Napoleon Retreats from Moscow: Empire Crumbles

Napoleon Bonaparte led the largest army Europe had ever assembled into Russia in June 1812 and began leading its remnants back out on October 19, a retreat that would destroy his Grande Armée and crack the foundation of his empire. Of the roughly 685,000 soldiers who crossed the Niemen River into Russia, fewer than 100,000 would return alive. The Russian campaign became history's most devastating illustration of imperial overreach. Napoleon had invaded to force Czar Alexander I back into the Continental System, the trade embargo against Britain that was the cornerstone of French economic strategy. The Russians refused to fight the decisive battle Napoleon needed, instead withdrawing deeper into their own territory while burning crops, slaughtering livestock, and destroying anything of military value. The scorched-earth strategy denied the French army the supplies it depended on from captured territory. When the Grande Armée finally reached Moscow on September 14, they found the city largely abandoned and, within hours, engulfed in a fire that destroyed three-quarters of it over four days. Russian authorities had likely ordered the burning. Napoleon waited five weeks in the ruined city for a peace offer that never came. With winter approaching and his supply lines stretched across 600 miles of hostile territory, he ordered the retreat on October 19. The march home became a death march. Russian forces harassed the retreating columns relentlessly. Early winter storms brought freezing temperatures that killed thousands of soldiers weakened by starvation and disease. The crossing of the Berezina River in late November, under Russian artillery fire, killed an estimated 25,000. Soldiers ate their horses, then their boots, then nothing. Frostbite, typhus, and desertion devastated units that had been among the finest fighting forces in the world just months earlier. Napoleon abandoned the remnants of his army in December and raced ahead to Paris to organize a defense against the European coalition that was forming against him. The Russian disaster emboldened his enemies, led directly to the Wars of Liberation in 1813, and began the cascade of defeats that ended at Waterloo in 1815.