Greatest Battles
PARIS, FRANCE, 30 MARCH 1814
The disastrous retreat from Moscow following the invasion of 1812 would have broken most military commanders, as well as the warfighting spirit of most nations, but Napoleon Bonaparte had proved to have superhuman resilience, raising a new army in 1813.
He continued to find success on the battlefields of Germany, but his army was too inexperienced to deliver the kind of decisive victories that might have shaped events in his favour. At the same time, Wellington’s masterful campaign in the Iberian Peninsula, coupled with savage guerrilla warfare (the so-called ‘Spanish Ulcer’) was draining French manpower and resolve.
At Leipzig, in October 1813, Napoleon was defeated by the massed ranks of his enemies, losing around 60,000 men and bringing his total losses for that year to half a million. It was a staggering blow that forced him to withdraw into France. There, the forces of the Sixth Coalition began to close in.
THE DEFENCE OF FRANCE
With the homeland now under threat, Napoleon hoped that his countrymen would rally to the cause. He called up nearly a million conscripts, including old men and teenagers, believing that he could overawe even the vast armies now marching against him. The problem was that his country had now been fighting for more than 20 years. While patriotism was still strong, war fervour was in shorter supply and only around 110,000 made themselves available to fight. It was a grossly insufficient number, but Napoleon set to work as best he could. He organised a 70,000-strong army to protect Paris and took the rest of his men on an ambitious campaign to defeat the enemy armies. It would push his military genius to its limits, but he was to enjoy a surprising number of successes.
The main threats to Napoleon were three Coalition armies entering north-eastern France. The British advance from the Iberian Peninsula and Heinrich von Bellegarde’s Austrian army in Italy posed less of a threat to Napoleon, but still tied up French soldiers. Of more immediate concern was the Army of Bohemia (around 200,000 Austrians commanded by Prince Schwarzenberg), the Army of Silesia (around 60,000 Prussians and Russians commanded by Prince Blücher) and the Army of the North (around 120,000 men, comprising Prussians and Russians commanded by Ferdinand von Wintzingerode and Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Bülow, and Dutch troops commanded by Prince Bernadotte). These armies had a combined total of close to 400,000 men, but coordination would be their weakness. For a start, the Army of the North was unable to move at the designated time – while Schwarzenberg and Blücher set their men in motion in December 1813, the Army of the North w
