---
title: Analyzing Minard's Visualization Of Napoleon's 1812 March
teaser:
tags: data
author: Joanne Cheng
published_on: 2014-06-08
---

In [_The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information_](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi), Edward Tufte calls
[Minard's graphic of Napoleon in
Russia](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard) one of the “best statistical
drawings ever created.” But what makes it so good?

Before we analyze this graphic, we need to know a bit of history.

The year is 1812, and Napoleon is doing pretty well for himself. He has most of
Europe under his control, except for the UK. No matter how many times he tried
to invade them, he couldn't break through their defenses. His plan was to place
an embargo on them, forcing the other European countries to stop trade with the
UK which would weaken them enough so that Napoleon could invade and take over
easily.

Czar Alexander of Russia sees that Napoleon was becoming too powerful, so he
refuses to participate in this embargo. Angry at Czar Alexander's decision,
Napoleon gathers a massive army of over 400,000 to attack Russia in June of the
year 1812. While Russia's troops are not as numerous as France's, Russia has a
plan. Russian troops keep retreating as Napoleon's troops move forward, burning
everything they pass, ensuring that the French forces could not take anything
from their environment. Eventually the French army follows the Russian army all
the way to Moscow during October, suffering major losses from lack of food. By
the time Napoleon gets to Moscow, he knows he has to retreat. As winter settles
into Europe and the temperature drops, Napoleon's troops suffer even more
losses, returning to France from lack of food, disease, and weather conditions.

Let's look at all the data we have for this battle.

We have the numbers of Napoleon's troops by location (longitude), organized by
group and direction. We can plot it on line graphs like so.

![''](https://images.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march/number_of_troops_by_group.png)

Next, the temperature experienced by his troops when winter settled in on the
return trip.

![''](https://images.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march/temperature_return_trip.png)

We also have the path that his troops took to and from Moscow. We can display
this information by plotting the paths on a map.

![''](https://images.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march/napoleon_path.png)

Finally, here is Minard's graphic.

![''](https://images.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march/minard_lg.gif)

[_Source_](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard)

We have many dimensions of data that takes several individual graphs to
represent. Minard's graphic is quite clever because of its ability to combine
all of dimensions: loss of life at a time and location, temperature, geography,
historical context, into one single graphic. He shows these various details
without distracting text or labels as well. For example, he displays the points
where Napoleon's troops divide into subgroups by breaking out the main bar into
branches. He adds thin lines to represent river crossings on the return trip
that further decimated Napoleon's diminishing troops. And he is able to show the
drastic loss in life from Napoleon's decision in just a single corner of the
diagram.

![Beginning vs end of the campaign](https://images.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march/minard_corner.png)

_The beginning of Napoleon's march vs the end of his retreat._

Equally important as what's shown is what's not shown — here's an earlier
example of a well-published data visualization:

![''](https://images.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march/playfair_timeseries.png)

[_Source_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Playfair)

This graphic was created by William Playfair, largely considered to be the
father of information design, in 1786 — about 100 years before Minard's
diagram was made.  Playfair is the inventor of the pie chart, the bar graph, and
the line graph - statistic graphics we use regularly today.  This graphic has
gridlines to mark the years and the number of exports. There are five colors,
each color representing something different, as well as a number of specific
labels in large text. Compare this to Minard's graphic: when he draws the map,
there are no geographical borders and only very minimal geographical plotting.
There are many labels describing cities and number of troops, but they are very
small. Minard only uses two colors to represent all of the data in the graphic.
Additional labels, gridlines, and geographical markings would have made the
graphic too overwhelming for the eye, which makes the impact of the data so much
stronger.

There are some similarities to designing print data graphics and designing
modern interfaces for mobile and web. When we need to translate numbers into
graphics to users, we want to focus on communicating lots of information without
overwhelming the users with extraneous content, much like Minard with his
visualization of Napoleon's March. Both designers created effective graphics to
turn numbers into a narrative, but Minard was able to tell a much more detailed
story with his design techniques.

## What's next

If you would like to learn more about information design, check out Edward
Tufte's [The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi) or any of his other
books. You can also take one of his
[courses](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses) in your city.

You can also read:

* _[Design for
  Information](http://isabelmeirelles.com/book-design-for-information/)_ by
  Isabel Merielles
* _[Data source for analysis](http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/re-minard.php)_
* The [R code](http://github.com/joannecheng/napoleon_analysis) I used to
  analyze the data