push towards Moscow. After the campaign's failure, the Grande Armée retreated to the area where 80,000 French soldiers died and were buried in the trenches they had built months earlier. After the November Uprising the Vilnius University was closed and repressions halted the city's further development. Civil unrest in 1861 was suppressed by the Imperial Russian Army. During the January Uprising in 1863 heavy city fights occurred, but were brutally pacified by Mikhail Muravyov, nicknamed The Hanger by the population because of the number of executions he organized. After the uprising, Polish was banned from public use. The Latin alphabet was prohibited in 1859 (Belarusian) and 1865 (Lithuanian); the ban was lifted in 1904. During the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century Vilnius also became one of the centres of Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian national rebirths. According to the 1897 Russian census, by mother tongue, 40% of the population was Jewish, 31% Polish, 20% Russian, 4.2% Belarusian and 2.1% Lithuanian. Jewish culture and population was so dominant that some Jewish national revival leaders argued for a new Jewish state to be founded in the Vilnius region, with the city as its capital. These national revivals happened in Vilnius because it was one of the most tolerant, progressive and liberal places in the region, a legacy of tolerance deriving from the years of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. One of the most important Polish, Belarusian poets and writers published their works in Vilnius at that time. It was the place where the first Belarusian weekly Nasha Niva was founded. Vilnius became an important place of the act of the Lithuanian national revival on 4–5 December 1905, when the Great Seimas of Vilnius was held in the Palace of the present-day National Philharmonics, with over 2000 delegates from all regions of Lithuania as well as emigres. It was decided to make a demand to establish an autonomous ethnic Lithuanian state within the Russian Empire with its parliament (Seimas) in Vilnius. Cultural life was revived after the 1905 Russian Revolution. Society of Friends of Science in Wilno was created in 1906 to practice science and literature in Polish. The Emilia and Eustachy Wróblewski Library, the centre of Polish culture, was established in 1912, around that time also Polish theatre was revived. Polish cultural life was still repressed despite its revival. In 1907 bishop Eduard von der