The Russian campaign, after Minard: a homage in motion

Europe in 1812, the tsar, the cost of the campaign: what the map does not say.

Europe in 1812

Napoleon rules or dominates most of the continent. At Tilsit, on 25 June 1807, he and Tsar Alexander met on a raft in the middle of the Niemen; in July they made peace, and Russia joined his Continental System, a blockade of British trade. On 31 December 1810, a ukase of Alexander reopened Russia's ports to neutral ships and taxed French goods: a way out of the blockade, without a declared break. The usual account of 1812: Napoleon invades to force Russia back into the blockade. He also called the campaign the "Second Polish War", to win over the Poles, without committing himself to restoring Poland.

Tsar Alexander I

Alexander I (1777-1825) became emperor in 1801, when his father was murdered. The loss of Moscow did not make him sue for peace, and Kutuzov turned Napoleon's envoy away. With his allies, he beat Napoleon at Leipzig in October 1813, and on 31 March 1814 he rode into Paris at their head. He then took part in the Congress of Vienna, and in 1815 he also became King of Poland.

Russia in 1812

Most Russians are peasants, and many of them are serfs, bound to the land and to their lords: as late as 1857, private serfs were 23 million of 62.5 million people. The soldiers are conscripts taken from these peasants, for 25 years. 1812 saw three levies, and the nobles raised a militia of over 400,000 men from their serfs. The officers come mostly from the nobility.

1812 in Russian culture

Tolstoy's War and Peace tells of 1812; the complete novel appeared in 1869, the year of Minard's map. Tchaikovsky wrote his 1812 Overture in 1880; it was first played in Moscow in 1882, by the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, then being finished. Alexander had vowed that cathedral in December 1812: consecrated in 1883, it was dynamited in 1931 and rebuilt by 2000. For the centenary of 1912, Franz Roubaud painted the Borodino Panorama, still shown in Moscow.

The cost

About a million dead, soldiers and civilians, roughly as many on each side; along the route, civilians died as much as soldiers, perhaps more. Estimates of the Grande Armée run from 400,000 to 685,000 men: about 380,000 of them died, went missing or were taken prisoner, and disease caused about half of these losses. Of some 110,000 prisoners counted by the Russians, more than half had died by February 1813. Minard counts 10,000 men back across the Niemen; historians count more survivors, up to about 120,000, depending on whom they count.