100000 prisoners

 

What happened to the 100000 French soldiers who remained in Russia after Napoleon's defeat?

Due to the lack of POW camps, the Russians weren't really sure what to do with all of those French soldiers. The situation was disastrous for the convicts and a tremendous headache for the authorities. The Russian peasants murdered several of them because they believed that Frenchmen were the evil bringers of the Apocalypse (basically, Mongol hordes 2.0). The extermination of the Frenchmen was seen by the peasants as their sacred Christian duty, and they even purchased prisoners from the troops to murder as many as they could.

Although the authorities made an effort to provide them with adequate clothing and money for food, many of the survivors perished from diseases and the hard environment.

However, they were moved to different districts of Russia, where they were guarded by Frenchmen and local officials,Many Frenchmen were passing away while travelling.

Portuguese, Spanish, and Poles received different treatment. As long as they were willing to swear allegiance to the Tsar, Poles were welcomed into the Russian troops (a sizable portion of modern-day Poland was then a part of Russia), while the rest were transferred to Spain via Britain to battle Frenchmen at home. They had their own mishaps in Spain, but that is a different story and not one I should share.

The majority of the Frenchmen survived the difficulties and settled in Russia, with roughly 30 thousand eventually returning home. They were initially compelled to assist the residents with the reconstruction (for example, they were cleaning up Moscow after the disastrous fire caused by the war),then they were doing whatever later.

French was a fairly popular language in Russia at the time, and many Frenchmen worked as educators. Mikhail Lermontov, a well-known Russian poet, studied French as a young lad. That person was formerly a French officer who was a prisoner. Even some ex-prisoners enlisted in the Russian military.

According to reports, the final ex-French POW passed away in Russia in 1894 at the age of 126.

He was a former officer who later worked as a French and fencing instructor in Saratov, which is about 850 kilometres from Moscow.