13.5: Russia, Elba, and Waterloo

Meanwhile, Russia remained outside of French rule. Despite the obvious problem of staging a full-scale invasion, Russia was geographically far from France, absolutely enormous, and remained militarily powerful. Napoleon saw Russia as the last remaining major power on the continent that opposed him. Perhaps with its conquest, he would regain lost inertia and popularity. His ultimate goal was to conquer Russia and the European part (i.e. Greece and the Balkans) of the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, he hoped to control Constantinople and the Black Sea, Thereby, re-creating most of the ancient Roman Empire under French rule. To do so, he gathered an enormous army, 600,000 strong; and in the summer of 1812, it marched for Russia.

Napoleon faced problems several problems from the beginning.

• His best troops were fighting in Spain.
• More than half of the "Grand Army" created to invade Russia was recruited from non-French territories, mostly in Italy and Germany.
• Many of the recruits were insufficiently trained and had no military background.

He chased the Russian army east, fighting two actual battles. Yet, he never pinned the Russians down or received the anticipated negotiations from the Tsar for surrender. In September, when the French arrived in Moscow, they found it abandoned and largely burned by the retreating Russians. They simply refused to engage in the "final battle" Napoleon always sought. As the first snowflakes started falling, the French held out for another month. By October, Napoleon was forced to turn back as supplies began running low.

The French retreat was a horrendous debacle. The Russians attacked weak points in the French line and ambushed them at river crossings. Disease swept through the ranks of the malnourished French troops. The weather got steadily worse. Tens of thousands starved outright, and desertion was ubiquitous. Of the 600,000 who had set out for Russia, only 40,000 returned to France. In the aftermath of this colossal defeat, the anti-French coalition of Austria, Prussia, Britain, and Russia reformed.

Figure 13.5.1: Napoleon’s retreat.

Amazingly, Napoleon succeeded in raising still more armies, and France fought on for two more years. Increasingly, the French lost, since the coalition armies were trained and equipped along French lines, as well as able to anticipate French strategy. In April of 1814, as coalition forces closed in, Napoleon finally abdicated. He attempted suicide, drinking the poison he had carried for years. But, the poison was mostly inert from its age and it merely sickened him. After his recovery, his self-confidence quickly returned. Fearing that his execution would make him a martyr to the French, the coalition’s leadership opted to exile him. He was sent to a manor on the small Mediterranean island of Elba, near his native Corsica.

He stayed less than a year. In March of 1815, bored and restless, Napoleon escaped and returned to France. The anti-Napoleonic coalition had restored the Bourbons to the throne in the person of the unpopular Louis XVIII, younger brother of the executed Louis XVI. When a French force sent to capture Napoleon defected to him, the coalition realized that they had not won. Napoleon's final army was defeated by a coalition force of British and Prussian soldiers in June of 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. Thereafter, Napoleon was imprisoned on the cold, miserable island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he finally died in 1821 after composing his memoirs.

Europe in 1815

This map depicts Napoleonic France, Prussia, the Austrian Empire, and the boundary of the Germanic Confederation in 1815.

Source: "Map of Europe in 1815," in World History Commons, https://worldhistorycommons.org/map-europe-1815 [accessed March 30, 2023]