A Stonemason’s Tale: Survival Amidst Napoleon’s Ruin

In the small town of Ellwangen in Württemberg, southwestern Germany, sometime between the late 1820s and early 1830s, a stonemason named Jakob Walter (1788–1864) began writing his memoirs. Drafted into the army of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), Walter had marched all the way to Moscow before retreating in defeat back to his homeland. His plainspoken account vividly describes the hardships he endured in the final months of 1812: relentless harassment by Cossacks, his own filth-ridden body scavenging for food in the bitter cold, ambushes by bandits, and repeated brushes with death. After barely surviving, Walter finally washed himself thoroughly in a Polish town—his first proper bath in weeks:

> “I washed slowly, cleaning my face and hands bit by bit, for they were as rough as bark, cracked and covered in black scales. My face looked like that of a bearded Russian peasant. I glanced in a mirror and was startled by my own grotesque appearance. Then I spent an hour scrubbing myself with soap and hot water.”

Despite his efforts, Walter failed to rid himself and his clothes of lice—his “masters,” as he called them. As his unit continued its westward retreat, he fell ill, likely with typhus. The rest of his journey was spent lying in a wagon. Of the 175 men in his convoy, over a hundred perished along the way. When the lice-ridden Walter finally returned home, he feared his family would not recognize him:

> “I walked through the door in a filthy Russian coat and an old round hat, my clothes infested with countless companions who had accompanied me all the way—Russians, Poles, Prussians, Saxons.”

At last, he could bathe properly, burn his lice-infested clothes, and slowly recover. Locals began calling him “the Russian”—a nickname given to anyone who had been to Russia.

Like most ordinary Europeans of his time, Walter had little interest in politics, if he understood it at all. In 1806, he was conscripted into the army of the French puppet state, the Kingdom of Württemberg. He was drafted again in 1809 and 1812, powerless to resist like hundreds of thousands of other soldiers. His diary reveals no loyalty to France or Württemberg, no interest in the war’s outcome, and no hatred—or even desire to kill—Russians. As a common soldier, he knew only battle, oblivious to the strategic considerations behind campaigns. His sole concern was survival.

By the 1810s, the revolutionary fervor that had once driven French troops singing the Marseillaise toward Austrian lines had long faded. Only a handful of soldiers, like the Imperial Guard, remained loyal to Napoleon’s cause. Walter’s war-weariness mirrored Europe’s mood—and with good reason. Nearly a quarter-century of conflict had left people numb to suffering and despairing of the future. If Walter held any belief at all, it was his devout Catholic faith that sustained him. Yet even this did not stop him from starkly describing war’s dehumanizing toll.

A Quiet Life After the Storm

After returning home, Walter resumed his trade as a stonemason, living an unremarkable life. He married in 1817 and fathered ten children. By 1856, he was a prosperous building contractor and foreman, with five surviving children. That year, he wrote to his son, who had emigrated to Kansas City, detailing family news. The following year, his son returned to Germany, married the daughter of a neighboring town’s mayor, and in 1858, brought his father’s manuscript back to America. It remained in the family until scholars uncovered it in the 1930s. Walter lived quietly in Ellwangen until his death in 1864; his wife passed in 1873. Like millions of 19th-century peasants, his life would have faded into obscurity were it not for his harrowing account of Napoleon’s doomed march on Moscow.

Napoleon’s Indifference and the Collapse of an Empire

During the retreat from Moscow, Walter once glimpsed Napoleon. Sitting by the Berezina River, preparing a meager meal, he observed:

> “Napoleon watched his ragged, starving army march past. What he felt, no one knows. His expression suggested indifference to his soldiers’ misery. Perhaps his mind was fixed only on grand plans and lost glory. Though French and allied soldiers shouted curses at him, Napoleon remained impassive.”

By then, most surviving soldiers felt only resentment and contempt for the emperor. France’s insatiable conscription machine had torn 685,000 men from their homes across Germany, Poland, Italy, and France itself to form the Grande Armée. Fewer than 70,000 returned. Around 400,000 died in battle, over 100,000 were captured by the Russians, and an unknown number deserted or straggled home. After a series of devastating battles, Napoleon’s forces were decimated. Pursued by a coalition of British, Prussian, Austrian, and Russian troops, they retreated westward. In 1814, the Allies occupied Paris and exiled Napoleon to the Mediterranean island of Elba.

The True Cost of War

Some once believed the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars caused less destruction than later conflicts. Yet from the Revolution’s outbreak, Europe endured 23 years of nearly continuous warfare, claiming around five million lives. Proportionally, the casualties rivaled—or even surpassed—those of World War I. One in five Frenchmen born between 1790 and 1795 died in Napoleon’s wars. His armies alone lost 1.5 million men.

The Russians burned Moscow to deny Napoleon winter supplies. One observer wrote:

> “Flames engulfed the city, smoke blotted out the sun, and the heat was unbearable. The fire raged for three days.”

Amid the chaos, French soldiers looted, while peasants from surrounding villages seized what they could. After the fire, Moscow’s ruins offered no shelter or food for Napoleon’s army. Nearly 7,000 of its 9,000 houses were destroyed, along with over 8,000 shops and warehouses. A third of its 329 churches were reduced to ashes. Private property worth 270 million rubles vanished, with no hope of compensation. Most civilians had already fled; those who remained mostly perished. When the Russians reclaimed Moscow, they burned 12,000 corpses in massive pyres. Reconstruction only began in earnest by 1814. The city’s tangled medieval streets gave way to parks and gardens, and craftsmen built a splendid new palace for the tsar. For over a generation, Moscow resembled a vast construction site. The committee overseeing its rebuilding disbanded only in 1842. Full recovery took far longer.

Spain, too, suffered immensely. Countless towns and villages were destroyed in sieges and battles. From 1810 to 1812, the French besieged Cádiz and occupied Puerto Real, where half the town’s 6,000 inhabitants perished. Forty percent of its houses, three-quarters of its olive trees, and vast pine forests were obliterated. Many Spanish towns never recovered. In war-ravaged regions, livestock numbers plummeted. Extremadura lost nearly 15% of its prewar population.

Francisco de Goya’s (1746–1828) The Disasters of War—82 etchings published only in the 1860s—captured the conflict’s brutality: rape, pillage, mutilation, and massacre. One etching shows a corpse half-rising from a coffin, clutching a paper inscribed “Nada” (“Nothing”). Goya chose this word to encapsulate war’s futility.

The Rhineland, repeatedly ravaged by French troops, saw farmland abandoned and livestock wiped out. French exactions bred looting and greed. As early as 1792, a French spy returning from the region reported:

> “Even basic necessities are gone—no fodder for livestock, no seeds. Villages have been stripped bare.”

Bandits disguised as French soldiers roamed the countryside, a sign locals had grown accustomed to rape and pillage by occupiers. In Aachen, the French seized everything movable—grain, fodder, clothes, livestock. Hundreds starved that winter.

The Scramble for Survival

All armies—not just the French—lived off the land, seizing supplies wherever they marched. By 1812–1814, patriotic fervor surged in Allied nations, with nobles, merchants, and peasants contributing to the war effort. Yet this was never enough. As Russian troops advanced westward in 1813–1814, their overstretched supply lines delivered only black bread and thin gruel. Soldiers stole to eat better—sometimes from their own allies.

Cavalry needed horses; field guns and supply trains required them too. Feeding tens of thousands of horses strained every army. Foraging parties scoured the land for oats and fodder. When Russians invaded France, villages burned, and peasants—like those evading Napoleonic conscription—fled to the woods, ambushing Allied supply wagons. After Waterloo, nearly 900,000 foreign troops occupied France, extorting and impoverishing the populace.

Nature’s Wrath: The Year Without a Summer

Economic recovery was further hampered by natural disaster. In April 1815, Mount Tambora on Indonesia’s Sumbawa erupted violently, spewing ash 43 kilometers high—the largest volcanic explosion in recorded history. The blast was heard over 2,000 kilometers away. Sulfur injected into the stratosphere dimmed the sun for two years, creating eerie orange sunsets. Lord Byron (1788–1824) wrote:

> “The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space.”

In January 1816, brown snow fell in Hungary, reportedly burying houses. From 1811, a decade of unusually cold summers—linked to solar cycles and an 1808 Colombian eruption—culminated in Tambora’s 1815 cataclysm. By late 1816, crop yields had plummeted to a quarter of normal, harvests delayed by over a month. Dutch summer storms ruined harvests; a British paper reported:

> “Disastrous news pours in: torrential rains flood Europe. Dutch pastures are submerged; fears of food shortages and soaring prices spread panic. France, too, suffers deluges.”

French observatory records show summers 3°C colder than the 1740–1870 average. In some regions, grapes failed to ripen before winter.

A Württemberg almanac (1817) noted:

> “After every summer downpour came frosts, as if it were November.”

The Lower Rhine flooded for five months; Lombardy-Venetia’s snow lingered until May. Early autumn frosts compounded the misery. For the third straight year, Carinthian farmers could not sow winter crops. Baden’s 1817 harvest was the worst in living memory.

In southeast Europe, the Franciscan monastery of Scharen records note:

> “The harsh winter of 1815–16 killed 24,000 sheep in Bač County. Spring brought ceaseless rain—the Danube swelled, causing catastrophic floods. No one, not even the elderly, recalled such devastation. Villages, fields, and meadows drowned under man-high waters.”

A Croatian priest called 1816 the “Year of Death”:

> “Endless rain, wretched weather, barren land. Many lacked food for half a year; some for barely two months… By March, the ‘black famine’ struck. Villagers shared what little they had… but soon, starvation drove them to wander—dying in homes, on roads, in forests.”

Croatia’s worst famine peaked in 1817, with grain prices 2–3 times higher than five years later. War-disrupted transport hampered relief efforts. This global climate catastrophe caused Europe’s worst harvests in over a century.

Economic Collapse and Social Unrest

Postwar Europe struggled to revive industry and trade. British blockades and Napoleon’s Continental System had crippled commerce. Markets lay in ruins; unemployment soared. By late 1816, London’s Spitalfields had 20,000–30,000 jobless weavers. Similar scenes unfolded in Saxon, Swiss, and Low Countries textile towns.

Demobilized soldiers like Walter swelled the ranks of the unemployed. Plummeting incomes met 1816’s crop failures, sending food prices soaring. Bread—the staple for most—doubled in price in Paris by 1817. Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), traveling in the Rhineland, wrote:

> “Southern and western Germany face true famine.”

He saw “emaciated peasants, barely human, scrabbling for rotten potatoes in fields.”

In Habsburg Lombardy, the poor ate roots and weeds. Transylvania and eastern Hungary counted 20,000 starved. Emperor Francis I (1768–1835) lamented:

> “In Lombardy, distress is extreme—people survive on raw greens and herb broth, often with nothing at all.”

Desperation and Exodus

The destitute turned to begging, theft, or migration. By late 1816, Munich’s beggars “seemed to sprout from the ground.” Hungary swarmed with paupers; Rome and Vienna police rounded up vagrants for forced labor. In Swiss Appenzell, “beggars—mostly women and children—shockingly outnumbered the employed.”

Many fled Europe entirely. In 1818, over 2,000 left Baden for Rio de Janeiro. In 1817, an estimated 20,000 Germans and 30,000 French sailed for America. Hearing of Tsar Alexander I’s aid promises, 9,000 Württemberg poor trekked east to Russia.

Mass movements—especially soldiers—spread epidemics. Without sanitation or antibiotics, disease ravaged armies, refugees, and beggars. Paris’s smallpox deaths nearly quadrupled (1816–18); the Low Countries suffered severe outbreaks. Malnutrition bred scurvy, dysentery, and edema. Brescia’s hospital admitted 300 scurvy cases in early 1816 alone. Louse-borne typhus raced through British and Irish towns. Glasgow (pop. 130,000) saw 32,000 typhus cases in 1818—3,500 fatal. Relief efforts worsened contagion. An Irish doctor noted:

> “Starving mobs roam for food; soup kitchens spread infection.”

Plague, flaring in the Balkans by 1815, reached Italy. Noicattaro lost a seventh of its people; the Balearics 12,000 by 1820. Bosnia’s plague killed a third of urbanites, a quarter of villagers. Hungry peasants breached quarantines, flocking to plague cities. Dalmatia’s Makarska shrank from 1,575 to 1,025; Tučepi lost 363 of 806. Ottoman rulers, still controlling much of the Balkans, stood helpless. This was Europe’s last major plague—and among its worst. One study concluded:

> “Since the Black Death (1347–51), no European nation suffered a sanitary and demographic catastrophe like Bosnia in 1815–18.”

Mediterranean ports hastily quarantined ships. Austria’s “Military Frontier”—heavily garrisoned against Ottoman incursions—blocked plague’s northward spread. Yet combined with crop failures, epidemics drove mortality up 8–9% across western Europe; in eastern Switzerland, deaths doubled.

Revolt and Repression

From 1816, Europe saw its widest-spread, most violent food riots since the Revolution. In East Anglia, mobs armed with spiked clubs and “Bread or Blood” banners smashed profiteers’ homes, demanding lower prices. Northern England and Scotland saw grain seizures and attacks on millers and merchants. French crowds blocked grain exports; Italian granaries and bakeries were looted. Augsburg and Munich faced riots.

In June 1817, soaring grain prices triggered Low Countries riots; looters stormed bakeries, protesting on Waterloo’s second anniversary. Eastern France witnessed farm raids reminiscent of 1789’s “Great Fear.”

Some uprisings had political overtones, like Lyon’s 1817 revolt sparked by rumors of Napoleon’s return. In March 1817, Manchester weavers marched on London demanding textile crisis relief. Nottingham’s failed “Pentrich Revolution” (June) and Breslau’s militia oath refusal (August 23) followed. Viewed continent-wide, these upheavals stemmed less from local politics than survival crises, mass unemployment, and despair.

Post-Napoleonic “White Terror” France tried 2,280 people—mostly for price-fixing, grain hoarding, tax evasion, or illegal logging. Royalist reprisals played a minor role.

By 1819, unrest waned but persisted. That August, 60,000 protested at Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field. Troops fired, killing 15—dubbed “Peterloo” in grim parody of Waterloo. Anti-Semitic “Hep-Hep” riots swept western/central Europe, blamed on secret societies but likely fueled by envy of Jewish traders. Students and artisans led attacks, forcing Jewish flights. Violence spread from Würzburg to Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Kraków, Prague, and Riga.

The Vienna Settlement and Its Challenges

The 1814–15 Congress of Vienna aimed to stabilize post-Napoleonic Europe. Yet Napoleon’s 1815 “Hundred Days” return—routed at Waterloo—forced revisions. The Second Peace of Paris (November 1815) harshened terms: France paid indemnities, endured Allied occupation, and returned looted art.

Territorially, Austria regained Lombardy-Venetia and Dalmatia; Prussia expanded into the Rhineland as a French buffer. Russia kept Poland; the Netherlands (now including Belgium) and Piedmont-Sardinia also bulwarked France. Britain secured Malta, Ceylon, and the Cape Colony, safeguarding India routes.

The Congress abolished the slave trade—a moral gesture—but ignored non-European issues. The “Concert of Europe” (regular great-power meetings)