412 Chapter 21Germany were also directly annexed to France. Spain
was given to another brother, Joseph Bonaparte.
By 1810 most of Europe was under Napoleon’s con-
trol, with Portugal, Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, and
most of the Balkans remaining free. Prussia and Austria
retained their independence, but they faced numerous
controls. Prussia, for example, was limited to an army of
forty-two thousand men and was made to host a French
garrison. Austria, after attempting a Fourth Coalition
and suffering another defeat at Wagram in 1809, was
bound to France by a marriage in 1810 between
Napoleon and Francis’s teenaged daughter, Maria
Louisa. As an angry Russian aristocrat said in the open-
ing sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace,the great
cities of Europe “are now just family estates of the
Buonapartes.”
Napoleon tried to fight Britain with economic war-
fare. His Berlin Decree of 1806 ordered the cessation of
all commerce and communication with Britain. This
plan, known as the Continental System, failed because
it required more cooperation than Napoleon could
compel. The loss of easy access to inexpensive English
manufactures caused some Europeans to defy the Con-
tinental System. When Czar Alexander I of Russia re-
fused to cooperate, Napoleon decided to invade Russia.
He did so despite unresolved difficulties in western Eu-
rope, where the Spanish resistance to Joseph Bonaparte
had already created an independent Cortes (1810) and
produced a liberal constitution (1812). The Spanish
had received the support of a British army commanded
by Sir Arthur Wellesley. Spanish and British armies
were already pushing back the French in Wellesley’s
brilliant Peninsular Campaign, which would earn him
the title of the duke of Wellington.
Napoleon’s Grande Armée of 600,000 men
nonetheless invaded Russia in June 1812 and won sev-
eral initial battles. This included the bloodiest battle of
the nineteenth century, at Borodino where forty-four
thousand Russians were killed in a single day. (In con-
trast, fifty-five thousand Americans were killed in the
decade of the Vietnam War.) Russian armies, however,
typically retreated without permitting decisive engage-
ments, following the scorched earth strategy of Mar-
shal Mikhail Kutuzov. Even when Moscow fell to
Napoleon, the Russians refused peace negotiations and
set fire to their own city. Napoleon, the author of the
maxim that “an army marches on its stomach,” found
himself with an impossibly long supply line and few
prospects for survival by plunder, as the winter neared.
His only choice was to retreat, which exposed his army
to attacks from the rear, the tactic with which he had
devastated opponents. He retreated, leaving nearly
300,000 French soldiers dead in Russia, with another
200,000 taken prisoner. Viewed from the other side of
the field, this was an epic triumph, celebrated by Tol-
stoy in War and Peace(1866) and by Peter Tchaikovsky
in The 1812 Overture.
Napoleon’s defeat in Russia led directly to the col-
lapse of his empire. Just as 1812 became a year cele-
brated in Russian patriotism, 1813 became a triumphal
year of German nationalism. Frederick William III of
Prussia immediately joined the Russians and urged Ger-
mans to unite against Napoleon. The leading statesman
of the new allied coalition was the Austrian foreign
minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich, who brought
Austria into the war against France after Napoleon had
rejected the generous offer of peace based upon the
“natural frontiers” of France (shrinking the country back
to the Rhine River).
The war in central Europe involved immense
armies, especially in a decisive battle near the city of
Leipzig (Saxony) in October 1813. This engagement,
known as the Völkerschlact(the Battle of the Nations) to
German patriots, saw the allies produce combined
forces of 365,000 men, nearly double Napoleon’s army
and ten times the size of typical armies in the 1790s.
Napoleon was thoroughly beaten (see illustration 21.5).
Shortly thereafter, allied armies poured into France
from several directions. They occupied Paris in March
1814, and Napoleon abdicated a few days later. The
victorious allies granted France a lenient peace treaty,
the Peace of Paris (1814), restoring the frontiers of- Napoleon was exiled to the Italian island of Elba
in comfortable conditions, and the Bourbon family was
restored to the throne of France. The new king, Louis
XVIII, was the brother of Louis XVI; he had survived
the revolution by joining the émigrés in 1791. (He
skipped the title of Louis XVII in deference to the son
of Louis XVI, who had died in prison.)
In the following year, Napoleon escaped from Elba
and with the support of his veterans seized control of
France for a brief reign known as “the 100 days.”
Alarmed, the British and the Prussians joined forces un-
der the duke of Wellington and defeated him at Water-
loo, just south of Brussels, Belgium, on June 18, 1815.
The Napoleonic era was over, but the emperor lived on
until 1821, exiled to house arrest on the remote British
island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic.