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Mapping the loss of human life
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“The best statistical graphic ever drawn“ (Edward Tufte)
This chart, or statistical graphic, is also a map. And a strange one at that. It depicts the advance into (1812) and retreat from (1813) Russia by Napoleon’s Grande Armée, which was decimated by a combination of the Russian winter, the Russian army and its scorched-earth tactics.
As a statistical chart, the map unites six different sets of data. One of them (marked in gold) identifies the number of soldiers remaining. The path gets successively narrower, a plain reminder of the campaigns human toll.
Pause a moment to ponder the horrific human cost represented by this map: Napoleon entered Russia with 442.000 men, took Moscow with only 100.000 men left, wandered around its abandoned ruins for some time and escaped the East’s wintry clutches with barely 10.000 shivering soldiers. Those include 6.000 rejoining the ‘bulk’ of the army from up north. Napoleon never recovered from this blow, and would be decisively beaten at Waterloo under two years later.
The Economist, in its last issue of 2007, pointed out that “As men tried, and mostly failed to cross the Berezina river under heavy attack, the width of the black line halves: another 20,000 or so gone. The French now use the expression C’est la Bérézina to describe a total disaster.”
The map was the work of Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870), a French civil engineer who was an inspector-general of bridges and roads, but whose most remembered legacy is in the field of statistical graphics, producing this and other maps in his retirement.
Thu 03-Jan-08 | Posted in: History, Created in France
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