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La Grande Armée

La Grande Armée
Emblem of Napoleon Bonaparte.svg
Active 1805–15
Country  France
Size At its greatest height, on 25 June 1812, before the Invasion of Russia:
680,000 men:
• 550,000 Frenchmen
• 95,000 Poles
• 35,000 Austrians
• 30,000 Italians
• 24,000 Bavarians
• 20,000 Saxons
• 20,000 Prussians
• 17,000 Westphalians
• 15,000 Swiss
• 10,000 Danes and Norwegians
• 4,000 Portuguese
• 3,500 Croats
Motto(s) Valeur et Discipline
Colors Le Tricolore
March La Victoire est à nous (from the ballet-opera La caravane du Caire)
Engagements
War of the Third Coalition
Ulm and Austerlitz
War of the Fourth Coalition
Jena-Auerstedt, Eylau and Friedland
War of the Fifth Coalition
Aspern-Essling and Wagram
Peninsular War
Bailén, Somosierra, Talavera and Vitoria
Invasion of Russia
Smolensk, Borodino and Berezina
War of the Sixth Coalition
Lützen, Dresden, Leipzig, Vauchamps and Arcis-sur-Aube
War of the Seventh Coalition
Ligny, Waterloo and Wavre
Commanders
Notable
commanders
Napoleon I
Joachim Murat
Louis Alexandre Berthier
Jean de Dieu Soult
Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte
Jean Lannes
Nicolas Davout
Michel Ney
Jean-Baptiste Bessières
André Masséna
Edouard Mortier

The Grande Armée (French pronunciation: ​[ɡʀɑ̃d aʀme]; French for Great Army) was the army commanded by Napoleon during the Napoleonic Wars. From 1805 to 1809, the Grande Armée scored a streak of historic victories that gave the French Empire an unprecedented grip on power over the European continent. Widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest fighting forces ever assembled, it suffered terrible losses during the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and never recovered its tactical superiority after that campaign.

It was renamed in 1805 from the army that Napoleon had assembled on the French coast of the English Channel for the proposed invasion of Britain. Napoleon later deployed the army east in order to eliminate the threat of Austria and Russia, which were part of the Third Coalition assembled against France. Thereafter, the name was used for the principal French army deployed in the Campaigns of 1805 and 1807, where it got its prestige, and 1809, 1812, and 1813–14. In practice, however, the term, Grande Armée, is used in English to refer to all of the multinational forces gathered by Napoleon I in his campaigns of the early 19th century (see Napoleonic Wars).


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