The Russians refused to come to terms, and both military and political dangers could be foreseen if the French were to winter in Moscow. After waiting for a month, Napoleon began his retreat, his army now 110,000 strong, on October 19, 1812. His first intention was to retire via Kaluga and thus to make a long detour through more fertile and unexhausted territory before regaining Smolensk, but after the successful combat of Maloyaroslavets (October 24), where he found Kutuzov in his path, he decided to return by the direct route.

At Vyazma, on November 12, 1812, Napoleon’s forces had already fallen to 55,000 men. It was not until November 6 that the first snowstorm overtook the army, to be followed by alternate thaws and frosts until early December, when bitter cold set in. Thus the large majority of Napoleon’s losses occurred before the first snowfall. On leaving Smolensk, which had been ravaged in August and was now virtually destitute of supplies, the French found Kutuzov threatening their path at Krasnoe. Kutuzov however declined to bring on a general engagement, and in the intermittent fighting that ensued (November 15–17) the main French forces secured their retreat. Ney, trapped with the rear guard on November 18, was able to escape, with heavy losses, only by crossing the unreliable ice on the Dnieper.

The Grande Armée now numbered 8,000 combatants and 40,000 stragglers. Victor-Perrin’s corps, 15,000 men who had gone northwestward from Smolensk, and Oudinot’s, fewer still, rejoined the army west of Orsha. In their rear Wittgenstein had crossed the Western Dvina. The French approached the Berezina only to learn that the vital bridge at Borisov had been captured by Chichagov, whom Schwarzenberg had failed to pursue on his march from the south. Oudinot’s corps took Borisov, but the Russians burned the bridge before they withdrew. During the night of November 25–26, 1812, two bridges were constructed upstream at Studyanka while a feint to the south distracted the Russians’ attention. Oudinot’s 7,000 men crossed on November 26, the main body of the army next day. On November 28 the rear guard under Victor-Perrin held off Wittgenstein’s attacks along the east bank while Chichagov’s assaults on the west bank were contained by the rest of the army. At 9:00 am on November 29 Victor-Perrin’s men fired the bridges. From Smorgon (Smarhon) the French continued their march, now in extreme cold, to Vilnius (December 9) and thence to Kovno, where a few broken thousands crossed the Neman to find refuge at Königsberg. A further 40,000 men in isolated detachments subsequently made their way to the Vistula. From the north, Macdonald’s corps retired with 16,000 men, and in the south, Schwarzenberg and Jean Reynier fell back to the Bug with 40,000. The exhausted Russians, their own forces reduced to 40,000, suspended their advance at the Vistula. Their casualties had also been extremely high: fewer than 30 percent of the troops who began the pursuit at Maloyaroslavets reached Vilnius.

When the remnant of his army was 60 miles (roughly 100 km) east of Vilnius, on December 5, 1812, Napoleon had handed the command over to Murat and had hastened on ahead in order to reach Paris before the news of his disaster. It is estimated that of the 612,000 combatants who entered Russia only 112,000 returned to the frontier. Among the casualties, 100,000 are thought to have been killed in action, 200,000 to have died from other causes, 50,000 to have been left sick in hospitals, 50,000 to have deserted, and 100,000 to have been taken as prisoners of war. The French themselves lost 70,000 in action and 120,000 wounded, as against the non-French contingents’ 30,000 and 60,000. Russian casualties have been estimated at 200,000 killed, 50,000 dispersed or deserting, and 150,000 wounded. The dissolution of the Grande Armée meant that the French army could no longer absorb new recruits into well-established formations. Nor could it find trained men and horses on a scale to replace the magnificent cavalry arm destroyed in Russia.

Prussia changes sides

Prussian resistance to Napoleon was precipitated by the initiative of Yorck, commander of the Prussian contingent under Macdonald. Instead of marching as Macdonald’s rear guard, Yorck chose to sign his own convention of neutrality with the Russians at Tauroggen on December 30, 1812. Yorck’s force retired to the Prussian territory between Königsberg and Memel so that Macdonald had to continue his retreat to Danzig. On the other wing of the French front, Schwarzenberg signed an armistice on January 30, 1813, and withdrew southward with his Austrian troops, exposing Reynier’s corps in its retreat to the Oder. The Poles offered no resistance to the Russian advance, which stood at the Neman on January 13, reached the Vistula on January 18, and gained Warsaw on February 7.

King Frederick William’s first reaction to Yorck’s Convention of Tauroggen was to declare it the act of “an insubordinate soldier.” Gaining confidence, however, he decided to join the patriotic advocates of resistance to France and to capture a leading role in the German War of Liberation. Meanwhile, the exiled Prussian statesman Karl, Reichsfreiherr vom und zum Stein, whom Frederick William had dismissed from the government in 1808 and who was known as a spokesman of the anti-French movement in Germany, was installed by the Russians as provisional governor in Königsberg. There the estates of East Prussia met to call for the formation of a Landwehr. Frederick William agreed on February 3 to an appeal for volunteers, and within a week he had abolished exemption from military service.

After negotiation and the use of some pressure on Frederick William, Alexander concluded an alliance with him at Kalisz on February 28, 1813. Frederick William undertook not to make peace until the kingdom of Prussia had been restored to an area and population equivalent to what it had had before Tilsit, though almost all the territory gained in the second and third partitions of Poland was to be renounced. On March 16 Prussia declared war on Napoleon and on March 19 Alexander and Frederick William issued a proclamation declaring the Confederation of the Rhine to be dissolved and summoning its rulers to change sides or forfeit their states.

Prussian support was essential to Alexander’s plans, since the Russian field army numbered only 64,000 at the end of March 1813. Prussia had 61,500 troops ready for campaign, 28,000 in garrison, and 32,000 in Pomerania and in East Prussia. In addition the Landwehr would be available for service in August. The practical results of Prussian enthusiasm for the German national movement in 1813 have been subject to some exaggeration: it furnished 22,000 volunteers between March and May, while the Landwehr contributed more than 120,000 men, to supply half of the Prussian effectives in the autumn campaign.

Eugène, who had replaced Murat in command of the French forces on January 16, 1813, retreated from Poznań on February 12 and paused only briefly on the Oder (February 18–22) before falling back on Berlin. On March 4, he withdrew from Berlin to defend the line of the upper Elbe, exposing Hamburg, which was captured by Russian cavalry on March 18, and abandoning Dresden, the Saxon capital, where Blücher and his Prussians arrived on March 27.

In April 1813 the British offered subsidies to Frederick William on the condition that Hanover, which Prussia had undertaken to forgo, was enlarged and that Prussia would agree with Russia not to make peace without Great Britain’s consent. Acceding to the Russo-Swedish agreement of 1812, the British not only assigned Norway to Bernadotte (Treaty of Stockholm, March 3, 1813), but allotted him Guadeloupe and £1,000,000 toward the cost of the contingent of 24,000 with which he landed in Pomerania on May 18.