One of the hallmarks of Imperial French rule was the Continental System. Under this system, countries or kingdoms, under direct French control or allied to France, could only trade goods and services with France or with each other. They were to have no economic relations with nations outside the system, most notably Napoleon's great enemy, England.
At first Russia agreed to the Continental System, even while continuing to trade outside of it. But, when Napoleon's continued conquests threatened to close off Russia's access to the sea, Czar Alexander's hand was forced. He openly rejected the system — and Napoleon, with 500,000 troops, invaded Russia. Before Christmas of that same year, Napoleon was back in Paris having lost 400,000 men.
That the largest army ever assembled in Europe would, by the end of the year, have suffered the greatest military defeat in history could not have been foreseen. In Alan Schom's biography, Napoleon Bonaparte, we see that possibility of defeat certainly never entered the mind of Napoleon himself.
Alexander was attending a ball at the estate of Gen. Baron Levin Bennigsen on June 24, 1812, when a special courier arrived with a dispatch informing the czar that the French army had just crossed the Niemen, the Russian frontier. Despite the blatant invasion of sovereign Russian territory, Alexander decided to make one last effort to save the peace. He wrote to Napoleon:
“Monsieur mon frere, I learned yesterday that, in spite of the loyalty I have demonstrated in maintaining my engagements with Your Majesty, his troops have crossed the Russian frontier. If Your Majesty has no wish to spill the blood of his people over a misunderstanding of this nature, and if he agrees to withdraw his troops from Russian territory, I shall choose to overlook the matter, thereby allowing an accommodation to remain in effect between us…. It lies within Your Majesty's hands alone to spare mankind the calamities of another war.”
“I have undertaken great preparations, and my forces are three times greater than yours,” an uncompromising Napoleon wrote back from his new HQ at Vilna, Lithuania. “At this time, with the whole of Europe behind me, how do you expect to be able to stop me?”
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
