French invasion of Russia French invasion of Russia The French invasion of Russia, known in Russia as the Patriotic War of 1812 () and in France as the Russian Campaign (), began on 24 June 1812 when Napoleon's crossed the Neman River in an attempt to engage and defeat the Russian army. Napoleon hoped to compel Tsar Alexander I of Russia to cease trading with British merchants through proxies in an effort to pressure the United Kingdom to sue for peace. The official political aim of the campaign was to liberate Poland from the threat of Russia. Napoleon named the campaign the Second Polish
War and Peace is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle". Large sections, especially the later chapters, are a philosophical discussion rather than narrative. Tolstoy also said that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call "War and Peace" a novel. Instead, he regarded "Anna Karenina" as his first true novel. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" states: "It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace"". Tolstoy began writing "War and Peace" in 1862, the year that he finally