10: Napoleon in Russia, Part I

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From the close of the year 1811, intensified arming and concentrating of the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces, millions of men reckoning those transporting and feeding the army, moved from the west, eastwards to the Russian frontier, towards which 1811 Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the 12th of June 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier, and war began. That is,

an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money. burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace, 1869. 200 years ago, in the second decade of the 19th century,

The world was a strange, fascinating, and precarious place. It was a time of global conflict and uneasy peace. A time of great environmental change. A time of disaster and miracles, anomalies and mysteries. It was a time when our modern world began to emerge, and a time like almost no other in history. This podcast is about stories, true stories, of this remarkable era. This is the Second Decade Podcast. My name is Sean Munger. I'm a historian, an author, teacher...

and podcaster. You can visit the website for this podcast at seconddecade.net. Second Decade is spelled out or one word, two D's in the middle. Thanks for joining me on this journey into the past. Episode 10, Napoleon in Russia, Part 1. On June 25, 1807, on the River Niemann, near the town of Tilsit in East Prussia, now located in Russia proper,

A young, handsome man in a very fetching military uniform got out of a boat next to a curious-looking raft that had been moored in the middle of the river. A special tent was constructed on this raft, and another man, shorter, older, also in a military uniform, was standing there waiting to meet him. A huge retinue of soldiers stood around in boats, on horseback on the shore, or were peering across the river with spy glasses to see what was going on.

The young man, age 29, handsome, with curly blonde hair and a rapidly receding hairline, was Alexander I, the reigning Tsar of Russia. The other man, age 38, only 5'2", and with the most instantly recognizable face in Europe at that time, perhaps the world, was Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of the French, military genius, and recently the winning general of the battle that had occurred not too far away.

called Friedland. What these two guys talked about on that raft, that summer afternoon in Eastern Europe, was, of course, politics. And the biggest and most high-level politics you could imagine. The fates of whole countries and peoples.

But an interesting thing happened during this summit meeting, which needed no translator. Alexander the Russian spoke French even better than Napoleon, whose native language was Corsican. These two guys, who just recently had been mortal enemies bashing away at each other,

started to like each other. Alexander was young and despite the great power he wielded in Russia, he was personally somewhat insecure, having been brought up under a brutal domineering father who constantly reminded him of his shortcomings. When he met Napoleon, he started to admire him. This guy, born on the island of Corsica, short and kind of tubby, had lifted himself up through the ranks. A military career wasn't exactly upwardly mobile in the late 18th century.

until he'd conquered most of Europe. He was dashing, self-assured, and smart. For his part, Napoleon liked the Tsar. He started treating him like a kind of younger brother. They talked, poring over maps, and when the foreign ministers were sent to fill in the details of the broad strokes they'd sketched out, Napoleon took about writing in the countryside. After dinner, the two emperors talked long into the night.

aperitifs in hand, two very powerful guys shooting the breeze about the most momentous subjects on earth. It was a pretty fun time those golden days and nights at Tilsit in the summer of 1807. and it proved politically profitable for both emperors. Alexander, formerly an enemy of Russia, agreed to become an ally of France.

In doing so, Alexander saved himself and his country, the consequences of the crushing defeat he'd suffered at Friedland. By recruiting Russia as his new ally, Napoleon had successfully split the alliance of nations arrayed against him. and was on the verge of finally pacifying Europe once and for all, a new Europe that had been remade mostly in his own image. But as it turned out, the alliance at Tilsit was not the dawn of a brave new world.

In fact, though he didn't know it yet, and was too stubborn and vain to acknowledge it even if he had, Tilsit was really the beginning of the end for Napoleon. In the seeds of that alliance, concluded by a personal meeting between two powerful rulers, was also the seed of the bloodiest military conflict in the entire first half of the 19th century. Within five years of that meeting on the Neiman, Alexander's Russia would be fighting for its very existence as a nation.

against the invading forces of Napoleon who committed one of the most epic mistakes in the history of warfare. This is the story of that war, that mistake, and the amazing lives and personalities of the men and women involved in it. It happened in 1812 and is one of the high points of the second decade, and a turning point in world history. This is the first of three parts of the story of Napoleon in Russia.

Before we return to the story of Napoleon in Russia, which is one of the stories I created this podcast specifically to tell, I'd like to ask a favor of all of you who listen to and enjoy this show every week. If you found Second Decade on iTunes, which numerically is probably where most of you get it from, it would really help increase the visibility of the show and help more people find it if you left a star rating and a review on iTunes.

Second Decade is climbing in the rankings, slowly, but some positive feedback on iTunes would be especially helpful in increasing its reach. The more highly rated a podcast is, the quicker it pops up on searches and lists. So help me out. Click those little stars, leave a short review. I'd really appreciate your support. So, Russia. There's something epic about Napoleon's war with Russia, even beyond its awesome military scale.

which would dwarf anything the world had seen before, and would never really see again until the First World War, a century later. There's something of a cage-match feel to the war between France and Russia in 1812, like the last big-money pay-per-view round of an exhausting series of MMA combats in which the last two champions left standing...

finally start bashing each other in earnest. This isn't a perfect analogy. Russia and France had been on opposite sides before in the Napoleonic Wars, and probably the biggest bruiser for Napoleon to go up against was Britain, not Russia. but it still seems like kind of a cage match to me, or like the final duel between mechanized Terminators at the end of a James Cameron movie.

How they both got into it, Napoleon and Alexander, is worth a little bit of background. Explaining how they got there, and especially how they went from after-dinner brandies and Big Brother Little Brother on the Neiman River in summer 1807, to scorched earth and soldiers eating their own poop in the winter of 1812, that might make real to you how fabulously complex the politics of the second decade really was, and how much it depended on mercurial personalities.

And when we're talking about personalities, we don't get much more mercurial than Napoleon and Alexander.

This episode is the first time that Napoleon has appeared in this series in any substantial way, so it's worth it to go into a little background on him. He really does have a fascinating life story. He was born in Azacazio, the provincial capital of Corsica, which is an island in the Mediterranean just off the French Riviera. That makes it sound exotic, but in 1769, when he was born, the Riviera was hardly the luxury destination it is today.

Mediterranean France and Italy in the 18th century was poor and backwater. The house where Napoleon was born is still there. Even the Rube is still there. His dad was a lawyer and briefly the representative of Corsica to the French court. At that time, it was Louis XVI. Corsica was formerly part of an Italian state called the Republic of Genoa, but it was given to France the year before Napoleon was born.

Smart kid, but awkward and short. He spoke with a heavy Corsican accent. What that sounds like I have no idea, but he didn't sound French. His dad got him into a military academy on the mainland. and eventually he went to a prestigious officer's college in Paris. You could say Napoleon had a talent for war. In this, he was different than the other conquest-hungry dictator he's often compared to, Adolf Hitler, who was not a brilliant military thinker.

They were both lucky. The French Revolution began in 1789, just before Napoleon's 20th birthday. The revolution made Napoleon the way reality TV made Donald Trump. but it was kind of a rocky road. At first, Napoleon was all about Corsican independence and Corsican nationalism. He hitched his wagon to what he thought was the rising star of Corsican independence, Pasquale Paoli.

but the two eventually had a falling out. Napoleon eventually became fiercely loyal to the revolution and the republic, even when it was going through its adolescent rebellion stage of chopping thousands of people's heads off with guillotines. In 1795, he quashed a revolt in the streets of Paris. If Marie Antoinette, who was beheaded in 1793, was famous for wanting her people to eat cake, Napoleon fed them a whiff of grapeshot.

Paoli was old news by now. Napoleon won his first victories for the French Republic in Italy in 1796. By now he was married to the beautiful and very rich widow Josephine de Beauharnais, six years older than he was, whose first husband conveniently went to the guillotine. She had two children by that marriage. Despite something of a debacle on the Nile in 1798,

Napoleon got enough punches on his frequent victories customer card to win an all-expense-paid military coup. In 1799, he took over France, inventing a new office for himself called the First Consul. The French people, of course, ratified his seizure of power through an election, a plebiscite, which was totally rigged. In the meantime, France was at war, usually with Britain and Austria.

There's a long list of battles and victories that sound like the names of European ski resorts. Hohenlinden, Marengo, Ulm, and the most important one, Austerlitz, which involves Tsar Alexander and the Russians, as we'll see. In December 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Becoming emperor was a decision ratified by the French people in another rigged plebiscite. When a trick worked for Napoleon, he kept using it over and over again until it wouldn't work anymore. Thanks to his bag of military tricks, which really were quite clever, his wars generally went pretty well, except he couldn't quite defeat Britain, whose navy had beaten his at Trafalgar in 1805. But across the channel...

Napoleon was the master of much of continental Europe. That's pretty much where things stood by the time the party got going at Tilsit in 1807.

The guy Napoleon would face in Russia in 1812, Tsar Alexander I, was an entirely different kind of man. I admit that as a historian, I find Russian rulers very difficult to understand. I have that in common with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had to deal with Stalin during World War II and who said, I don't know the Russians.

Even among Russians, I think Alexander's hard to know. Such a fascinating guy, so full of interesting tidbits and contradictions. He was born in 1777, eight years younger than Napoleon. His early life was dominated by a larger-than-life figure, his grandmother, Catherine the Great. Catherine didn't have much use for her son Paul. She was pretty busy adding little, and sometimes big, bits of territory to the Russian Empire.

which was continually strengthening during the second half of the 18th century. When she wasn't attending to affairs of state, she was having affairs, with a dizzying array of lovers. She paid them a lot more attention than she did her son. Catherine was getting up in years, and she wasn't enthused by the idea of Paul succeeding her. Alexander, when he was born, seemed to solve this problem.

It's rumored that Catherine, at the time of her death in 1796, was scheming to remove Paul from the line of succession totally, so the crown would go directly to Alexander. She hadn't quite pulled that off by the time she died, and Paul became Tsar. It's not relevant to our story, but I just want to say, for the record, that Catherine the Great did not die while having sex with a horse. That's an urban legend, completely false.

But unfortunately, it's the only thing that a lot of people think they know about Catherine. Anyway, back to Alexander. He had a strange education. The tutor that Catherine hired to teach him at court was Swiss, and a diehard devotee of Republican, small r, Republican ideas. Alexander was thus brought up in the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment, many of them originating with France. In fact, there was a great affinity for France among Russian nobles and Russian society. We'll get to that.

Anyway, it's an odd mix to hire a Swiss liberal to teach a boy who was destined to grow up to head the most autocratic government in Europe, perhaps the world, with the possible exception of China. Add to this mix the weird mysticism of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexander was very devout, and you've got a young man with a very bewildering sense of himself, if he had any sense of himself at all. He did not want to be czar.

At the age of 19, about the time Catherine died, he said, quote, My plan is to settle with my wife on the banks of the Rhine, where I shall live peacefully as a private person, finding happiness in the company of friends and in the study of nature. When he wrote that, he'd been married to a German princess, Louise of Baden, for about three years. Catherine had chosen her, of course, for political reasons. The marriage was not a happy one. Tsar Paul was mentally unstable.

In early 1801, a group of generals and court officials hatched a plot against him. At St. Michael's Castle in St. Petersburg, which had just been completed, the conspirators struck. One of them told Alexander, then age 23, and who was in the castle at the time, that they were going to depose his father. Alexander reportedly agreed reluctantly to assume power, but he told the plotters his father was not to be killed under any circumstances. It didn't work out that way.

When the conspirators barged into Paul's bedroom, finding the Tsar hiding behind a curtain, they threw him against the table and tried to force him to sign an article of abdication. Somebody obviously went a little too far, because Paul was ultimately strangled and trampled to death, as well as being hit with a sword. Suddenly, on March 23, 1801, Alexander was Tsar of Russia.

He felt crushing guilt for being complicit, even just a little bit, in the plot that killed his father. But Russia was now his. Alexander had dreams of great liberal reforms in Russia, especially doing something about the serfs. the terrible system of land ownership, kind of like slavery, that held the vast majority of the Russian people in feudal bondage, like something out of the Middle Ages. He also dreamed of remaking the world.

Big, bold dreams for a 23-year-old ruler with a liberal education and virtually no checks on his power. In the end, he didn't really do either of these things. Domestically, he made some moves toward liberal reforms, and he tinkered around the edges of serfdom. But he couldn't quite muster the cojones to make the bold moves needed to really change things.

Alexander did, however, try to seize the opportunity internationally, with Europe embroiled in war thanks to Napoleon, to improve Russia's position. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong side, at least at first. In 1805, Alexander wrote a letter to William Pitt, Prime Minister of Great Britain, suggesting a grand plan to reorganize Europe into a coalition of states founded on the rights of man. That was Alexander's old Swiss tutor talking.

finding voice through his bold, idealistic dreams. The Brits, however, weren't interested in grand schemes to remake Europe. They wanted to kick the crap out of Napoleon. Alexander unwittingly let Pitt manipulate him. Ultimately, he agreed to join Austria in attacking France. Britain in the meantime would put up the money. In summer 1805, Russia was suddenly at war with France. This was a weird state of affairs for Russia, especially the Russian nobility. They loved France.

Most educated people in Russia spoke French, and it was the language at court. They guzzled French wine at parties, and Russian women loved to wear the latest fashions from Paris. In many ways, at least culturally, Russia kind of wanted to be France, so Alexander's decision divided the nobility. If you've ever read Tolstoy's War and Peace, I began this episode with a quote from that book, This is where the story opens, and with this exact subject.

Russian nobles in 1805 are having a party and debating the propriety of war with France. Some people think Napoleon's a mad butcher who'll be the end of civilization. Others, like Pierre Bezhukov, the hero of war and peace, admire him, at least at first. you see this same dichotomy reflected in Alexander's personality. The war went badly for Russia and Austria.

Alexander himself joined the campaign and brought with him one of the best generals in Russia, a fat, grubby, one-eyed gargoyle named Mikhail Kutuzov. At the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, which happened in part because of Alexander's botched military strategy, he and Kutuzov got utterly clowned by Napoleon. Kutuzov, incidentally, warned the Tsar that this was going to happen if he didn't listen to him. He was proven right. Remember this. It becomes important later on.

The second epic clowning came in June 1807 in yet another war, this one involving Prussia. At the Battle of Friedland, Napoleon again issued a massive beatdown to the Russian forces. Kutuzov wasn't involved this time, fortunately for his career. After this defeat, Alexander decided quite literally, if you can't beat him, join him. It was his idea, not only to negotiate peace with Napoleon,

but to join Russia as France's ally going forward. And that's what brought the two rulers face to face on that raft in the River Neman in the latter days of June 1807. Their meeting, their horseback rides, late night dinners and boozing, as well as a lot of charming and flattery by Napoleon, who could be very charming, resulted in the treaties of Tilsit. The latest war was over.

temporarily, Alexander hoped that a new day was dawning for Russia, and for Europe. As we're going to see in the bottom half of this episode, he was in for a hell of a disappointment.

The seeds of the conflict between Napoleon and Alexander grew out of Napoleon's attempts to reorganize Europe, at least the pieces of Europe he conquered or controlled indirectly. They also arose out of the classic vanity of a dynastic ruler, which Napoleon now was, the desire to have a son to carry on his dynasty. First things first. European politics was a mess before Napoleon. and, say what you will about him, he did his best to clean it up.

For example, before Napoleon's conquests, there was no such thing as Germany. In the center of Europe, there were over 200 scattered states, duchies, and principalities loosely associated under the old Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and replaced it not with a real country of Germany, but with a thing, I'm not sure exactly what it was, called the Confederation of the Rhine.

Napoleon had a wonderful time carving up countries on the map and reorganizing them. One of the new countries he created in 1807, a puppet of France of course, was called the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. This was sort of like Poland lite. The country of what we now know as Poland was never stable throughout history.

It sort of blinked in and out of existence over several centuries, and every time any sort of Polish state did exist, it tended to be irritating to Russia. So Alexander, Napoleon's brand new ally, was already a little ticked off. less than a year after the Tilsit meeting. Anything that tended to encourage Polish nationalism was alarming. But then Napoleon went and did something else. You may know, and I referred to this earlier, that Napoleon had a grand romance with Josephine.

I mean, they're a thing in history, a famous power couple, Napoleon and Josephine, it's like Red and Scarlet. The problem was, though, that Josephine couldn't have any more children. She had two by her first husband, and whether as a result of a rough delivery... or an abortion she had later, she was what they called in the 19th century barren. Big problem.

Lack of sons to carry on the dynasty was the Burr and Henry VIII's rather large butt back in the yet 16th century, and by 1804, when Napoleon became emperor of France, the lack of a male heir started to bug him. I may do an episode on Napoleon's marital troubles, but suffice it to say he divorced Josephine, despite still being in love with her, and started looking around for a hot young number, definitely royalty, who could become lucky wife number two. As it turned out...

Tsar Alexander of Russia had two sisters. The older one, Catherine, utterly hated Napoleon, and in any event, she married a German prince before he could get to her. The second sister, Anna, was 14. Yeah, a bit of a creepy match with a 39-year-old guy. Napoleon started sussing out Alexander whether he might let him marry his younger sister.

He did think about it. A dynastic alliance between France and Russia had certain benefits. But he also didn't want to seem like he was Napoleon's lapdog, so he sort of dithered in getting back to him. Napoleon was not a patient guy. By 1810, the beginning of the second decade,

he started to realize the Russians were dragging their feet, and the match with Anna probably wasn't going to go off. He wound up marrying Marie Louise, daughter of the Emperor of Austria. In March 1811, she squeezed out a pup. who Napoleon quickly proclaimed the king of Rome. The point here, though, is that even though Alexander wasn't super keen on marrying his sister to Napoleon, the way Napoleon suddenly broke off the relations and married the Austrian emperor's daughter...

humiliated Russia. Alexander, after all, was supposed to be France's ally, so here's another sharp poke in the eye that Napoleon delivered to Alexander. Napoleon also insisted that Russia join what was called the Continental System. This was basically an economic and trade system that Napoleon instituted among his allies and puppet states, which was basically aimed at starving Britain, his old enemy, economically.

The continental system was supposed to freeze British goods out of any markets on the European mainland. With the remnants of Napoleon's navy littering the bottom of the sea off Trafalgar, economic warfare was really all he had against Britain.

and he wanted to make sure all his allies didn't trade with the Brits either. For a country like Russia that depended on imports, the economic disruption of the continental system hurt pretty bad in the pocketbook. In 1807, a bottle of champagne in Moscow. cost three and three quarters rubles. In 1811, it was 12 rubles. Russian nobles drank a lot of champagne, so this was a pretty big deal. The final flashpoint came back to that Polish thing, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw.

Rather than let Napoleon create a radio-controlled drone country right next door to Russia, Alexander started thinking that he would take the bull by the horns and create a new kingdom of Poland under his control. He dusted off an old plan to invade the Grand Duchy and put it together with some Polish provinces that Russia already controlled. The Russians had some trouble finding some Polish noble who would support this scheme.

and who didn't see through Alexander's sudden interest in becoming the liberator, air quotes around that word, the liberator of Poland. But the Tsar started to make preparations anyway. In part, this was to tamp down the anger in Russia, especially among the nobles who were starting to view Alexander's foreign policy as one misstep after another. Of course, carrying out this plan for Poland required troops, lots of them.

By January 1811, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were beginning to mass on the borders next to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Napoleon looked at this development and saw an ally about to stab him in the back by invading territory friendly to him.

Now France and Russia were definitely headed towards some kind of conflict. By the late spring of 1811, it seemed in both countries that war was inevitable. The reasons for it really weren't visible to a lot of people.

There was no sneak attack or some grand insult that brought everything to a head. Indeed, it was just sort of a slippery slope leading down to an explosive conflict, perhaps a needless one. In June 1811, a nobleman... called the Marcus de Calencourt, one of Napoleon's chief diplomatic advisors, arrived in Paris after coming from St. Petersburg.

Kolincourt had been in Russia and had conversations with Alexander and his people, trying to gauge what was going on, and if he could, avert the war that was coming. As soon as he got out of the carriage, Napoleon demanded a report. They spent seven hours together talking about Russia. Given what was to happen eventually, this meeting proved to be very interesting.

Collencourt laid out the situation pretty accurately to Napoleon, saying that the biggest bone of contention for Alexander was this continental system malarkey. He also said that he thought the Tsar had changed a lot in the past four years. He wasn't the fawning, easily manipulated little brother figure he'd been at Tilsit.

Collain Court warned Napoleon in no uncertain terms that if there was war, Alexander would probably never give up. It wouldn't be a question of just winning a battle or two and forcing the Tsar to sign a peace treaty. which had worked in most of Napoleon's other wars. Indeed, here is what Collencourt, who wrote his memoirs years later, records that Alexander told him. Quote,

I would rather retreat as far as Kamchatka than give away provinces and sign in my capital any treaty which would only be a truce. The Frenchman is brave, but long privations in a bad climate tire him and discourage him. Our climate, our winter, will fight for us. Prodigious victories are only achieved where the emperor is, and he cannot be everywhere or spend years away from Paris."

Despite this warning, which proved entirely prophetic, Napoleon didn't listen. He accused Colain Court of having been duped by Alexander into thinking he was stronger than he was. He thought the Tsar was bluffing. There is some evidence that by 1811, Napoleon was kind of slipping. His attention span had grown much shorter, and he couldn't concentrate as much as he could before. It took him longer to make decisions these days than it used to.

He was also changing physically. He was starting to get fat. Some medical experts have suggested, based on symptoms in the historical record, that Napoleon's pituitary gland was giving out. I don't know anything about that melody, but it evidently can account for a lot of these changes.

In any event, it seems pretty likely, at least to me, that the Napoleon of 1811, or even the Napoleon of 1806, probably would have paid more attention to Kolencourt's warning, and probably would have seen himself that, when it came to enemies, Russia and Alexander were a whole different kettle of fish. But Napoleon had one bag of tricks, only one. There was going to be war, and he was going to do it the way he'd always done it before, except on a much bigger scale.

Beginning in the late summer of 1811, Napoleon began a military build-up, the kind France had never seen before, not even in his reign. He started with various Polish forces, which he already controlled, and which were already there near the border of Russia. Then he started combing the German states he controlled for fresh soldiers, the last big untapped reserve of potential fighting men left in his empire.

The princes of Westphalia, Württemberg, Bavaria, Baden, and a bunch of other German states were ordered to supply tens of thousands of troops. Napoleon was constructing a massive fighting force he called La Grande Armee. It was going to be the biggest army in the history of the world, more than half a million strong.

That he actually managed to pull it off is a testament, really, to Napoleon's genius for organization and logistics. The Grand Armée was the largest military force ever assembled in pre-industrial times. When he finally stepped off for the Russian campaign, Napoleon had about 600,000 troops by one account. The numbers do vary.

If that figure is correct, that's bigger than the American army that liberated Kuwait during the first Gulf War in 1991. It's bigger than all the American armed forces that were deployed in Southeast Asia at the height of the Vietnam War. And this was in 1812, before trucks, before planes, before instant communications, before any of the stuff that goes into a modern military force. Let's just think about this for a moment.

Without modern communications, like the telegraph that was still 32 years from being invented, orders could travel only as fast as a horse could ride. The farther the various pieces of the army were from Napoleon, the longer it was going to take to coordinate them. Thus, giving an order to a distant regiment, even a simple one like march your army from Bavaria to the Naaman River, had to go out weeks in advance.

Napoleon knew exactly how many days it would take for an order to get from point A to point B and exactly how long it would take to carry out that order. This was his genius. He was also very skilled at understanding what it would take to supply an army of this size and where they were going to get all this stuff. 600,000 men needed a lot of food. They need shoes. Their horses need hay and saddles and riding stuff.

Of course they need ammunition. You need blacksmiths to shoe the horses, wheelwrights to fix the wheels of carts and gun carriages that are always breaking. But on the other hand, in some ways, the Grand Armée was kind of a Mickey Mouse operation. Putting 550 or 600,000 troops in the field today, like the United States and its coalition did in the Persian Gulf in 1990, means you have to supply them everything, from uniforms to toilet paper. And you've got to get all that crap.

on site before your army could be ready to fight. That just wasn't true in 1812. Take uniforms, for example. It's not like Napoleon had warehouses full of seamstresses frantically sewing French army uniforms for half a million guys. Officers had uniforms, those tall fancy hats with feathers like you see in the movies and on BBC shows.

But the rank-and-file guys that Napoleon and his people scraped up from all over Europe, not just French, but Italians, Germans, Poles, Swiss, Prussians, Austrians, those guys brought their own clothes from home. Most of these people were poor. Imagine if you've been cleaned out of a bar somewhere in Bavaria, some French guy tells you you've got to join the army, and you've got two sets of clothes and one pair of shoes. You're going to have to walk.

From southern Germany to the frontier of Poland, then all the way across Russia to Moscow and back, you're going to have to walk all that way in your single pair of shoes. See the problem? Okay, what about food? For his army, at least the French regulars in his army, Napoleon amassed a huge cache of stuff. In the French army in 1812, on paper at least, you were supposed to get, now this is daily, you're supposed to get 550 grams of bread,

Biscuit, that is, what they call hardtack in the Navy, kind of like a crumbly cracker. You get 60 grams of dried vegetables. Mmm, dried broccoli isn't that tasty. You get 240 grams of meat if there is fresh meat, if not 200 grams of salt beef and lard. You get a quarter of a liter of wine and one-sixth of a liter of brandy.

By spring 1812, Napoleon had warehouses bursting with this stuff, but there's no way that he could stockpile everything. The real strategy for feeding an army this size was what they called, in military parlance, forage. Essentially, the army was expected to go out and find food on the road.

Napoleon had done this pretty successfully in his previous campaigns. When the army marched through an area, they'd send out scouts to all the nearby farms and requisition everything they could from the locals. Supposedly they were purchasing it, but they gave in return paper promissory notes that were effectively worthless, so much of the time it was just thievery. The army would carry off grain, pigs, cows, butter, stored meats, potatoes, whatever.

In fact, Napoleon and his people had foraged down to such a science that it affected where and how he moved the army from place to place. If you stripped the land bare in one area on the way to a battle, that meant you had to march back after the battle was over by a different route, or the army would starve to death on the way back because they'd already consumed everything of value. Remember that detail becomes important.

So Napoleon's Grand Armée really was awesome and impressive, at the same time that it was pretty much a shabby mob of thieves and ne'er-do-wells, shambling from place to place, stealing from the locals to feed and clothe itself. and even when it was doing well, you can see that an army like this was always just barely getting by, and if something went wrong, the distance between doing well and starving to death was very short.

This is to say nothing about whether these guys were any good as soldiers. A lot of them, maybe even half, were completely useless. Some of them had never fired a musket before in their lives. Many of the men in the cavalry couldn't ride properly, and they took horses, which are very expensive, out of action from things like saddle sores.

In 1812, there was no uniform system of training recruits like boot camps and modern armies. You just found the men you needed, got them all corralled in the same place, gave them muskets and some ammunition, and then started marching them toward the assembly points.

Theoretically, they received training while on the march, but you can imagine how that went. Was Napoleon blind to all this? No, of course he wasn't.

He was a seasoned commander, the most skilled military guy in the world. The problem was that he didn't think any of this really hurt him. He told one of his aides, quote, I know very well that I cannot hope for that number of good horsemen, but I'm playing on the morale of the enemy, who learns through his spies, by rumor, or through the newspapers, that I have 40,000 cavalry.

Passing from mouth to mouth, this number and the supposed quality in my regiments are both rather exaggerated than diminished. The day I launch my campaign, I am preceded. So it's spring 1812, heading into summer. Napoleon's got this gigantic army, but it moves so slowly and makes such a huge fuss as it moves that it takes months to get it into place. Forget about the elements of surprise.

If they'd had satellites in 1812, you could probably see the Grand Armée from space, a big dark cloud of ants marching across Eastern Europe, assembling on the borders of Poland. Napoleon himself seems to have counted on Alexander losing his nerve. He never took the Tsar at his word, and he never really understood how the Russians were going to be on their own territory, much different than any other enemy he'd faced.

After he left Paris, bringing a mobile retinue of lackeys and government clerks with him so he could still pretend to run the French state while on campaign, Napoleon spent quite a while in Dresden, where there were lots of dinners, balls, and military parades. Part of the game was to impress Alexander with the size and ostentatious nature of his army, hoping he'd cave and that they would negotiate.

He even sent an envoy, a fellow named Narbonne, to the Russian court for one last-ditch effort to get the Tsar to bite at some kind of negotiated settlement. There's the sense that Napoleon was kind of reluctant to go through with this thing. but he was in too deep now to turn around. In point of fact, and this is important to remember, the Grande Armée was already starting to disintegrate in May and June 1812, even before they set foot across the Niemann River.

The army was so big and needed so many provisions that the local countryside just couldn't support it. The previous harvest in the farms of Poland had been pretty pathetic, and the spring of 1812 was cold and wet. This meant the peasants who farmed in that area were already basically operating at a subsistence level.

The government of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon's ally, was insolvent. The system of requisitioning supplies, those mostly worthless promissory notes, that broke down pretty quickly. When peasants refused to give the army the supplies that they themselves needed to prevent their families from starving, the French army just took it. They sentenced whole towns to slow starvation as they crawled across the landscape.

What the army got in this manner wasn't very good. Because of the poor harvest, the oats were particularly bad, and most of them weren't ripe. When they fed them to their horses, the animals got sick and died. Thus, the villages of Poland were shattered ruins filled with burnt-out farmhouses, empty barns, and destitute people. The roads were littered with dead horses, slaughtered cattle, and broken carts.

Men in the army, most of them marching under different flags or even serving under officers that didn't speak their language, were demoralized. Many died. And this was at the beginning of the campaign. The army hadn't yet fired a shot in anger. They hadn't even gotten to Russia yet. Napoleon's army was already starving in June before a single flake of snow had fallen, before they even saw a Russian soldier. Narbonne returned from Russia with nothing positive to report.

Tsar Alexander, who'd been building up his own army for months, told the French envoy, tell the emperor that I will not be the aggressor. He can cross the Naaman, but never will I sign a peace treaty dictated on Russian territory. On June 24, 1812, at various posts along the Niemann River in eastern Poland, the French commanders read out a harangue to the troops that Napoleon had written the previous evening. It read, Soldiers,

The Second Polish War has begun. The first ended at Friedland and Tilsit. At Tilsit, Russia swore an eternal alliance with France and war on England. She is now violating her promises. Russia is tempting fate, and she will meet her destiny. Are we no longer the soldiers of Austerlitz? Let us advance, let us cross the Niemann, let us take the war onto her territory. The Second Polish War will be glorious for French arms, as was the first, but the peace that we will conclude will be a lasting one.

The French army began crossing the river that day. The biggest war in the first half of the 19th century was on. If you like this podcast, please share it, tell somebody about it. Mention it on your social media, your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. I'd love for you to contribute to my Patreon account. That's at patreon.com slash seanmunger.

Pledge an amount, even a dollar, and get access to members-only goodies that no one else gets, including video bonus lectures. In addition to my Patreon account, you can find me on Twitter at Sean Munger. There's an underscore there. and my website, seanmunger.com. My historical sources for this episode include 1812, Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow, by Adam Zamoyski, HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2004.

Music credits. The main theme of this podcast is titled String Impromptu No. 1 by Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com, used under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0 license. Additional music. Selections from the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky from museopen.org public domain. This podcast was written and recorded by me, Sean Munger. Good night.