page_title: French invasion of Russia
section_title: Grande Armée
hierarchical_section_title: French invasion of Russia / Opposing forces / Grande Armée
caption_attribution_description: Image Caption: Nous marchames l'arme au bras. Written on board: "Feb. 1896" "Russian campaign."
context_page_description: The French invasion of Russia, known in Russia as the Patriotic War of 1812 and in France as the Russian campaign, began on 24 June 1812 when Napoleon's Grande Armée crossed the Neman River in an attempt to engage and defeat the Russian Army. Napoleon hoped to compel the Emperor of All Russia, Alexander I, to cease trading with British merchants through proxies in an effort to pressure the United Kingdom to sue for peace. The official political aim of the campaign was to liberate Poland from the threat of Russia. Napoleon named the campaign the Second Polish War to gain favor with the Poles and to provide a political pretext for his actions.
  At the start of the invasion, the Grande Armée numbered around 685,000 soldiers. It was the largest army ever known to have been assembled in the history of European warfare up to that point. Through a series of long marches Napoleon pushed his army rapidly through Western Russia in an attempt to destroy the Russian Army, winning a number of minor engagements and a major battle, the Battle of Smolensk in August.
context_section_description: On 24 June 1812, the 685,000 men of the Grande Armée, the largest army assembled up to that point in European history, crossed the Neman River and headed towards Moscow. Anthony Joes wrote in the Journal of Conflict Studies that:
  Figures on how many men Napoleon took into Russia and how many eventually came out vary widely.
  [Georges] Lefebvre says that Napoleon crossed the Neman with over 600,000 soldiers, only half of whom were from France, the others being mainly Poles and Germans.
  Felix Markham thinks that 450,000 crossed the Neman on 25 June 1812, of whom fewer than 40,000 recrossed in anything like a recognizable military formation.
  James Marshall-Cornwall says 510,000 Imperial troops entered Russia.
  Eugene Tarle believes that 420,000 crossed with Napoleon and 150,000 eventually followed, for a grand total of 570,000.
  Richard K. Riehn provides the following figures: 685,000 men marched into Russia in 1812, of whom around 355,000 were French; 31,000 soldiers marched out again in some sort of military formation, with perhaps another 35,000 stragglers, for a total of fewer than 70,000 known survivors.
  Adam Zamoyski estimated that between 550,000 and 600,000 French and allied troops (including reinforcements) operated beyond the Nemen, of which as many as 400,000 troops died.
  
  "Whatever the accurate number, it is generally accepted that the overwhelming majority of this grand army, French and allied, remained, in one condition or another, inside Russia."
  — Anthony Joes
  Minard's famous infographic (see below) depicts the march ingeniously by showing the size of the advancing army, overlaid on a rough map, as well as the retreating soldiers together with temperatures recorded (as much as 30 below zero on the Réaumur scale (−38 °C, −36 °F)) on their return. The numbers on this chart have 422,000 crossing the Neman with Napoleon, 22,000 taking a side trip early on in the campaign, 100,000 surviving the battles en route to Moscow and returning from there; only 4,000 survive the march back, to be joined by 6,000 that survived from that initial 22,000 in the feint attack northward; in the end, only 10,000 crossed the Neman back out of the initial 422,000.
caption: French infantry in 1812
exif: {}