Napoleon Bonaparte, the self appointed Emperor of France, gathered a large army “La Grande Armee”. This army was over 680,000 soldiers strong, including 175,000 cavalry men. The Big Army converged from many parts of Europe to Dresden; it included 270,000 French soldiers, 20,000 Italians, 80,000 from the Rhine Confederacy, 30,000 from Poland, 30,000 from the Austrian Empire, and 20,000 from Prussia. The objective was to punish the Russian Czar Alexander I. No one among the politicians and the Generals saw any cause for this war. The Czar simply was the only independent monarch in the European continent not to obey promptly to the ducats of the Emperor. Napoleon’s avowed reason for this war was that Alexander I did not sign on a tariff treaty that bind all the other monarchies in Continental Europe and thus was alienated from the continental system.
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