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This is an amazing, classic 1869 French infographic and data visualization on Napoleon’s disastrous 1812-13 Russia campaign.
Although it does not entirely fit into an Instagram square (this was originally published on IG), the very thick line in color is the Emperor of France’s army arriving.
The extremely thin black lines are the surviving retreating troops staggering back home from Moscow. Frost bite and the bitter Russian winter were a major factor contributing to the heavy losses. (The temperature is shown in the bottom of the chart in Celsius, and you can see the impact of lower temperatures on the thinning black line. Had wind chills been understood in 1869, an even more dramatic correlation might have been possible.)
This infographic is successful because it succinctly captures a great deal of information into a single figure. In addition to showing Napoleon’s dwindling troop strengths at various points in the campaign, a rough sense of chronology, geography (town names) and troop movements is given, together with the environmental conditions that contributed to the disaster. he infographic is particularly amazing given the fact that 19th century researchers lacked our modern desktop research and publishing tools. Many hours must have been spent researching the data and preparing the graphics manually.
This simple 145-year old drawing immediately makes clear what many history textbooks do not: the truly staggering magnitude of Napoleon’s war loss in Russia. This visualization is one of the favorite examples in data visualization guru Tufte’s books.
One criticism of Tufte is that he advocates very ‘busy’ figures that convey so much information they can potential overwhelm a viewer. (There are mixed opinions, for example, as to whether such ‘busy’ infographics should be used in slide presentations. There might be too much information for the speaker to convey in a reasonable amount of time, and the additional information in the infographic may distract the audience from the speaker’s presentation.) The historical French infographic is certainly in the ‘busy’ genre and might succumb to that criticism.
A version of this article originally appeared as a photo post on our Instagram feed.
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