Who won the Battle of Leipzig?
The allied Sixth Coalition of Austria, Prussia, Russia and Sweden won the Battle of Leipzig, the Battle of the Nations, fought from 16 to 19 October 1813. More than half a million soldiers met in the largest battle in Europe before World War I, and the defeat ended Napoleon's power east of the Rhine.1
Between 16 and 19 October 1813, around the Saxon city of Leipzig, more than half a million soldiers from a dozen nations fought the largest battle Europe would see until World War I. Russians, Prussians, Austrians and Swedes fought against Frenchmen, Poles, Italians and the Germans still loyal to Napoleon. When it ended, Napoleon's empire east of the Rhine had ceased to exist. Contemporaries called it simply the Battle of the Nations.2
After the snows of Russia
The catastrophe of 1812 had swallowed the Grande Armée, yet Napoleon raised a fresh army of raw conscripts within months. In the spring of 1813 he beat the Russians and Prussians at Lützen on 2 May and at Bautzen on 20 and 21 May, but he lacked the cavalry to turn either victory into a rout. On 4 June both sides agreed to an armistice. Many historians count it among his worst mistakes, because the allies used the summer to rearm and to bring Austria into the war against him.3
When the fighting resumed in August, the coalition fielded three great armies: the Army of Bohemia under the Austrian Prince Karl Philipp zu Schwarzenberg, the Army of Silesia under the old Prussian hussar Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, and the Army of the North under Sweden's crown prince, Jean Bernadotte, once one of Napoleon's own marshals. Their plan, worked out at Trachenberg and Reichenbach in July, was simple and shrewd: avoid a general action with Napoleon himself unless the odds were very favorable, and strike at his flanks and communications.4
It worked. Napoleon beat the Army of Bohemia at Dresden on 26 and 27 August, but his lieutenants were beaten at Kulm, on the Katzbach, at Gross Beeren and at Dennewitz, and his armies failed to take Berlin. On 8 October Bavaria changed sides. As the three allied armies closed on his communications through Leipzig, Napoleon concentrated everything he had around the city.5
The armies and their commanders
No two accounts give the same totals. Britannica gives Napoleon about 185,000 men against about 320,000 allies. The military historian F. Loraine Petre, working from the regimental returns, counted about 191,000 French and allied troops with 690 guns available on the morning of 16 October, against about 205,000 coalition soldiers with 916 guns. The decisive difference lay in what was still on the road. Napoleon could expect only Reynier's 14,000 more, while the allies would bring up another 111,000 by the 18th, with Bernadotte and Bennigsen, for a total of about 316,000 men and nearly 1,400 guns.6
Schwarzenberg held the supreme command, with the Tsar Alexander I, the Emperor Francis I and King Frederick William III of Prussia riding close behind him and often second-guessing him. Napoleon led in person, with Murat, Ney, Marmont, Macdonald, Victor and Augereau under him. On his right, along the Pleisse, stood the VIII Corps of Prince Józef Poniatowski, the Polish army that had followed him since 1812.7
The ground favored the defender only in patches. Leipzig was no longer a fortress. To the south, low ridges rolled out from the city like waves, with villages of solid houses and walled gardens. To the west the rivers Elster and Pleisse broke into a maze of channels, woods and marsh, crossed by a single raised causeway with several bridges that ran to Lindenau. It was the French army's only good road home.8
16 October: Wachau, Lindenau and Möckern
The battle opened two days early. On 14 October Murat's cavalry fought the Army of Bohemia around the village of Liebertwolkwitz, in a clash of horsemen on a vast scale, which is often counted among the largest cavalry battles in history. The village changed hands, and the day ended in a draw.9
The morning of Saturday 16 October broke cold and rainy, under a thick mist, and the allied attack did not begin until about eight o'clock. Four allied columns advanced from the south on Markkleeberg, Wachau and Liebertwolkwitz, spread over some six miles and unable to see one another. Napoleon watched from a hill called the Galgenberg and met each thrust with artillery. Wachau was taken, fought over house by house and lost again. By two in the afternoon every allied column had been thrown back to its starting point, and, Petre writes, Napoleon ordered the bells of Leipzig rung for a victory.10
Then he counterattacked. In Petre's account a battery of 84 guns prepared the way, and the cuirassiers of General Bordesoulle charged through the allied center, capturing 26 guns and riding almost to the hill where the Tsar and the King of Prussia stood. Allied reserves and fresh cavalry drove them back. Across the Pleisse, the Austrian general Meerveldt, who was short-sighted, rode into a body of Saxons and Poles he took for his own men and was captured. At nightfall the southern battle was a draw.11
North of the city the day went the other way. Blücher's Army of Silesia attacked Marmont's corps at Möckern, a village taken and retaken again and again in one of the most desperate struggles of the war. In the evening General Yorck's Prussians carried it, taking about 2,000 prisoners and more than 40 guns, and, Petre relates, as the firing died away the victorious troops sang the hymn Nun danket alle Gott. West of the river an Austrian attack on Lindenau, the gateway to the causeway, was beaten off.12
17 October: the lull
The 17th was a Sunday, and there was little fighting. Every hour of it worked against Napoleon. Bennigsen's Army of Poland and Bernadotte's Army of the North were marching up, while he could add only Reynier's corps. During the night he had talked with the captured Meerveldt, from whom, Petre writes, he learned that Bavaria's army was moving against his road home. He sent the Austrian back to his emperor with an offer to negotiate. Nothing came of it. Napoleon now knew he would have to retreat, yet he chose to hold the field one more day.13
18 October: the ring closes
At two in the morning, in pouring rain, the French pulled back to a tighter ring around the city, from Connewitz and Probstheida in the south to Paunsdorf and Schönefeld in the east. Then the allies came on from every side with more than 300,000 men. By nightfall the French in the north had been pushed back into the suburbs of Leipzig.14
Probstheida, the hinge of the French line, saw the worst of it. Prussian and Russian columns stormed the village again and again and were thrown out each time. The fire was so heavy that, Petre notes, the Prussian general Kleist counted 30 wrecked guns in and around it the next day. To the east, the British rocket troop attached to Bernadotte's army fired its new Congreve rockets on Paunsdorf, a weapon still new to European battlefields.15
Then Napoleon's alliances began to crack on the field itself. Saxon cavalry rode over to the allies, and later in the day the Saxon infantry of Reynier's corps followed them, and the Württemberg cavalry changed sides too, opening a gap in the French line east of the city. By nightfall the perimeter still held, but the army was short of ammunition and could not stand another day.16
19 October: the bridge over the Elster
The retreat began in the dark. While a rearguard of about 30,000 men, Macdonald's command with Poniatowski's Poles among it, held the suburbs, the rest of the army filed out through the Ranstädt Gate and along the single causeway to Lindenau. The allies, slow to notice, stormed the city in the morning. Napoleon himself drifted out with the crowd of soldiers and wagons and reached Lindenau about eleven.17
The bridge over the Elster just outside the gate had been mined, to be blown once the rearguard was across. The engineer officer in charge went off to ask which corps would be last and left a corporal to watch the charge. Around one in the afternoon, with allied skirmishers firing from the meadows and the bridge still crowded with retreating men, the corporal lit the fuse. Thousands of French soldiers were trapped in the city; Britannica counts 30,000 rearguard and wounded men left behind, to be taken prisoner the next day.18
Those left behind could surrender or swim. Thousands surrendered. Marshal Macdonald rode his horse into the river and got across. Prince Józef Poniatowski, made a Marshal of France by Napoleon on 16 October, three days before, did not. Already wounded several times while covering the retreat, he urged his horse into the Elster, was hit again and drowned on 19 October. The Polish History Museum records words later attributed to him, that God had entrusted him with the honor of the Poles and to God alone he would return it.19
The cost
Leipzig cost well over 100,000 casualties on both sides. Britannica gives the French loss as about 38,000 killed and wounded, with another 30,000 taken prisoner, and the allied loss as 55,000. Petre, citing the German historian Friederich, puts the allied loss at about 53,800 and the French at 73,000, counting 15,000 prisoners and 15,000 sick and wounded left in the hospitals.20
Why did Napoleon lose the Battle of Leipzig?
Bruno Colson, who rebuilt the battle from the first-hand sources of every army involved, calls it the greatest and the longest battle of the age, with about half a million combatants, and Europe saw nothing like it again until August 1914. Napoleon lost it, first of all, to numbers and to a strategy aimed at his weak points. On Petre's figures he had about 191,000 men on 16 October and could add only Reynier's 14,000, while the allies grew to some 316,000 by the 18th. The French historian Walter Bruyère-Ostells, in a book reviewed by the Fondation Napoléon, points to the allies' use of Napoleon's own methods against him, striking at his marshals rather than at the emperor himself, and to the defection of the Saxons.21
Then he stayed too long. After the drawn battle of 16 October, Petre argues, Napoleon's hope of victory was gone and he should have begun his retreat on the quiet 17th; instead his "invincible obstinacy, based mainly on political grounds" kept him at Leipzig while Bernadotte and Bennigsen closed in. Marcellin de Marbot, a French colonel who fought there, went further: he thought Napoleon should have fallen back behind the Saale and into the hills of Thuringia before the battle, while the allied armies were still apart and their numbers would have counted for less.22
Last, the army had only one way out. Neither Petre nor Marbot could find any order to build more bridges over the Pleisse and the Elster, although the 17th passed without fighting and the city could have supplied timber in plenty, so the whole army had to leave by a single causeway. Marbot adds that the French artillery had fired some 220,000 rounds in three days and had only about 16,000 left, enough for two more hours of battle; Petre likewise notes that the ammunition would scarcely have lasted another day like the 16th.23
What Leipzig decided
Napoleon fell back toward the Rhine with what was left of his army. At Hanau on 30 and 31 October a Bavarian and Austrian army under Count Wrede tried to bar his road, and he fought his way through it. The Confederation of the Rhine, his league of German client states, fell apart, and its princes went over to the allies one after another. Germany was lost to him for good.24 › Battle of Hanau, 1813
The war now crossed into France. The allies won the battle for Paris on 30 March 1814 and took the capital, and on 6 April Napoleon was forced to abdicate for the first time. On 4 May he landed on Elba, his new and very small realm. He would return in 1815, but the empire that had stretched from the Atlantic to the Vistula had been broken in the four days at Leipzig.25 › Battle of Waterloo, 1815
Memory and the monument
Leipzig is remembered by a name that captures its scale: the Battle of the Nations, the largest battle Europe would see until 1914. For the battle's centenary the city raised the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, designed by Bruno Schmitz. It stands 91 meters high and was dedicated on 18 October 1913, exactly a hundred years after the decisive day of the battle. A museum at its base, FORUM 1813, displays weapons, uniforms and personal mementos of the battle.26
Poland remembers Leipzig through Poniatowski. His body was recovered from the river, embalmed and carried home, and in 1817 he was laid to rest in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków beside the kings of Poland. Nineteenth-century poets and writers built his romantic legend as the Polish Bayard, the knight without fear and beyond reproach.27 › Józef Poniatowski
