My domination will not survive the day when I cease to be strong and therefore feared.” Half a million men had fallen in the past six years to reaffirm Napoleon’s hold on power, and yet by the end of the year the emperor’s much-vaunted Grande Armée was virtually back where it had started when the emperor first seized control of his country’s destiny in 1799 and made all of Europe tremble at his name. As he would later tell Austrian peace envoy Prince Clemens von Metternich, “Your sovereigns born on the throne can let themselves be beaten twenty times and still return to their capitals. His hold on France depended entirely on his success on the battlefield. After his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte desperately needed to reassert his military dominance over Europe.
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