In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte – emperor of the French for the previous eight years – sent 600,000 of his troops into Russia. Allied with the British and Austrian empires, Russia had increasingly become the focus of Napoleon's foreign policy following his naval defeat to the British at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The same year, victory over combined AustroRussian forces at the battle of Austerlitz had seen him extending his influence eastwards through the annexing of lands in Prussia.
Before considering what would have happened next had Napoleon's Russian campaign beenwas simply empire-building and pursuing ambitions of controlling much of mainland Europe. This is not the case, as Michael Broers – professor of western European history at the University of Oxford and author of (Pegasus Books, 2022) – explains.
