Grande Armée

• 1. Introduction

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  The Grande Armée crossed the Niemen River on the 24th of June 1812 with 685,000 men drawn from across Europe. French, Polish, Austrian, Prussian, Bavarian, Italian, Danish, Swiss, Spanish, Portuguese, Croat, and Irish soldiers marched together under Napoleon's command. It was the largest field army he had ever led. Within months, fewer than 100,000 of those men would survive to leave Russia.

  From its formation in 1804 to its final defeat in 1815, the Grande Armée reshaped Europe. It won battles that dissolved empires, marched distances that defied expectation, and pioneered an organizational model that armies would copy for generations. But it also consumed more than two million Frenchmen through conscription, and historians estimate that somewhere between 700,000 and 1.8 million French soldiers died in the Napoleonic Wars, with many placing the likely figure around one million.

  How did a single fighting force rise from a planned invasion of Britain to master most of a continent? What made it so formidable, and why did it ultimately shatter? Those questions run through the history of the Grande Armée, from the camp at Boulogne in 1804 to the field at Waterloo in 1815.

• 2. From Boulogne to Austerlitz

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  At the port of Boulogne in 1804, over 100,000 men assembled with a different target in mind: Britain. The army was then called L'Armée des côtes de l'Océan, the Army of the Ocean Coasts, though most referred to it as the Army of England. Napoleon's planned invasion of Britain never launched. Instead, when Austria and Russia began preparations to invade France in late 1805, the army pivoted east.

  The Grande Armée left Boulogne in late August 1805 and moved through rapid marches into southern Germany. At the fortress of Ulm, Napoleon's corps surrounded General Karl von Mack's isolated Austrian army and extracted 60,000 prisoners at a cost of just 2,000 French soldiers. By November, Vienna had fallen, though Austria refused to surrender while Russia had yet to fully commit its forces.

  The decisive moment came on the 2nd of December 1805 at the Battle of Austerlitz. A numerically inferior Grande Armée routed a combined Russo-Austrian force led by Russian Emperor Alexander I. The victory was total. Within weeks, the Treaty of Pressburg was signed on the 26th of December 1805, and the Holy Roman Empire dissolved the following year.

  Prussia, alarmed by France's growing grip on Central Europe, had stayed neutral through all of this. That would not last. When the Fourth Coalition came into being in 1806, the Grande Armée moved into Prussian territory using the bataillon-carré system: corps marching in close supporting distances, able to rotate instantly into vanguard, rearguard, or flank positions. On the 14th of October 1806, two simultaneous battles at Jena and Auerstedt destroyed the Prussian army. The follow-up pursuit captured 140,000 prisoners and killed or wounded roughly 25,000 more. Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout's III Corps, the victors at Auerstedt, received the honour of marching into Berlin first.

• 3. The Art of Organization

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  Corps were first formed in 1800, when General Jean Moreau divided the Army of the Rhine into four groupings. They were temporary then. It was not until 1804 that Napoleon made them permanent.

  Each corps of the Grande Armée was a self-contained combined-arms force. Depending on mission and size, a corps numbered anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 men, with an average of around 20,000 to 30,000. Infantry, cavalry, artillery, and support services all operated together within a single corps, meaning the formation could defend itself independently until reinforced. Corps typically kept within a day's marching distance of one another, dispersed enough to live by foraging and reduce the supply burden, but close enough to concentrate rapidly.

  Speed was the army's great weapon. Through dispersion and forced marches, the Grande Armée could appear where enemies least expected it. Corps followed separate routes on a wide front, and this ability to cover long distances quickly flowed directly from the way French infantry were trained. Unlike most European armies of the era, which drilled for rigid formations and massed volleys, French fusiliers trained for speed of march, endurance, and individually aimed fire at close range.

  At the staff level, the Grande Armée inherited a system from General Louis-Alexandre Berthier, who was assigned Chief of Staff to the Army of Italy back in 1795. Napoleon took command the following year and adopted Berthier's organized support structure, which became the Imperial Headquarters. Berthier's role as Chief of Staff was to absorb Napoleon's strategic intentions, translate them into written orders, and transmit them with speed and clarity. He also received reports from the marshals and forwarded the most critical to the emperor. Nothing was to be concealed from Napoleon. A subordinate staff officer named Brossier recorded that at the Battle of Marengo, Berthier himself was hit by a bullet in the arm, and two of his aides-de-camp had their horses killed beneath them.

• 4. The Guard: Elite Within an Elite

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  At Boulogne in 1804, the Imperial Guard counted 8,000 soldiers. By 1812, that number had reached 112,000. The Guard grew alongside the army itself, evolving from a compact bodyguard into a corps-sized force with infantry, cavalry, artillery, and even sailors.

  The oldest and most demanding regiment was the Foot Grenadiers of the Old Guard. To join, a recruit had to have served at least 10 years, received a citation for bravery, be literate, and stand over 178 centimetres tall. Some veterans had served in more than 20 campaigns. Napoleon gave them the nickname Les Grognards, The Grumblers, during the 1807 campaign in Poland. The Old Guard was rarely committed en masse in battle; Napoleon held them in reserve for the critical moment, to serve as the hammer blow against an already shaken enemy.

  The Guard cavalry carried their own legends. The Horse Grenadiers, known as the Gods or the Giants, were mounted on large black horses and required 10 years of service in a minimum of four campaigns. At Eylau, they stood under the fire of sixty Russian guns until their commander, Colonel Louis Lepic, ordered them: "Up with your heads gentlemen, those are only bullets, not turds." They then joined Marshal Murat's charge into Russian lines. The Horse Grenadiers, together with the Polish lancers, were the only Guard cavalry units never beaten in battle.

  The Chasseurs a Cheval were Napoleon's personal favourites. Their origins ran back to 1796, when Napoleon narrowly escaped Austrian cavalry at Borghetto while at lunch and ordered a 200-man bodyguard unit to protect him. He habitually wore the old-style uniform of a colonel of their regiment. The Mamelukes, fierce cavalrymen recruited during the Egyptian campaign, fought at Austerlitz in 1805 and won their own standard and promotion to full squadron. Their ranks included Egyptians, Turks, Greeks, Georgians, Syrians, and Cypriots, though by the time of the Hundred Days, the personnel were almost exclusively French.

  The Polish lancers earned their place in the Old Guard at Somosierra during the Peninsular War. Napoleon ordered them to charge a heavily fortified Spanish artillery position. Armed with only sabres and pistols, they overran four batteries and captured over 20 cannons. Napoleon proclaimed them his bravest cavalry and elevated them to Old Guard status. They were never defeated by enemy cavalry.

• 5. Catastrophe in Russia

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  On the 24th of June 1812, the force that crossed the Niemen was multinational on a scale the army had never reached before. Over one-third of its ranks were non-French: 95,000 Poles, 35,000 Austrians, 30,000 Italians, 24,000 Bavarians, 20,000 Saxons, 20,000 Prussians, and smaller contingents from Westphalia, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, and Ireland.

  Napoleon's plan was to catch the two main Russian armies, commanded by Generals Barclay de Tolly and Pyotr Bagration, before they could unite. The Russians evaded his pincer movements at least three times. The campaign grew defined by frustration. A final stand for Moscow led to the massive Battle of Borodino on the 7th of September 1812. The Grande Armée won, but the victory was bloody and indecisive. A week later, French troops entered Moscow to find the city largely empty and on fire.

  The army spent over a month in the burning city, waiting for a Russian peace offer that never came. Napoleon sent peace proposals to the Russian emperor; none received a reply. On the 19th of October, the French began their retreat. By the time they reached the Berezina River, Napoleon had only about 49,000 troops and 40,000 stragglers of little military value. The engineers under General Jean Baptiste Eblé built the bridges that saved what remained of the army.

  Of the 685,000 men in the initial invasion force, only 93,000 survived. As many as 380,000 died in the campaign. Of those who made it out, 50,000 were Austrians, Prussians, and other Germans; 20,000 were Poles; only 35,000 were French. The losses to disease, primarily typhus, skirmishes, starvation, cold, and Cossack raids had shattered the most experienced army in the world. The Grande Armée would never regain the strength it held in June 1812.

• 6. The Long Collapse

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  "The Grand Empire is no more. It is France herself we must now defend." Napoleon spoke those words to the Senate at the end of 1813, after one of the most consequential defeats of his career.

  The Sixth Coalition formed after Russia, emboldened European powers against France. Napoleon opened the German campaign with victories at Lützen and Bautzen, but the poor quality of French troops and cavalry after Russia meant neither victory was decisive enough to end the war. They only secured an armistice. When Austria joined the Allies, Napoleon's strategic position grew desperate.

  The campaign reopened in August 1813 with a significant French victory at the two-day Battle of Dresden. The Allies then adopted the Trachenberg Plan: avoid fighting Napoleon directly and focus on defeating his subordinate marshals. The strategy paid off at Grossbeeren, the Katzbach, Kulm, and Dennewitz, where French corps suffered defeat after defeat. The campaign reached its crisis at Leipzig, the three-day Battle of the Nations, where a bridge was prematurely destroyed, stranding 30,000 French soldiers on the wrong side of the Elster River.

  The defense of France in 1814 produced some of Napoleon's most remarkable tactical performances under hopeless strategic conditions. In the Six Days' Campaign of February 1814, a 30,000-man Grande Armée inflicted 20,000 casualties on Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher's scattered corps at a cost of just 2,000 French. But Allied armies were pressing in from the Pyrenees, across northern Italy, and through France's eastern borders simultaneously. Paris fell at the end of March. Napoleon wanted to keep fighting. His marshals refused. He abdicated on the 6th of April 1814.

  He returned from Elba in February 1815 and built the Army of the North for a final campaign in Belgium. The Waterloo campaign began on the 15th of June 1815 with a victory over the Prussians at Ligny on the 16th. Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy's delayed pursuit, however, allowed Blücher to rally his forces and march to Wellington's aid at Waterloo, where the Grande Armée met its final defeat. The Treaty of Paris in 1815 closed what the conscription of over 2.1 million Frenchmen between 1805 and 1813 could not prevent.