrew in good order and retreated past Moscow. Napoléon resumed his advance and entered the city on September 14. He then assumed its fall would end the war and force Alexander to negotiate peace. Still the Czar refused to come to terms. Instead, on orders of the city’s military governor and commander-in-chief, Fyodor Rostopchin, rather than capitulating, Moscow was abandoned, deserted by its civil population, and burned in order to deny the French markets, magazines, stores and winter quarters.
By then, a general with republican ideas, the extravagant and deranged Claude- François de Malet, was attempting a coup in Paris. Malet, a conspirator imprisoned in 1806 and later moved to a mental hospital, spread rumors that the tyrannical Napoléon had been killed. With the help of accomplices he escaped the mental asylum, and announced that he had been entrusted with a provisional government. He tried to seize power and proclaimed the restoration of a republic and civic freedom. The lack of information quickly prompted rumors and speculations, but the ill-prepared conspiracy made no real headway, and only enjoyed a few hours of wavering success. Malet’s plot was rapidly unmasked by the Imperial commander of the Paris garrison, the putschist was arrested, summarily tried and duly executed. The episode was short-lived but it was very disquieting. The Napoleonic dynasty had become demonstrably fragile, nearly overthrown by a madman, and the cement of victory had begun to crack. Extremely perturbed, Napoléon hastily and secretly left Moscow—a city, now ravaged by a gigantic fire, that the French were forced to abandon.
With the coming of the harsh winter, and the Russian army’s scorched-earth tactics, the French army, finding it increasingly difficult to forage food for themselves and their horses, was beginning to disintegrate. Already suffering hunger and cold, the exhausted French army was obliged to withdraw. The retreat was a total disaster, and the crossing of the River Beresina in November 1812 was the most dramatic episode of all. From the Beresina to Vilna the retreat reached the climax of disaster and horror. The experiences of the Grande Armée in its retreat from Moscow have become a byword for suffering. The strategy employed by the Russians had worn down the invaders; the French had been decimated by the freezing cold and constantly harassed by Cossack raiders and Russian marauders. Marshal Murat, left in charge of the remnants of the army, lost his nerve and all control of the army, and the last vestiges of discipline vanished. In the course of the ruinous retreat, the heroic episodes, the sacrifices of the war-weary rear guard, the desperate last-ditch stands, were all in vain. Murat said his famous words: “On est foutus!” (We’re doomed!) Of the 600,000 men who entered Russia, fewer than 100,000 returned to their bases in Germany.
