Qualla: Battle of Leipzig

Battle of Leipzig: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexander von Sauerweid, Public domain. When the citizens of Leipzig walked out of their houses the morning after the battle ended, the smoke was still drifting across the Saxon plain and the corpses were too many to bury. Four hundred thousand rounds of artillery had been fired in four days. Bodies of men and horses lay in the fields surrounding the city, and locals were still finding remains the following spring. About six hundred thousand soldiers had marched onto these fields from a dozen different countries. Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Swedes, Saxons, French, Italians, Poles, Wurttembergers. About 133,000 of them did not march off again. Nothing on this scale had ever been seen in Europe. Nothing on this scale would be seen again until the First World War, more than a century later. The Germans would call it the Volkerschlacht, the Battle of the Nations, and remember it as the moment when Europe finally turned against the man who had ruled half of it.

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Image: Alexander von Sauerweid | Public domain

Battle of Leipzig: The Year of Catastrophes

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Werner Schuch, Public domain. Napoleon had never recovered from Russia. The 685,000 men he had marched to Moscow in 1812 had come back as ghosts, frostbitten skeletons walking out of a winter that swallowed his Grande Armee whole. He had spent the spring of 1813 building a new army out of teenage conscripts w...

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Image: Werner Schuch | Public domain

Battle of Leipzig: Four Days of Killing

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit January Suchodolski, Public domain. The fighting began on 16 October when the Austrian and Russian Army of Bohemia under Schwarzenberg attacked from the south while Blucher's Prussians and Russians struck from the north. Napoleon held his ground that day, even managed a counter-attack that nearly broke through, but...

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Image: January Suchodolski | Public domain

Battle of Leipzig: The Cost

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul-Émile Boutigny, Public domain. About 38,000 French were killed or wounded across the four days. The coalition lost 54,000. Napoleon left another 36,000 men behind as prisoners when the bridge blew, along with 325 guns and most of his supply train. Six French generals were killed, twelve wounded, thirty-six cap...

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Image: Paul-Émile Boutigny | Public domain

Battle of Leipzig: The Monument

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stein53, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the centennial of the battle, in 1913, the city of Leipzig dedicated the Volkerschlachtdenkmal, the Monument to the Battle of the Nations. It is a brutally massive thing, ninety-one meters tall, designed by Bruno Schmitz and built of granite and concrete at a cost of six milli...

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Image: Stein53 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Leipzig: What Remains

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Babaev P.I., Public domain. Walking through Leipzig today, with its Bach archives and Mendelssohn houses and the chocolate-rich gingerbread cake the locals call Leipziger Lerche, it is hard at first to picture what happened in the surrounding fields two centuries ago. The city itself, an old trade-fair town...

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Image: Babaev P.I. | Public domain