insidelife22:
good writeup I like history alot

RichBoy247:
Russians didn’t really know what to do with all of those Frenchmen, as POW camps had not been invented yet. It was a major headache for the government and a catastrophe for the prisoners themselves. Many of them were killed by the Russian peasants who saw Frenchmen as the unholy bringers of the Apocalypse (basically, Mongol hordes 2.0). Peasants were even buying prisoners from soldiers to kill as many as possible, as they saw the eradication of the Frenchmen as their sacred Christian duty.

Many of the survivors died from illnesses and harsh climate, although the government tried to supply them with appropriate clothing and money for food. But they were sent to various regions of Russia to be guarded by local authorities, and Frenchmen were dying on the way en masse.

Poles, Spaniards, and Portuguese were treated separately. Poles were accepted into Russian military service (a large chunk of modern Poland was part of Russia at the time), as long as they were ready to pledge their allegiance to the Tsar, while the others were sent to Spain through Britain, to fight Frenchmen at home. They had their own misadventures in Spain, but that’s another story and not mine to tell.

Among the Frenchmen, about 30 thousand eventually returned home, while the rest who survived all the hardships settled in Russia. At first, they were forced to help the locals with the reconstruction (for example, they were cleaning up Moscow after the disastrous fire caused by the war), and later they were doing whatever.

French was a very popular language at the time in Russia, and many Frenchmen became teachers and instructors. Famous Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov had a French tutor as a boy. That man was originally a French officer, one of the prisoners. Some former prisoners even joined the Russian military service.

The last former French POW died in Russia in 1894, allegedly at the age of 126. He was a former officer who became a teacher of French and fencing in the city of Saratov, 850 km from Moscow.


SOURCE: https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-fate-of-the-100-000-French-prisoners-left-behind-during-Napoleons-retreat-from-Moscow/answer/Boris-Ivanov-49