211 years ago Napoléon led a city of soldiers and supports into russia. Should he have been psychiatrically examined before he left Paris?

From Sainte-Hélène, Napoléon wrote: … “the defeat was not the result of the ‘efforts of the Russians’ but rather [due to] ‘complete accidents … a capital burned to the ground by foreign parties before the eyes of its inhabitants … a freezing winter the sudden arrival and intensity of which was nothing less than phenomenal’ and finally ‘false reports, ridiculous plots, betrayal and pure stupidity.’

Was Napoleon’s failure due to bad luck or the mistakes of others? or was the fault not in his stars but in himself

After the conflict was over, Napoléon did ascribe one ‘possible-fault’ to himself: ‘I did not wish for this famous war, this audacious undertaking. I had no urge to fight. Nor did Alexander, yet once we were face to face, circumstance drove us against each other. Fate did the rest.’

Preparations for the campaign began in 1811. Writing to his brother Jérôme 27 January 1812, Napoléon said: “I have had to assemble my armies, train them, and reconstitute my equipment. These preparations have taken a year.”

So if he “had no urge to fight” why for a year did he wholeheartedly plan an invasion of Russia? Did he expect Russia to hand itself over to him without argument—just for turning up at the Lithuanian border with a huge force?

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In the sweltering European summer of 1812 Napoléon marched various elements of a 420,000 strong army, driving a city-sized mass of 690,000 soldiers and supports up through France and today’s Germany, arriving late July at the Grand Duchy of Warzaw’s border with Russia. Napoléon said his objective was to ‘speak with Alexander’—only he forgot to leave his army back in Paris.

What was Napoléon’s real motive for this project? A few ideas have occurred to observers for this 1812 debacle, because France invading Russia still doesn’t make a lot of sense, with Napoléon’s largest military project accruing its indelible meaning inside Russia—that of a complete and utter failure.

Did Napoléon dream of becoming Napoléon the Greatest, Tsar of the richest European country? Or was the plan to conquer Russia then head-on to the Far East? Or was the dream really to conquer Russia, then march south, climb the Himalayas and lay claim to India, before the British annexed the whole sub-continent, after the Dutch had ceded the island of Ceylon to them in 1802.

Colonialising nations had used the ’empty land’ legal argument to successfully annex multiple lands by the end of 18th century. Any European power brazen enough to invade and take control of a terra nullius could take their choice of the many lands out in the lesser known seascapes in the now round world, lands many Europeans didn’t know existed. However, one place Europeans knew very well, Russia, was not a terra nullius.

Napoléon’s game-plan was devoid of guile. His subjugation of Russia was simply his first and main task. He wanted to demonstrate who was boss of Europe, show who truly ruled Europe’s disparate gaggle of neighbouring powers.

Tsar Alexander had broken the terms of the Treaties of Tilsit in trading with Britain. Napoléon was said to very angry about this—with the Tilsit Treaty rupture given as the reason for this massive military adventure.

At the Nieman River border with Lithuania, the most western point of the Russian Empire, the French leader fell off his emblematic white horse, joking that if he had been a Caesar in Ancient Rome he might have accepted the omen was bad and headed home. For Napoléon, in the summer 1812, there was no going back. Onward to the East!

Some months before he informed European leaders he was confident of conquering Russia. Ever the military showman, Napoléon demonstrated himself as thirsty as ever for another bloody encounter, even if seven years earlier at Austerlitz he admitted he only had five years left in him as a soldier.

The Nieman River Russian border arrival made for a great and glorious day. The pontoon crossings were orderly, uneventful, except for the unnecessary deaths by drowning of a contingent of Polish cavalry, who in trying to impress their great leader threw themselves into the swiftly flowing river.

With French troops across the river a skirmish occurred, when Russian cavalrymen appeared suddenly on the eastern bank. After some shooting, the Russians quickly retreated, seeming not to desire any escalation of the confrontation.

Once inside the Russian Empire, Napoléon marched his men up and down and around and about trying to find his opponent. He wanted to force the Russian army into a decisive battle but he couldn’t find them. Onward Napoléon and his soldiers rode, with Napoléon still supremely confident of an early Russian surrender.

Meanwhile the Russians under the German Scot, Barclay de Tolly, carefully avoided him. Then eventually the French caught up with Barclay’s men at Smolensk. In truth, Barclay let himself be found. Seeing the Russians ready to fight, Napoléon smacked his lips—this was the moment he had been craving throughout the entire summer.

However on day one of his first major confrontation on Russian soil, military inventiveness somehow deserted the 43 year old soldier, though you wouldn’t know it by his demeanour speaking with his aide-de camp, Marquis de Caulaincourt, the pair standing on a hill overlooking the city as the battle began. Caulaincourt was struck by how fired up Napoléon was just by the idea of another difficult fight. Yet, once described as Europe’s military genius, Napoléon made a fundamental error. He neglected to secure Smolensk’s back gate. Launching a full frontal artillery bombardment, his troops stormed into the city in a direct unimaginative attack plan, while the Russians under their most able commander, General Prince Bagration, took the opportunities presented to him—an open back door through which he could pour in fresh troops.

The sister city of Moscow, Smolensk was filled with religious icons and a fiercely patriotic population. While Napoléon craved a clear victory with his first battle inside Russia, Barclay’s troops and the citizenry of Smolensk took up the challenge, so determined were they to give the French invader a wake-up call.

Napoléon’s army faced a fierce opposition and sustained major casualties. Forced to fight mano-a-mano against fired-up Russian soldiers, joined by priests and locals, many of them untrained, French casualties were substantial, in the main because Bagration was able to continuously reinforce his own forces.

Napoléon lost this first test on Russia soil because he failed to overpower, more importantly, he failed to demoralise the Russians. The Prussian military theorist, Carl Von Clausewitz, then advising Russia, wrote that Napoléon began losing the war tactically from Smolensk onward. In this first real encounter with the Russian army, Von Clausewitz was astounded that Napoléon attacked without first surrounding and securing the city. For Von Clausewitz, this new Napoléon signalled a decline in tactical nous. Outnumbering the Russians significantly the French only just beat them. Napoléon’s dubious 1812 project had already begun to unravel.

With casualties high on both sides, the battle is accorded by history as a small victory to the French, though this seems now due more to the Barclay’s decision to retreat east along the road to Moscow, making it seem as if he accepted he’d lost at Smolensk.

Whether or not Barclay decided on this strategy, or it was due only to his default position of avoiding most confrontations, a strategic fact of 1812 had emerged—Napoléon’s defeat had already begun.

In receiving support from farmers and peasantry, an intact Russian army could march easily and without fear towards Moscow, whereas the French following behind them faced the western Russian farming communities in full resistance mode.

So why did Russia decide to retreat?

The Russians were deep in tactical disagreement. Many of the high-command deplored Barclay’s strategies. “Tell me for God’s sake,” Prince Bagration said, “what will our Russia—our mother—say seeing that we are so frightened … that we are giving up such a good and zealous Fatherland to such rabble and instilling hatred and disgrace in every subject? Why are we so cowardly, and who are we afraid of? It is not my fault that the minister is irresolute, cowardly, muddle-headed, temporizing, and has every bad quality. The whole army is completely in tears and scolds him to death …”

Bagration despised Barclay, thinking him weak, and a poor soldier. To Bagration, the foreign-born army chief lacked a Russian’s determination to stand and fight for his-her homeland. Barclay’s retreat signalled defeatism to the enemy.

Napoléon was barely a shadow of his old self. Beset by ailments, his mind wasn’t sharp. He began failing himself and his army early on in the campaign. It was already unsound strategically to drive his diminishing army further into enemy territory, where the Russians could regroup and replenish their ranks. Driving his army on with insufficient food, water and rest, in pursuit of the Russians showed Napoléon was ageing, losing the plot.

His supply-lines severely stretched, Napoléon’s army foraged, as was its way in foreign places, but in finding little food and only tainted water, men and horses began dying. Desertions, starvation and thirst were now seriously depleting his troops, but now suddenly an even bigger threat appeared. Napoléon’s soldiers were also dying in alarming numbers from a mysterious disease.

Napoléon’s personal and chief army surgeon, Dominique Jean Larrey and Caulaincourt, witnessed the terrible deaths. It is unimaginable that Napoléon was unaware of what Typhus was doing to his army.

So, did Napoléon fail to surround Smolensk because he knew he didn’t have enough troops to manage the simultaneous tasks of securing and attacking the city? If so, then why continue pursuing the Russians? Speaking with Austria’s Prince Metternich months earlier, Napoléon said he planned to build a base at Smolensk, resting there for the winter, after which he would attack Russia’s heartland the following spring. Yet late in the stifling 1812 summer, with disease, starvation, thirst and desertion already ravaging his army, Napoléon altered his plan, putting his army at risk.

Leaving a contingent to hold the city of Smolensk, in part as he had planned to do, Napoléon drove his much-depleted force on in pursuit of the Russians. Barclay’s men were heading to Moscow for sound defensive reasons, while Napoléon was now engaged in a military gamble. Exhibiting early signs of desperation, in craving a morale-boosting victory, Napoléon could not stop himself chasing the Russians. He even ordered Maréchal Junot to attack the retreating Russians from the rear. Junot ignored the order. Napoléon’s plans seemed now to be unravelling fast. Yet, he rode on, not really chasing the Russians anymore, more lagging in their wake.

Overwhelmed by the desire to win a major battle, to define the moment, the once sublimely-successful military campaigner had mislaid his skills. Had he lost his mojo? In ordering Junot, a no-longer completely trustworthy commander, to attack the Russian rear, Napoléon was not only let down by Junot, he let himself and his army down by sending Junot in the first place. Why Junot of all commanders, a man continuing to suffer from a life-altering head-wound, gained from a prior campaign? Why not send Murat or Ney? There is a deeper needle in Napoléon’s misjudgment. The intact Russians after Smolensk were now well inside their own territory. Was Junot right after all? Any attack now needed careful planning.

Then Napoléon found himself facing a new chief-of-staff of the Russian army. Yielding to the pleas of Bagration and others, Tsar Alexander removed Barclay. The new commander of Russian forces was a Russian’s Russian—Mikhail Kutuzov. Coming back from a campaign against the Ottoman Empire in the deep south, Marshal Kutuzov rode to assume his new command on 29 August, 1812, meeting his troops at Borodino, 84 miles south west of Moscow. With solid battle credentials, Kutuzov was an experienced and trusted Russian general—a shrewd soldier who had survived two serious head wounds, though unlike Maréchal Junot, neither touched his brain. Kutuzov satisfied the Russian high command, particularly Bagration, who now considered Barclay de Tolly as a complete incompetent.

Predictably perhaps, Napoléon also declared himself happy with Kutuzov’s appointment. He had beaten him at Austerlitz. But that was in 1805 in a battle fought under different conditions, when Napoléon was, by almost everyone’s estimation, at the peak of his powers.

At 67, Marshal Kutuzov was near the end of his career too, but being a thoughtful man, and exhibiting a light touch in command style, he suited Russia’s needs almost perfectly.

There are ways of rationalising how wars develop and there is at least one good defence for them—self-defence. Nations have a right, even a duty, to defend themselves. 19th century Russians knew what they had to do was whatever it took to make their defence against the invading army succeed. It was up to Napoléon to match Russia’s resolve.

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On September 7 1812 the Russians decided to make their stand, with the Battle of Borodino planned to take place in an insignificant field—a field ‘like any other’, as Tolstoy wrote.

The night before battle two armies camped about two football fields apart from each other, the French silently chewing on horse meat listening to the morale boosting singing of the Russian army.

Marshal Kutuzov knew how to rouse his men, and he did so by parading before them a Russian priest recently released from captivity, as if he were a religious icon. The morning arrived and the French and Russian forces charged at each other.

Having awoken with a urinary tract infection, silent, hunched low, staring into the smoke, Napoléon watched it all from a dinner chair on a western hill, his brain receiving repetitive hammer blows every second of seven muskets and three cannon firing. He was unable to engage in the free-for-all before him.

His maréchaux offering him ideas and plans, Napoléon kept rejecting every suggestion one by one. When he most needed to be bold and begged repeatedly to send in his Imperial Guard to take advantage of opportunities, one which came early in the day on the French left flank, or to shore up hard-pressed troops, Napoléon shook his head.

His military prowess shrivelled down to nothing, Napoléon would not, could not, commit his last piece in the chess game, the military piece that defined him in the end—his personal protection.

Watching Russians hold-up, turn back, the more numerous invaders’ attacks, one charge after another, Borodino drifted into a kind of French victory. Throughout the battle, Napoléon looked-on bereft of ideas, even courage it seemed. Was he thinking: any more battles like this I am doomed? He would’ve been right if he were thinking like this. Borodino was a brutal lesson—invade Russia at your peril.

Summarising the day, Napoléon emphasised Russia’s losses, downplaying his own. Camped on the field where his invasion project had gone up in smoke, Napoléon wrote to his Austrian-born wife Marie-Louise claiming that Russian losses were 30,000 men, failing to mention what had happened to his own army. In a letter to Maret, he wrote: “Russian losses at the Moskova are huge. It is the most beautiful battlefield I have seen thus far: there are 2,000 French and 12,000 Russian, and that is no exaggeration.”

Napoléon fantasized a 1 to 6 ratio ratio of losses in favour of his own army. These days those losses are calculated as 25,000 to 28,000 dead to the Grande Armée, and about 45,000 to the Russians. The loss ratio was around 1 to 2. While accruing more favourably to Napoléon, Borodino is one of the bloodiest battles ever fought by the French anywhere. So far from home, it was just short of a complete disaster.

Kutuzov was realistic. Knowing both armies had suffered terrible losses, he knew when to quit, slowly marching his broken army up the road towards Moscow. He saw no victory where there was none, no beauty in war or death. Kutuzov knew how many men the Russian contingents had lost, and he mourned every one of them, particularly the death of his finest battle commander, General Bagration. While the Russians took time to bury their soldiers, the French left dead bodies strewn all over the battlefield.

Murat wanted to use Napoléon’s Imperial Guard, unused throughout the Battle of Borodino, to chase down the stricken Russians, attacking them hard from the rear. Napoléon, once famed as a shrewd military tactician, now seemed unable to read his opportunities for victory anymore. He ignored Murat precisely when the Russians so badly wounded could have been defeated—why did Napoléon Bonaparte refuse to commit his Imperial Guard?

Optimism, which in the past sat at the core of his military reasoning had suddenly gone missing. Napoléon seemed consumed by self-preservation. His diary entries from Sainte Hélène mentioned ‘false reports, ridiculous plots, betrayal and pure stupidity’. Where did these false reports come from? Officers high up in his own command? Was he beset by fears of a mutiny?

Perhaps Napoléon’s inaction after Borodino could be seen as a show of respect, a soldier’s sympathy for the struck-down enemy. But as Napoléon had rarely, if ever, let a chance for military victory slip by him, and because he was not in Russia to demonstrate sympathy for the Russian army—even if peace was now his best hope for salvaging anything from this failing campaign—this seems unlikely to be the reason.

Two centuries later, of course, it is difficult to look inside Napoléon’s mind at this crucial moment. His objective was to take Moscow, and to do that, clearly he needed a strong Guard. So is this why he ignored Murat? But could destruction of the Russian army have made taking Moscow harder? Is it possible that Napoléon in a post-Borodino depression thought that crushing the Russians in a charge from the rear would be seen as a cowardly war crime? That the French leader’s largesse in deciding against such an attack might be seen favourably by Russians as a whole? Hardly. And war crimes, who really thought of things such as war crimes in 1812?

Perhaps Napoléon even thought he could be invited to take over Russia, that he’d be seen as generous an invader as history accords Alexander the Great as being. Could the Russians admire Napoléon as the ancient world once admired Alexander the Great?

History shows us now that the Russians were never going to accept Napoléon. That was clear to the clear-headed even before Borodino. So, whatever Napoléon’s reasoning, in showing an unwillingness to employ the Imperial Guard against the Russians at an opportune post-Borodino moment, he lost the chance to deal the Russians a death blow. Allowing them to survive Napoléon lost the campaign.

Taking Moscow was still the French leader’s ‘moment in history’, at least in his own head. So, on he rode, not chasing any new military engagement, thinking only of how he could manage an entry into Moscow. Taking Russia’s main city represented everything his campaign was about. Onward he marched his battered army, staying well behind the retreating Russians, focused only on his grand entrance into the capital.

There were big questions left to resolve: not only, would the Russians ever accept Napoléon as Emperor? How could the Grande Armée control the centre of Russian life? Would Tsar Alexander give up his throne? Could Napoléon’s army open a gateway to the far east? Could Napoléon ever be as great as Alexander of Macedonia? Many energy-consuming thoughts must have been circulating in his battle stricken brain.

For Russia’s Marshal Kutuzov the way forward was far simpler. Moscow was whatever he had to do to rid the fatherland of the French. The Russians troops marched through the city and left the metropolis to Napoléon.

Arriving at the city’s gates, waiting impatiently on his horse, Napoléon fully expected to be greeted by Moscow’s elders. When nobody came he sent Murat in to check that the city was clear of the enemy, bedding himself down in a village house on the perimeter. The next morning, with Russian troops riding southward from Moscow, retreating to a base camp at Kaluga, Napoléon rode in towards the Kremlin, thinking, deluding himself, that he could now occupy Moscow, even if only for a few depressing weeks. And depressing it was going to be for him. Napoléon controlled Moscow only because the Russians left it for him, in chaos, when its mayor, Count Fyodor Rostopchin, made sure the city was soon ablaze.

Napoléon couldn’t comprehend the depth of the Russian spirit of resistance. Waiting for a letter of surrender from Alexander, he watched sacred Moscow burning down, a city he described in a letter to Marie-Lousie as “500 palaces as beautiful as the Elysée Napoléon furnished luxuriously à la française, several imperial palaces, barracks, magnificent hospitals.”

Napoléon Bonaparte witnessed his composite army ransack and abuse the cradle of Russian history for five weeks. Meanwhile Tsar Alexander continued on ignoring him. Moscow gave Napoléon nightmares. Moscou, la capitale asiatique de ce grand empire, la ville sacrée des peuples d’Alexandre, Moscou avec ses innombrables églises en forme de pagodes chinoises!

Napoléon must have known the game was up. His army was now not even half its original size. He remained in Moscow far too long while dithering over what to do. It was said only in seeing the first October snowflakes did he finally bring himself to order his army to pack-up and leave. In truth, he was moved to act when a French foraging party, sent south to find food, was attacked by Russian soldiers. This was the event that made Napoléon realise it was time to go. Marshal Kutuzov’s army was regrouping fast, while Napoléon’s troops had become barely more than an undisciplined rabble of looters.

Heading south to warmer, hopefully food-stocked territories, Napoléon’s exit was soon known to the Russians. They had spies in Moscow. They had spies everywhere. When the French arrived at Maloyaroslavets, Kutuzov’s army attacked them. Riding out to reconnoiter with his men in the aftermath of another disturbing encounter, Cossack cavalrymen charged Napoléon’s party. Appearing suddenly from out of some woods the Cossacks got so close to the French leader he was nearly captured, with Napoléon saved only by the intervention of his Imperial Guard.

Back in his headquarters that night a very shaken Napoléon listened to Murat, his brave calvary commander, the most-headstrong of his maréchaux, arguing for an big attack on Kutuzov. Napoléon should take on the Russians at Kaluga. No matter how replenished the Russians were, the French would beat them, gaining access to the food they needed for the long march home along a warmer southern route.

Napoléon listened but demurred, ordering his troops to march north west, back up along the food-stripped, battle-ruined old Moscow to Smolensk road. He dragged his men by the still-shocking death scene at Borodino—a battlefield which weeks afterwards still lay littered with rotting French remains. The sight stunned even his most battle-hardened soldiers.

Napoléon drove a demoralised army right into the jaws of a freezing Russian winter on an iced-filled, foodless road. With each passing mile, the smell of death seemed everywhere, his troops slipping, sliding themselves west, pulling their booty behind them. Napoléon’s letters home demonstrated just how much in denial he was over the state of his army, its exhaustion, lack of winter clothing and food, with full-winter closing in. On 18 November, writing Maret four weeks after exiting Moscow, Napoléon finally admitted in explicit and almost naive terms the structural difficulties he now faced:

“Since the last letter I sent you, our situation has worsened. Freezing conditions and a biting cold of 16 degrees [below zero on the Réaumur scale, about minus 20° C ] have killed nearly all our horses, almost 30,000 of them. We have been forced to burn more than 300 artillery pieces and an immense number of transports. […] A few days of rest, some good food and above all horse and artillery equipment will set us right. But the enemy has over us experience of moving in icy conditions, something that gives him an immense advantage in winter. As we struggle to get a transport or artillery piece over the smallest defile without losing 12 or 15 horses and 12 to 15 hours, they – with their skates and specially equipped teams – move them as if there were no ice at all.”

Frequently attacked by Cossack raiding parties, the invaders staggered on until they were halted at the ice-filled but not yet fully-frozen-solid Bérézina river. It was uncrossable. It looked as if Napoléon’s end game had arrived. A final battle was at hand. Admiral Pavel Chichagov was waiting for Napoléon’s army on the western bank. To the north, Peter Wittgenstein was approaching with another Russian army. A day’s ride to the east, Kutuzov slowly marched behind the retreating French with the rest of the Russian troops. Napoléon ordered his papers be burnt.

Yet Bérézina turned into another miracle escape. Not because of Napoléon, in spite of him. Having disobeyed orders to jettison all his heavy bridge-building gear, Général Eblé, crucially kept his pontoon equipment. Climbing down into freezing waters, Eblé and his corps of Dutch engineers constructed pontoons for French troops and the ragtag followers to walk over. The engineers spent many hours in the freezing waters building and rebuilding the pontoons—twice—because a repair was needed. All of Eblé’s men died as a result of their efforts, with Eblé succumbing to the experience after arriving home in Paris.

Eblé managed the impossible, working with Murat who made a noisy decoy move up river. Managing to trick Chichagov, the French made out as if they were crossing the river elsewhere. Taking Murat’s bait, Chichagov tracked them up the river, leaving the Bérézina free for Napoléon’s troops to pontoon over, for a few short hours. It was enough.

On the west bank, an incandescent Chichagov realising his mistake, retraced his steps only to meet Swiss troops under Général Oudinot defending the crossing, which they did down to their last man. Napoléon’s army escaped, his soldiers just getting across the treacherous ice-filled Bérézina river by the skin of their chattering teeth.

The Grande Armée’s rag-tag followers support city though were not so lucky. Too cold and demoralised to move when ordered to, upon hearing that the pontoons were being destroyed, most drowned when they rushed the pontoons at the very end. Bérézina is a tale of woe, underlining how tragically misguided 1812 truly was.

29 November Napoléon wrote he was “cut off from everything: It has been fifteen days since I last received any news or any dispatch, and I am in the dark on everything” adding: “The army is large but terribly strung out,” before instructing Maret to assemble plenty of provisions in Vilnius. “Without them,” he warned, “there is no horror that this undisciplined and unruly mob will not visit upon the city.”

30 November, Napoléon wrote: 40,000 soldiers “driven, by fatigue, cold and want of food roaming as vagabonds and looters.” Napoléon ordered: “100,000 rations of bread, without which anarchy and violence would reign in Vilnius.”

4 December he wrote Maret before crossing the Niemen, admitting now that: “The army, exhausted and worn out by the miseries it has experienced, is at the brink. It is capable of no more, not even if it were asked to defend Paris.”

As his history shows, Napoléon forged this sort of military failure more than once. At Bérézina, once again he got off lightly. Convincing his generals it was best for him to head to Paris, he deserted yet another army, riding south with his aide-de-camp Caulaincourt in a big sleigh. Freed from his responsibility as principal architect of yet another failed military campaign, Napoléon was heard laughing uproariously.

Back again in Paris, 19 December, buoyed by his good reception, he turned his mind once again to more grandiose plans. On the day of his arrival he wrote to Murat that he was raising another army: ‘I have arrived in Paris. I was extremely satisfied with the Nation’s resolve. They are prepared to make any sort of sacrifice, and I shall be tireless in my work to reorganise the means [at my disposal]. I already have an army of 40,000 men in Berlin and on the Oder.’

How can this be defended? Is it madness? Hubris. Both? Madness is part folklore, a tale children shout at each other in streets. It has meaning in Psychiatry. When military commanders demonstrate themselves to be certifiably insane what censures are available for dealing with them?

Many would say it is wrong to call Napoléon’s invasion of Russia an act of a mentally ill man—at least without defining what ‘madness’ means. Analysing his state-of-mind unscientifically, let us say then, that in his attack on Russia in 1812, Napoléon, Emperor extraordinaire, military adventurer, in marching, cajoling 690,000 humans northward across Europe to invade a sovereign nation, Russia, the French leader unfortunately messed up his military plan, due to some minor miscalculations.

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in truth Napoléon needed to be physically and psychiatrically examined before he left Paris but no-one even thought of analysing leaders that way back then.

He force-marched 690,000 humans into Russia and exited five months later with around 10,000 of his original force—10,000 humans who were barely in any condition to carry out any duties let alone military tasks. Of the support team of hangers-on, few survived.

One year later Napoléon lost the Battle of Leipzig. Another Napoléonic army gone, ending when a panicked corporal blew up a bridge early, trapping thousands of fleeing French soldiers who were still in the German city. By 1815 and Waterloo, European armies and generals had pretty-well worked out Napoléon’s time-worn tactics.

These battles have been thoroughly examined, explained, but questions of the 1812 campaign remain. Did Napoléon’s 1812 Russia campaign represent a great military-leader brought down by unforeseeable events, or were the thousands upon thousands of French troops and loyal allies needlessly sacrificed on the altar of the ego of a fly-by-the-seat of his pants gambling-freak soldier whose luck just ran out?

With troops at his disposal reduced by half quite suddenly, fighters deserting daily, supplies already short, Typhus raging, would a young Napoléon—in his right fully-conscious mind—have known that by Smolensk the game was already up?

Before Russia, Napoléon was considered to be the military genius’ in late 18th, early 19th century Europe. If this was still true inside Russia the man making the decisions was another person entirely. The truth seems to be that by Russia 1812, as a général, Napoléon was not the same man anymore. Was he aware of his own decline? Probably. In keeping his Imperial Guard sidelined, he seemed to know his weaknesses and like an ageing mob boss he knew when he needed protection. So was Napoléon by 1812 a military-gangster surrounding himself with gunmen in order to survive? Was his self-protective state-of-mind in the 1812 Russia campaign a major factor of its failure? Or was the campaign’s failure due to more than an ageing leader’s decline?

Almost everything Napoléon tried to do went wrong. His failure to analyse and manage evolving crises, meant each new failure only worsened matters for his army and himself. Reaching for medical reasons, not yet recognised in 1812, Napoléon could well have been a victim of a cumulative war injury first-known as shell-shock, now described by the condition Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

British Physician and Psychologist, Charles Myers, when asked by the British Army to examine an emerging problem, wrote an article for Lancet in 1915. Listing his findings under shell-shock, Myers was criticised by many military decisionmakers who believed by medicalising the condition it allowed ‘psychological hoo-ha’ to be an excuse for cowardice and malingering.

Do Napoléon’s 1812 symptoms paint him as a PTSD victim coward-malingerer? In conventional historical analysis, ‘malingering-coward’ doesn’t sit easily next to Emperor Napoléon’s name. Yet the Russia campaign presents a stark portrait of the man. His military in-decision, lack of inspiration, more-than-occasional absences of courage inside Russia, raise many important questions.

How far PTSD defines his performance needs further examination, but that he was a sufferer of PTSD seems a probable cumulative result of his long career in the artillery—and a reasonable cause for his impaired-thinking inside Russia. So long among the big guns, it would be surprising if Napoléon’s judgment wasn’t somehow affected by the continuing concussive blows of twenty years of cannon-fire.

Could his maréchaux have done more? Should they have staged a mutiny? But when to stage such a revolt? After Smolensk—Borodino—Moscow?

Probably not the the former, and not the second, but after Moscow, when Napoléon decided to take his remnant-force back-up along the food-stripped Moscow to Smolensk road—sure death for so many—Maréchal Murat could have taken charge and removed Napoleon as head of the composite invasion force.

The French army could and probably should have fought the Russians at Kaluga. At worst, it would have been a glorious end to an inglorious campaign. History books would have been filled with details of a courageous battle end to a failed project. Instead we read of the desperately sad drawn-out utter failure of France’s 1812 retreat.

If Napoléon were a PTSD sufferer would it reduce any of his responsibility for this failure? Or should historians, 211 years after 1812, finally bring Napoléon to account for all his failed military campaigns?—specifically, his manically misguided, mentally-deranged, military misadventure inside Russia.

© Lew Richard Collins