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The military machine Napoleon the artilleryman had created was perfectly suited to fight short, violent campaigns, but whenever a long-term sustained effort was in the offing, it tended to expose feet of clay. [...] In the end, the logistics of the French military machine proved wholly inadequate. The experiences of short campaigns had left the French supply services completed unprepared for ...
[125] Schroeder says Poland was "the root cause" of Napoleon's war with Russia, but Russia's refusal to support the Continental System was also a factor. [126] In 1812, at the height of his power, Napoleon invaded Russia with a pan-European Grande Armée, consisting of 450,000 men (200,000 Frenchmen, and many soldiers of allies or subject areas).
Since the disaster in Russia and the start of the war, the French populace had become increasingly war-weary. [3] France had been exhausting itself at war for 25 years, and many of its men had died during the wars Napoleon had fought until then, making conscription there increasingly unpopular.
Napoleon's Wars: An International History 1803–1815 (2008), 621pp; Gates, David. The Napoleonic Wars 1803–1815 (NY: Random House, 2011) Hazen, Charles Downer. The French Revolution and Napoleon (1917) online free; Nafziger, George F. The End of Empire: Napoleon's 1814 Campaign (2014) Parker, Harold T. "Why Did Napoleon Invade Russia?
The failed campaign against Russia proved to be a major turning point in Napoleon's fortunes. After Napoleon's defeat in the east, most of the territory of the Duchy of Warsaw was occupied by Russia in January 1813 during their advance on France and its allies. The rest of the duchy was restored to Prussia.
Napoleon with the French Grande Armée began his invasion of Russia on 24 June 1812 by crossing the Niemen. [24] As his Russian army was outnumbered by far, Mikhail Bogdanovich Barclay de Tolly successfully used a "delaying operation", defined as an operation in which a force under pressure trades space for time by slowing down the enemy's momentum and inflicting maximum damage on the enemy ...
A week of close escapes on the part of the Russian army followed. Napoleon and Kutuzov even slept on the same bed in the manor of Bolshiye Vyazyomy just one night apart, as the French chased the Russians down. Napoleon and his army entered Moscow on 14 September. To Napoleon's surprise, Kutuzov had abandoned the city, and it fell without a fight.
In the War of the Sixth Coalition (French: Guerre de la Sixième Coalition) (December 1812 – May 1814), sometimes known in Germany as the Wars of Liberation (German: Befreiungskriege), a coalition of Austria, Prussia, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Sweden, Sardinia, and a number of German States defeated France and drove Napoleon into exile on Elba.