The Grande Empire's multi-national character was reflected in early 1812, when Napoleon massed 650,000 troops for the invasion of Russia. It was the largest force concentrated in history up to that point, representing the armed might of Continental Europe. French regiments comprised a third of this host: of the eleven infantry corps, five were composed entirely of foreign contingents – Polish, Bavarian, Saxon, Westphalian and Prussian – while another four contained non-French units. The Austrians provided their own semi-autonomous expeditionary corps. Overall, Germans outnumbered Frenchmen as the largest ‘national’ contingent, a contribution that included the German-speaking ‘new Frenchmen’ of the Rhine serving in the regular French regiments.

The Russian invasion marked the culmination of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, a generation of conflict unparalleled in scale. Eighteenth-century armies were measured in the tens of thousands; under Napoleon they frequently exceeded 100,000. This expansion not only affected the battlefield, but European society as a whole. Not only was conflict large scale, but also of long duration, something ascribable to Napoleon himself. Despite the rapidity and decisiveness of his campaigns, his policy towards his neighbours precluded any possibility of the French Empire successfully integrating itself into a stable international framework. Consequently, Europe suffered successively the wars of the second, third and fourth coalitions (1799–1801, 1805 and 1806–7 respectively), the Franco-Austrian war (1809), the Russian campaign (1812), Wars of Liberation (1813), and invasion of France (1814), not to mention protracted guerrilla warfare in Spain (1808–14).