French historian Jacques Bainville, who I admire for providing amazingly accurate 20-year predictions [1], advocated that Napoleon had no choice but to invade R

French historian Jacques Bainville, who I admire for providing amazingly accurate 20-year predictions [1], advocated that Napoleon had no choice but to invade Russia [2]. When the revolutionary politicians in France submitted to Napoleon, during his coup (1799) and his subsequent coronation as an emperor (1804), it was under the implicit premise that he would be the one who would be able to militarily keep Belgium, because the Revolution had seized Belgium but wasn't able to hold it. So Napoleon's power was tied to keeping Belgium, although England would never allow any continental state to be that unbalancedly powerful. Thus Napoleon has no choice but to subjugate England. To that end, as his fleet had been hit hard in Aboukir (1798) then smashed in Trafalgar (1805), he could not rely on an old-school invasion: thus he tried to subjugate all of Europe and cut commercial links with England to besiege the island at a continental scale. This was called the Blocus Continental, and it was bound to fail as long as Russia wouldn't participate. Thus the desperate attack in 1812. --- [1] Les conséquences politiques de la paix_, (https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Cons%C3%A9quences_politiques_de_la_paix https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Cons%C3%A9quences_politi...) is a book in which Bainville predicts, in this exact order and in the year 1919, that Germany will annex the Sudeten, then Austria, then Poland, then attack western Europe, and that Italy will be their allies. [2] In his biography of Napoleon.