Introduction
In June of 1812, the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, led a massive European coalition against the Russian Empire to compel adherence to French economic policies that sought to isolate the British Empire from its ability to enable resistance on the continent. This invasion, representing a turning point in the history of the Napoleonic Wars, ended as an unmitigated catastrophe for the French due to three interrelated and multifaceted reasons: the emperor’s inability to gain a decisive battlefield victory; inadequate supply and basing to support the expedition; and, strategic failure to credibly threaten Alexander I, the Russian Emperor, with regime change. Though Napoleon would continue to remain a viable threat and shape European politics until his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo three years later, the French Empire’s military strength and coercive influence would never fully recover from the disaster in Russia.
This epic campaign now stands among the most compelling examples of strategic overreach and imperial hubris in the annals of warfare. Described as a defeat on a ‘colossal and decisive scale’ by famed Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz in his seminal work, On War, the meteoric fall of Napoleon from master of Europe in the summer of 1812 to defeated and exiled monarch less than two years later now stands as a cautionary tale for the risks of military adventurism.1
While the French Emperor was not the first—and wouldn’t be the last—commander to experience a dramatic reversal of fortunes due to the vagaries of war and unbridled ambition, his calamitous invasion of Russia in 1812 offers a particularly compelling example of echeloned failure across the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war. More importantly, it shows how the resulting misalignment can conspire to unleash cascading setbacks and systemic collapse.
The Lure of Decisive Victory
The proximate reason that Napoleon, then at the zenith of his power, came to defeat in Russia centered on his inability to decisively annihilate the Tsar’s primary field army at the tactical level. In previous campaigns, perhaps best represented by his triumphs at Austerlitz in 1805 and Jena-Auerstedt the next year, the French emperor had attained definitive victory by swiftly bypassing fortress frontiers to invade his enemy’s territory, shattering their dynastic forces with his superior corps system, and then imposing diplomatic arrangements on the defeated monarchs. Though the Grande Armee of 1812, comprising more than 600,000 soldiers with contributions from across Europe, initially outnumbered and outmatched their Russian adversaries, the invaders were never able to fully close with and destroy their enemy as they were drawn deeper and deeper into the continental interior amidst challenging environmental conditions.2
This conflict featured an incredible scope of suffering and privation as the campaign devolved into an attritional nightmare where the defenders could increasingly replace losses even as the French-led coalition lost soldiers they could not. Even at the bloody Battle of Borodino just 60 miles from Moscow, the Tsar’s main army, under the command of the ageing Russian general Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, endured tremendous punishment as it managed to resist, retrograde, and remain a viable fighting entity. The seminal engagement, which proved notable for Napoleon’s uncharacteristic lack of creativity in planning and leading the attack, resulted in more than 68,000 casualties between the two sides and held the Pyrrhic result of exhausting the invaders without meaningfully changing the strategic equation.3 As stated by Clausewitz in his treatise, the engagement was ‘never completely fought out’ and resulted ‘only in a partial victory’ for the aggressors.4
A Logistical Nightmare
The second reason for the great invasion’s failure stemmed from Napoleon’s inability to sustain his inordinately large and multinational expeditionary force in the face of Russia’s geographical depth and the defenders’ ‘scorched earth’ strategy. Representing a gross miscalculation at the operational level where the practical planning of theater logistics can define the margins between defeat and victory, the Grande Armee suffered both from insufficient quantities of war materials and inadequate means to transport supplies from depots in western and central Europe to the forward traces in Russia. Throughout the campaign, the French general staff consistently underestimated human and equine consumption rates, overestimated available grain and cattle resources available for requisition. There was also a failure to anticipate the slowness of wagon movement along the long stretches of increasingly muddy and broken roads that led from the borders of Poland to the Russian interior.5
The resulting logistical nightmare conspired with harsh Russian climates and difficult terrain to make the campaign increasingly expensive so long as Alexander I, who managed to consolidate domestic political support against the specter of foreign subjugation, preserved his ability to resist. The sprawling coalition’s operational vulnerability was then made acute by Napoleon’s fateful decision to advance his columns an additional 230 miles from Smolensk to Moscow while in pursuit of the main Russian field forces.
This move reflected a departure from the original operational scheme that had envisioned out-maneuvering and defeating the bulk of the Russian field army in detail near the Polish frontier and consequently extended the French lines of communication far beyond their functional capacity. As criticized by Antoine Henri Jomini, a Swiss officer and military theorist who served under Napoleon, the ambitious emperor attempted to implement an expeditionary logistical scheme ‘on too large a scale and to countries where it was impractical.’6
A Failure to Topple the Tsar
The final reason for Napoleon’s failure in 1812 was strategic in nature and reflected his inability to leverage battlefield outcomes to politically threaten the Tsar with removal from the throne. Though the Russian Army suffered costly setbacks at Smolensk and Borodino, and endured the humiliating occupation and destruction of their ancient cultural home of Moscow, Alexander confounded Napoleon by yet refusing to negotiate terms for a cessation of hostilities as he earned time and space for his forces to rearm and reconstitute.
Instead of reaching out to the French emperor, Alexander continued to implement a semi-Fabian strategy of preventing the destruction of his primary field army in any single engagement while dispatching Cossack cavalry to harass and terrorize the French columns during their retreat with incredible savagery. In contrast, while Napoleon had won a series of indecisive tactical victories, he was never able to, as described by military historian Peter Paret, win by ‘forcing the opposing government into negotiations under newly unfavorable circumstances.’
By preserving his army for future engagements and exploiting the vastness of his imperium, the Russian emperor thus maintained the survivability of his monarchy and denied Napoleon the thing he needed the most: a shattering battlefield outcome. Though certainly speculative, this leads to a conclusion that the Grande Armee likely had to threaten the very existence of the Russian regime to compel emasculating compliance with the Continental System.
Nothing short of destroying the Russian Army as a viable organization, marching north to occupy the capital of St. Petersburg, capturing or killing the Tsar himself, or enabling a viable pretender to the throne to divide the nobility would have likely placed the necessary pressure on Alexander to capitulate and seek terms. When none of this proved feasible, the Russian defenders, angered by the invasion and pillaging of their home territory, were then postured to launch a dramatic counter-offensive that would drive the French and their wavering allies back into Central Europe.
Conclusion – Failure at Echelon
The defeat of the French Empire in 1812, unfolding as one of the most calamitous ventures in military history, offers cautionary lessons for future expeditionary campaigns. Given Napoleon’s failure to achieve a battlefield decision, supply his massive force across unexpectedly vast distances, and credibly threaten regime change, the expedition was ultimately doomed to fail at a spectacular cost in men and material.
Cascading setbacks across the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war for the invaders allowed the defending Russians to endure the emasculating shock of the initial setbacks at Smolensk and Borodino, recover and reconstitute their primary field forces, and launch a devastating pursuit that would effectively destroy the French-led coalition. Of the 655,000 coalition soldiers that marched under Napoleon’s banners in June of 1812, only approximately 93,000 would remain to defend his beleaguered regime against a vengeful anti-French alliance by January of 1813.
This catastrophic defeat, in addition to the debilitating loss of over 200,000 trained horses, represented a staggering destruction of more than 85% of the Grande Armee’s original strength while shattering the myth of French battle invincibility. Foreshadowing a similarly calamitous offensive by the German Third Reich in 1941 that would unfold across the same landscape, the French Empire’s echeloned failures in 1812 dramatically illustrate the perils of reliance upon strategies that revolve on battlefield decision, schemes that move beyond the scope of logically planned theater logistics, and misunderstanding the realities of adversary political tolerances.
Finding further resonance in the nationalistic conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries, the ill-fated invasion exemplifies the timeless capacity of defending societies to adapt and persevere when existentially threatened. If Napoleon’s earlier campaigns in Central Europe revealed the potential for achieving stunning victories through integrated approaches, his calamitous invasion of Russia in 1812, which heralded the end of French primacy in that century, should caution against the limits of unbridled ambition.
Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings
Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings is an Associate Professor and Army Strategist at the US
Army Command and General Staff College. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Army War College, Department of the Army or Department of Defense.
- Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings#molongui-disabled-link
- Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings#molongui-disabled-link
Footnotes
- Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 616.
- Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Cambridge History of Warfare (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 206.
- Ibid, 207.
- Clausewitz, On War, 267.
- David Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1966), 855.
- Ibid., 856-857; BG T. Phillips, ed., Roots of Strategy, Book 2 (Harrisburg: Stackpole Books, 1985), 481