What Problems Were Cause When the French Army Lost Again Russia During the Napolionic Era
After taking power in 1799, French leader Napoleon Bonaparte won a string of military victories that gave him control over most of Europe. He annexed present-day Kingdom of belgium and Holland, forth with large chunks of nowadays-24-hour interval Italy, Croatia and Frg, and he gear up dependencies in Switzerland, Poland and various High german states. Spain was largely nether his hegemony despite continuing guerilla warfare there, and Austria, Prussia and Russia had been browbeaten into condign allies. Only Britain remained completely outside of his grasp.
In 1806 Napoleon decided to punish the British with an embargo that became known as the Continental System. But by the cease of 1810, Arbiter Alexander I had stopped complying due to its deleterious consequence on Russian trade and the value of the ruble. Alexander also imposed a heavy tax on French luxury products like lace and rebuffed Napoleon's endeavour to marry one of his sisters.
Exacerbating tensions was the 1807 formation of the Duchy of Warsaw. Though Napoleon created that land from Prussian, not Russian, lands, Alexander worried that it would incite a hostile Polish nationalism, according to D.K.Thousand. Sutherland, a history professor at the University of Maryland who has authored two books on the Napoleonic era. "Down to the nowadays twenty-four hours, the love thing between the French and Polish is pretty permanent," Sutherland said.
Napoleon, who considered Russia a natural ally since it had no territorial conflicts with French republic, soon moved to teach Alexander a lesson. In 1812 the French emperor raised a massive army of troops from all over Europe, the first of which entered Russian federation on June 24. "It was the about various European army since the Crusades," Sutherland said.
Estimates vary, merely experts believe that at least 450,000 Grande Armée soldiers and perhaps as many as 650,000 ended upwards crossing the Niemen River to fight approximately 200,000 soldiers on the Russian side. By comparison, George Washington'south ground forces during the American Revolution rarely numbered more than ten,000 or 15,000 men, explained Sheperd Paine, president of the Napoleonic Historical Society.
A brutally cold battle in Russia during the French invasion
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Napoleon'due south goal was to win a quick victory that forced Alexander to the negotiating tabular array. The Russians pulled back, notwithstanding, and let the Grande Armée capture the city of Vilna on June 27 with barely a fight. In an ominous sign of things to come, an electrical storm pouring down freezing rain, hail and sleet killed a number of troops and horses that very dark. To make matters worse, Grande Armée soldiers were already deserting in search of food and plunder.
All the same, Napoleon remained confident. "I accept come up once and for all to finish off these barbarians of the North," he purportedly declared to his top military advisors. "The sword is now drawn. They must be pushed back into their ice, so that for the next 25 years they no longer come to decorated themselves with the affairs of civilized Europe."
In belatedly July, the Russians similarly abandoned Vitebsk, setting fire to armed services stores and a span on their way out. Then, in mid-Baronial, they retreated from Smolensk and torched that city. Many peasants, meanwhile, burned their crops to prevent them from falling into French easily. "Certainly, the scorched earth tactics were incredibly important in denying the French army sustenance," said David A. Bong, a history professor at Princeton University and author of The Kickoff Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as Nosotros Know Information technology. The summer estrus had likewise get oppressive, and Grande Armée soldiers were coming down with insect-borne diseases such every bit typhus and water-related diseases like dysentery.
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Thousands of men died while fighting at Smolensk and elsewhere. But the Russians did non truly make a stand until the September 7 Boxing of Borodino, which took place but 75 miles from Moscow. That twenty-four hour period, the French and Russians pounded each other with artillery and launched a number of charges and countercharges. Roughly three canon booms and seven musket shots rang out each second. The losses on both sides were enormous, with total casualties of at to the lowest degree seventy,000. Rather than proceed with a second day of fighting, the Russians withdrew and left the road to Moscow open up.
On September xiv, the Grande Armée entered the ancient upper-case letter of Moscow, only to encounter it too go engulfed in flames. Virtually residents had already escaped the metropolis, leaving backside vast quantities of hard liquor just little nutrient. French troops drank and pillaged while Napoleon waited for Alexander to sue for peace. No offering ever came. With snow flurries having already fallen, Napoleon led his regular army out of Moscow on October 19, realizing that information technology could not survive the winter at that place.
Past this time, Napoleon was down to some 100,000 troops, the rest having died, deserted or been wounded, captured or left along the supply line. Originally he planned a southerly retreat, but his troops were forced back to the road they took in subsequently a replenished Russian army engaged them at Maloyaroslavets. All forage along that route had already been consumed, and when the army arrived at Smolensk it establish that stragglers had eaten the food left there. Horses were dying in droves, and the Grande Armée's flanks and rear guard faced constant attacks.
To top it off, an unusually early winter set in, complete with high winds, sub-goose egg temperatures and lots of snow. On peculiarly bad nights, thousands of men and horses succumbed to exposure. Stories grow of soldiers splitting open up dead animals and crawling inside for warmth, or stacking dead bodies in windows for insulation. "Things got bad very quickly," Paine said. "It was a constant attrition."
In late November, the Grande Armée narrowly escaped complete annihilation when information technology crossed the frigid Berezina River, only information technology had to leave behind thousands of wounded. "From and so on, it was almost every man for himself," Paine said. On December 5, Napoleon left the army under the command of Joachim Murat and sped toward Paris amid rumors of a coup attempt. 9 days later, what fiddling remained of the Grande Armée'southward rear guard stumbled back across the Niemen River.
Emboldened past the defeat, Austria, Prussia and Sweden re-joined Russia and Dandy Britain in the fight against Napoleon. Although the French emperor was able to enhance another massive army, this time it was short on both cavalry and experience. Napoleon won some initial victories against his enemies, merely he suffered a crushing defeat in October 1813 at the Boxing of Leipzig.
By the following March, Paris had been captured and Napoleon was forced into exile on the isle of Elba. In 1815 Napoleon made one more effort to accept power but was overcome at the Battle of Waterloo. "Charles XII tried information technology, Napoleon tried it, Hitler tried it," Bell said. "It never seems to work out invading Russia."
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