Unfortunately for the average soldier of the Napoleonic Wars, there was no real standard for the care and upkeep for prisoners of war. Although the military culture of the period maintained a series of loose conventions surrounding POWs, the honoring these conventions was often depended greatly upon circumstances and which army had captured them. Treatment of POWs often varied quite heavily by theater during the Napoleonic Wars and often privileged officers over enlisted and NCOs. For the approximately 110000 troops of the Grande Armee captured in Russia, they had to navigate within a system that was often quite fluctuating and mercurial.

The official POW policy of the Russian Ministry of War, which was responsible for the POWs, was in a number of ways typical of states in the late-eighteenth century. The Ministry sent out regulations in which prisoners would be relayed through proper channels for intelligence and safely conveyed by the militia into secure rear areas for detention. The Ministry also issued Articles prohibiting despoiling POWs of clothing or buying valuables, but like other such regulations in the Napoleonic Era, these were honored more in breach than practice. As the scale of the campaign overburdened the militia and military forces guarding the prisoners, Emperor Alexander II shifted responsibility of POWs to the Ministry of Police and armed convoys of POWs to the Russian interior with Astrakhan, Perm, Orenburg, Saratov and Vyatka being the main POW depots. Civilian authorities in these areas were responsible for the care and upkeep of these POWs, but the administrative poverty of the imperial state often meant that local authorities were overburdened caring for these foreign elements. The POWs were often quartered in private residences and closely monitored by the police. As the war swung decisively against Napoleon in 1813/14, there was a lessening of restrictions of POW movement and prisoners were allowed to send unsealed correspondence, which would be monitored by police.

While bureaucratic chaos and violation of regulations was relatively normal for POW treatment in this period, there were a number of elements in this POW experience that reflect the unique nature of their captor. The Russians divided up prisoners by nationality, or, more accurately, the nationality of their unit, and treated the troops differently. For German units, the Russian Ministry of War saw them as potential recruits for the Russian foreign legions being assembled in Orel. As the Tsar began to style himself as the Liberator of Europe, there was a growing perception that the Germans would be the chief ally in this endeavor and the Russian authorities tended not to treat the Germans as POWs, but rather as unfortunate soldiers dragooned by Napoleon. Spanish and Portuguese POWs were also treated better than average because the Treaty of Velikie Luki established Russo-Spanish alliance and the Russians were likewise thinking of establishing an Iberian foreign legion for the upcoming German campaign in 1813. French POWs often found that their knowledge of French culture and the French language was valuable cultural capital inside the Russian interior as the Francophile nobility and gentry needed tutors and other household appointments. In contrast, the Russian state had little thought to Dutch and Italian POWs regarded Polish prisoners as traitors and not subject to the standard conventions as their other Grande Armee comrades. Polish POWs typically could not send correspondence home and officers could not manage their estates. The state often assigned the Poles to punitive military service in the distant provinces and the Poles were among the last cohorts of POWs to be repatriated after the Napoleonic Wars had ended.

The use of the Poles in punitive military service was not just an expression of the growing antipathy of the Russian state to any imagined sign of Polish rebellion, but also reflected the very functional approach the imperial state had towards emigration. In his study of imperial citizenship, the historian Eric Lohr had classified the emigration policy of the Romanovs from Peter I to Alexander II as "attract and hold," in that the state offered foreign specialists the tantalizing prospects of land and status while instituting various policies that would keep this foreign element in place. Even prior to the Napoleonic Wars, POW policy sometimes shifted into this paradigm; non-Christian POWs (Ottoman Turks, Crimean Tartars, and other Muslims and Jews) captured in the eighteenth-century wars were often encouraged to convert to Orthodoxy and given a payment to settle in Russia as subjects of the tsar. The POWs of the Grande Armee sometimes had a skillset that was in short supply in the interior and therefore a number of POWs elected to become subjects of the empire. Western-trained physicians and surgeons were often able to skip a number of the formalities of becoming subjects of the tsar on account of their relative rarity and need for these professionals in the army. Likewise, some officers could find their rank could open doors into service in the Russian state closed to the enlisted men. But the bulk of the POWs were not so fortunate and often had to deal with the Russian state. The regulations of July 1813 laid out the process for this process. POWs were to swear allegiance to the Emperor, decide which profession to pursue, and were restricted from settling in the cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow or newly acquired territories of Poland and Finland. These newly minted Russian subjects were incorporated into the soslovie estate system and since they were professionals, they often enjoyed higher privileges than serfs as townsmen in the interior. In a departure from prior practice, the state did not require the POW's conversion to Orthodoxy as a condition for being a subject, but did maintain that to marry, these resident aliens had to convert. Marriage also became a pretext to keep these POWs in the country during the rounds of repatriation between 1813-1815. The Russian state held that any POW married to a Russian subject had to remain in the empire, especially if they had children. Childless marriages allowed the POW to be repatriated, but not his wife, who was then given permission to remarry.

Using marriage as a pretext to hold these individuals is apparent in the enigmatic story of Jean-Baptiste Savin, one of the last living veterans of the Grande Armee. Although Savin embellished his biography by claiming to be an officer and recipient of the Legion of Honor, claims that an eager public both in Russian and France were eager to believe in the 1890s, the few surviving records indicate Savin was an NCO in 2nd Light Infantry with some skills as a cabinet maker. His woodworking skills allowed him a place in the soslovie system and he settled in Saratov on the Volga River. In 1836, Savin appealed to the Russian government to be sent back to France, but the state denied it on account of his marriage to a Russian subject and their children. Savin subsequently became something of a local fixture in his community, adapted a Russian name (Nicolai Andreevich), and his advanced age made him especially notable. By the 1890s, Savin's story became particularly poignant in an era of warming Franco-Russian relations. The press in both countries reported on Savin's death in 1894 despite some obvious gaps in his official biography.

Savin's fate was in many ways emblematic of the choices many POWs faced in Russian captivity. After being relayed to the interior, POWs had to make hard choices about their future and these choices, unbeknownst to them, often limited their own subsequent freedom of action. The Russian state held the initiative in this relationship and could decide individual POW's fate based upon a set of highly arbitrary criteria. The POWs that remained in Russia were then incorporated into an already long-established Russian system for assimilating and controlling permanent foreign residents. Those few that reached advanced age like Savin became minor local celebrities in no small measure because of the romance of the Napoleonic Wars tended to eclipse anti-French sentiments almost as soon as Napoleon's defeat in 1815.

Sources

Janet M. Hartley, Dr. Paul Keenan, and Dominic Lieven. Russia and the Napoleonic Wars. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, GB, 2015.

Lieven, Dominic. Russia against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace. New York: Viking, 2010.

Mikaberidze, Alexander. "Napoleon’s Lost Legions. The Grande Armée Prisoners of War in Russia." Cairn.info https://www.cairn.info/revue-napoleonica-la-revue-2014-3-page-35.htm#no24 .

Totfalyshin, Victor. "The 'Last Veteran' of Napoléon’s 1812 Grande Armée or How a Great Mystery Was Solved The Campaign of 1814." Napoleon-Series.org. http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/biographies/France/Enlisted/c_Savin.html .

Russia is a hard one, because soldiers left behind either starve or froze to death, or worse they were killed by the Cossack bands that were harassing the French army.

In Egypt, the French soldiers were captured by the British and eventually sent back to France. Some, like Louis Davout, would try to make their way to France on their own, traveling through hostile lands to make it back to France. Those captured would be exchanged through treaty of prisoner exchange, which was common in the era.

Turgenev includes an entertaining anecdote of a french drummer in Sportmans Sketches. He was left behind in Russia and nearly drowned by serfs before being rescued by the local noble and becoming a music teacher for his children.