Polish wars
Polish Wars is a term used by Napoleon I for the Russian campaign he has just begun and the Fourth Coalition War of 1806/07.
He introduced the name in 1812, on the one hand to tie in with the Fourth Coalition War, which was successful for him against Prussia , and on the other hand, to address the renewed war against Russia as a fight for the defense and further territorial restoration of the dual state of Poland, which had been broken up in the Polish partitions of Austria, Prussia and Russia - Legitimate Lithuania .
Although one of the main results of the First Polish War was the partial re-establishment of Poland as the Duchy of Warsaw at the expense of Prussia, the cause of the second war was the Russian-French dispute over the implementation of the continental barrier in the Baltic Sea region.
Napoleon addressed his army in Lithuania on June 22, 1812:
“Soldiers, the second Polish war has begun! The first ended in Friedland and Tilsit (1807) […] The second Polish war will be as glorious for French arms as the first was […] ”
The war began with a French advance by the Grande Armée into Russia, but ended in a debacle for France. For Poland it did not bring the hoped-for permanent expansion through the Lithuanian territories conquered in 1812, but rather occupation, bogus independence and ultimately Russian annexation from 1831 to the First World War .
See also
- War of the Polish Succession
- Polish-Russian Wars , Polish Uprising and Polish-Soviet War
- Polish-Swedish Wars
- Polish Turkish War
- Patriotic War, the Russian campaign in 1812
- attack on Poland
literature
- Franz Herre : Napoleon - A biography . Munich 2006, p. 241 f .
- Yevgeny Viktorovich Tarle : Napoleon . Berlin (East) 1961.
- Vincent Cronin: Napoleon, Strategist and Statesman . Heyne, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-453-09047-0 , p. 403, 405 .