Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  No sooner had the French entered Moscow and begun to ransack it, therefore, than they had to try to save it from being razed by its own inhabitants. With no knowledge of its geography and no fire-fighting equipment, they were unequal to the task. They shot around four hundred arsonists, but 6,500 of the 9,000 major buildings in the city were either burned down or ruined.14 Many of his soldiers, Napoleon remembered, died while ‘endeavouring to pillage in the midst of the flames’.15 When they cleaned up the city after the French had left, Muscovites found the charred remains of nearly 12,000 humans and over 12,500 horses.16

  Napoleon was fast asleep on his iron camp bed beneath the chandeliers of the Kremlin when he was woken at 4 a.m. on September 16 and told about the fires. ‘What a tremendous spectacle!’ he exclaimed, watching them from a window whose panes were already hot to the touch. ‘It is their own work! So many palaces! What extraordinary resolution! What men! These are indeed Scythians!’17 (Typically, he reached back to ancient times for an analogy, here to the famously ruthless Persian tribe mentioned by Herodotus who left their Iranian homeland to fight on the Central Eurasian steppes.) He was fortunate not to fall victim to the fires himself, as incompetent guards allowed an artillery convoy – including gunpowder wagons – to draw up under his bedroom window in the Kremlin. If one of the burning brands that were flying around had landed there, Ségur noted, ‘The flower of the army and the Emperor would have been destroyed.’18 After spending much of the day organizing his soldiers into units of firefighters, pulling down houses in the path of the blaze and interviewing two arsonists, at 5.30 p.m. Napoleon bowed to the exhortations of Berthier, Murat and Eugène to leave the city when flames reached the Kremlin arsenal. As Ségur recalled, ‘We already breathed nothing but smoke and ashes.’19 The two-hour journey to the imperial palace of Petrovsky, 6 miles outside the city, was dangerous and at times had to be made on foot because of the horses’ terror of the flames. As front entrances of the Kremlin were by then blocked by the fire and debris, Napoleon escaped through a secret postern gate in the rocks above the river.20 ‘With long detours,’ recalled the veteran General Fantin des Odoards, ‘he was out of danger.’21 One of the household comptrollers, Guillaume Peyrusse, who was also evacuated, told his brother: ‘We were boiling in our carriages … the horses didn’t want to go forward. I had the sharpest worries for the treasure.’22 It survived and was soon augmented when an on-site forge was built to melt down 11,700lbs of gold and 648lbs of silver, much of it taken from palaces and churches.23

  Discussing the Russian campaign two years later, Napoleon admitted ‘that when [I] got to Moscow, [I] considered the business as done’.24 He claimed he could have stayed in the well-stocked city throughout the winter had it not been for the burning of Moscow, ‘an event on which I could not calculate, as there is not, I believe, a precedent for it in the history of the world. But by God, one has to admit that showed a hell of a strength of character.’25 Although the part of the city that survived the fire was large enough for winter cantonments, and some supplies were found there in private cellars, it was not remotely capable of wintering an army of over 100,000 men for half a year. There was not enough fodder for the horses, campfires had to be built of mahogany furniture and gilded window-frames, and the army was soon subsisting off rotten horseflesh.26 In retrospect it would have been better for the French had the whole city been razed to the ground, as that would have forced an immediate retreat.

  The central striking force of the Grande Armée had shrunk to less than half its original size in the eighty-two days between crossing the Niemen and entering Moscow. According to the figures Napoleon was given at the time, he had lost 92,390 men by the end of the battle of Borodino.27 Yet he did not act like a man whose options were limited. During the two days he spent at the beautiful Petrovsky Palace he considered almost immediately retreating to the Lower Dvina in a circular movement, while sending out Eugène’s corps to make it appear as if he were marching on to St Petersburg.28 He told Fain that he believed he could be between Riga and Smolensk by mid-October. Yet although he started looking at maps and drawing up orders, only Eugène supported the idea. Other senior officers reacted with ‘repugnance’, arguing that the army needed rest, and to go north would ‘look for the winter, as if it wasn’t coming soon enough!’ They urged Napoleon to ask Alexander for peace.29 Army surgeons needed more time to treat the wounded and they argued that Moscow still had resources to offer under the ashes.30 Napoleon told his advisors: ‘Don’t believe that the ones who burnt Moscow are people to make peace a few days later; if the parties who are guilty of this determination dominate today in Alexander’s cabinet, all the hopes with which I see you flatter yourselves are in vain.’31

  Another plan, to march on Alexander’s court nearly four hundred miles away in St Petersburg itself, was proposed, but Berthier and Bessières quickly convinced Napoleon on logistical grounds ‘that he had neither time, provisions, roads, nor a single requisite for so extensive an expedition’.32 Instead they discussed marching south nearly 100 miles to Kaluga and Tula, the granary and arsenal of Russia respectively, or retreating to Smolensk. Napoleon eventually chose what turned out to be the worst possible option: to return to the Kremlin, which had survived the fire, on September 18 to wait to see whether Alexander would agree to end the war. ‘I ought not to have stayed in Moscow more than two weeks at the utmost,’ Napoleon said later, ‘but I was deceived from day to day.’33 This was untrue. Alexander didn’t deceive Napoleon into thinking he was interested in peace; he simply refused to reply either positively or negatively. Nor was Napoleon self-deceived; the burning of Moscow confirmed him in his belief that there was no hope of peace, even though he would probably have accepted as little as Russia’s return to the Continental System as the price.34 The reason he stayed in Moscow for so long was that he thought he had plenty of time before he needed to get his army back to winter quarters in Smolensk, and he preferred to live off the enemy’s resources.

  On September 18, Napoleon distributed 50,000 plundered rubles to Muscovites who had lost their houses and he visited an orphanage, dispelling the widespread rumour that he was going to eat its inhabitants.35 ‘Moscow was a very beautiful city,’ he wrote to Maret, using the past tense. ‘It will take Russia two hundred years to recover from the loss which she has sustained.’36 He wrote to Alexander on the 20th, as autumnal rains finally quenched the fires, which in some places had burned for six days. (The letter was delivered by the brother of the Russian minister to Cassel, the most senior Russian to be captured in Moscow, which shows how thorough the nobility’s evacuation of the city had been.) ‘If Your Majesty still preserves for me some remnant of your former feelings, you will take this letter in good part,’ he began.

  The beautiful and superb city of Moscow no longer exists; Rostopchin had it burnt … The administration, the magistrates and the civil guards should have remained. This is what was done twice at Vienna, at Berlin and at Madrid … I have waged war on Your Majesty without animosity. A letter from you before or after the last battle would have halted my march, and I should have even liked to have sacrificed the advantage of entering Moscow.37

  On receipt of this letter, the Tsar promptly sent for Lord Cathcart, the British ambassador, and told him that twenty such catastrophes as had happened to Moscow would not induce him to abandon the struggle.38 The list of cities Napoleon gave in that letter – and it could have been longer – demonstrates that he knew from experience that capturing the enemy’s capital didn’t lead to his surrender, and Moscow wasn’t even Russia’s government capital. It was the destruction of the enemy’s main army at Marengo, Austerlitz and Friedland that had secured his victory, and Napoleon had failed to achieve that at Borodino.

  While waiting for Alexander’s reply, the Emperor made life in Moscow as easy as possible for his troops by organizing entertainments for them, although there were some practices at which he drew the line. ‘Despite repeated warnings,’ read one order, ‘soldiers are con
tinuing to relieve themselves in the courtyard, even under the windows of the Emperor himself; orders are now issued that each unit will set punishment parties to dig latrines and … buckets will be placed in the corners of the barracks and these will be emptied twice a day.’39 Napoleon used his time at the Kremlin to rationalize the units of the army and take into account their losses, review them and receive detailed reports on their state, which told him he still had over 100,000 effectives after reinforcement. Meanwhile, cannonballs collected from the field of Borodino started arriving by the cartload.40 He liked to cultivate the appearance of constant industry: one of his ushers, Angel, later revealed that he had been ordered to put two candles in Napoleon’s window every evening, ‘so that the troops exclaim “See, the Emperor doesn’t sleep by day or at night. He works continuously!” ’41

  When Napoleon discovered the plight of Madame Aurore Bursay’s troupe of fourteen French actors and actresses, who had been robbed by both Russian and French troops, he came to her assistance and asked her to put on eleven plays, mostly comedies and ballets, in the Posniakov Theatre.42 He didn’t go himself, but he did listen to Signor Tarquinio, a famous Muscovite singer. He drew up new regulations for the Comédie-Française, and decided that he wanted the gigantic golden cross from the Ivan the Great bell tower to be placed on the dome of Les Invalides.43 (Once they got it down, it turned out to be made only of gilded wood, and it would be thrown into the Berezina on the retreat by General Michel Claparède’s Polish division.44)

  One way in which Napoleon could have caused severe problems for the Russian governing class would have been by freeing the serfs from their lifetime of bondage to their aristocratic landowners. Emelian Pugachev’s violent serf revolt in the mid-1770s had in some respects presaged the French Revolution, and the Russian elite were terrified that Napoleon might reach back to its ideas.45 He certainly ordered the papers covering Pugachev’s revolt to be brought to him from the Kremlin archives and asked Eugène for information about a peasant uprising in Velikiye, and to ‘let me know what kind of decree and proclamation can be made to excite the revolt of the peasants in Russia and rally them’.46 Yet despite abolishing feudalism in all the lands he conquered, he did not emancipate the Russian serfs, whom he thought of as ignorant and uncivilized.47 It certainly wouldn’t have helped bring Alexander to the negotiating table.

  In the first week of October, Napoleon sent his former ambassador to Russia, Jacques de Lauriston, to Kutuzov, who had entrenched himself at Tarutino behind the River Nara, 45 miles south-west of Moscow. According to Ségur, Napoleon’s parting words to his envoy were: ‘I want peace, I must have peace, I absolutely will have peace – only save my honour!’48 Kutuzov refused to offer Lauriston safe passage to St Petersburg, saying his message could be taken by Prince Sergei Volkonsky instead. Once again, there was no reply. By this stage Murat was losing forty to fifty men a day to Cossack raiders on the outskirts of Moscow, and Kutuzov’s army had grown to 88,300 regular troops, 13,000 regular Don Cossacks and another 15,000 irregular Cossack and Bashkir cavalry, with 622 guns. By contrast, Napoleon received only 15,000 reinforcements during the thirty-five days he spent in Moscow, while 10,000 died of wounds or disease there.

  The fine weather in Moscow, which Napoleon told Marie Louise was ‘as warm as in Paris’ on October 6, made it seem less important that the men had thrown away their winter clothing on the boiling march from the Niemen, although it worried him that he couldn’t buy the shoes, boots and horses they would soon need.49 In a second letter to Marie Louise that day he asked her to persuade her father to reinforce Schwarzenberg’s corps, ‘so that it may be a credit to him’.50 He could not know that Metternich had given secret undertakings to the Tsar that Austria would do nothing of the kind, and at about this time Schwarzenberg started to behave suspiciously independently, avoiding any engagement with the Russians that he could. ‘Right now,’ Napoleon told Fain in mid-September, acknowledging his other diplomatic failings of that year, ‘Bernadotte should have been in St Petersburg and the Turks in the Crimea.’51

  Napoleon had collected all available almanacs and charts on the Russian winter, which had told him that sub-zero temperatures weren’t to be expected until November. ‘No information was neglected about that subject, no calculation, and all probabilities were reassuring,’ recalled Fain; ‘it’s usually only in December and January that the Russian winter is very rigorous. During November the thermometer doesn’t go much below six degrees.’52 Observations made of the previous twenty years’ winters confirmed that the Moskva river didn’t freeze until mid-November, and Napoleon believed this gave him plenty of time to return to Smolensk. It had taken his army less than three weeks to get from Smolensk to Moscow, including the three days at Borodino.53

  Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, which Napoleon read while in Moscow, described the Russian winter as so cold that birds froze in mid-air, falling from the skies as if shot.54 The Emperor also read the three-volume Military History of Charles XII by the king’s chamberlain, Gustavus Adlerfeld, published in 1741, which concludes with the disaster of Poltava.55 Adlerfeld attributed the King of Sweden’s defeat to stubborn Russian resistance and the ‘very piercing’ cold of the winter. ‘In one of these marches two thousand men fell down dead with the cold,’ reads a passage in the third volume, and in another Swedish troopers ‘were reduced to warm themselves with the skins of beasts as well they could; they often wanted even bread; they were obliged to sink almost all their cannon in morasses and rivers, for want of horses to draw them. This army, once so flourishing, was … ready to die with hunger.’56 Adlerfeld wrote of how the nights were ‘extremely cold … many died of the excessive rigour of the cold, and a great number lost the use of their limbs, as their feet and hands.’ From this if nothing else, Napoleon would have keenly understood the severity of the Russian winter. When the army did finally leave Moscow on October 18 he told his staff: ‘Hurry up, we need to be in winter quarters in twenty days.’57 The first major snowfall took place seventeen days later, so he was only three days out. Only military considerations, rather than any insouciance over the weather, forced him to take a different, far longer route to Smolensk than the one originally intended.

  The first flurries of snow fell on the 13th. By then the forage situation for the horses had become critical, with teams leaving Moscow at dawn and rarely returning before nightfall, their horses exhausted.58 With no reply from Alexander and winter clearly now approaching, on October 13 Napoleon finally gave the order for an evacuation of the city five days later. This decision was reinforced by Lauriston’s return on the 17th with Kutuzov’s refusal of an armistice. As the Grande Armée, now comprising around 107,000 men, thousands of civilians, 3,000 Russian prisoners, 550 cannon and over 40,000 vehicles loaded with the fruits of over a month’s looting – which people chose to carry in favour of edible provisions – began to evacuate Moscow on the 18th, Kutuzov mounted an impressive surprise attack at Tarutino (also known as Vinkovo), in which Murat lost 2,000 killed and wounded and 1,500 men and 36 guns were captured.59

  Napoleon himself left Moscow in bright sunshine around noon on October 19, 1812, taking the southern road towards Kaluga – which he nicknamed ‘Caligula’, just as he called Glogau ‘Gourgaud’ – 110 miles to the south-west.60 He retained the option of going to Tula, where he hoped to destroy Russia’s arms factories, and reach the fertile Ukraine while drawing in reinforcements from Smolensk, or moving back up to Smolensk and Lithuania if need be. Either way it permitted him to present the retreat from Moscow merely as a strategic withdrawal, the next stage in the campaign to punish Alexander. But his weakened, lumbering army was too slow for the kind of operation he now needed to pull off, and the mud produced by heavy rainfall on the night of October 21 only slowed it down further. Kutuzov didn’t learn of the evacuation for two days, though as the Grande Armée was limping along in a column that extended for 60 miles this was of little consequence. He sent General Dokhturov’s 6th Corps to block Napol
eon’s route at Maloyaroslavets. Dokhturov arrived on the 23rd and the next day ran straight into Eugène’s advance guard commanded by General Alexis Delzons.

  Napoleon’s order to Mortier to blow up the Kremlin has been denounced as an act of Corsican revenge, but it was actually a means to keep his options open. He told General de Lariboisière, ‘It is possible that I will return to Moscow’, and calculated that he would find it easier to recapture without its formidable defences.61 Mortier laid 180 tons of explosives in the vaults under the Kremlim and Napoleon heard the explosion at 1.30 a.m. on the 20th from 25 miles away. He boasted in a bulletin that ‘The Kremlin, ancient citadel, coeval with the rise of the [Romanov] monarchy, this palace of the tsars, has ceased to exist, but in fact although the arsenal, one of the towers and the Nikolsky Gate were destroyed, and the Ivan bell tower damaged, the rest of the Kremlin survived.62 Napoleon also urged Mortier to take all the wounded from Moscow, drawing from classical precedent to say: ‘The Romans gave civic crowns to those who saved citizens; the Duc de Treviso will be worthy of this as long as he saves soldiers … he must make them ride on his horses and those of his men; this is what the Emperor did at Acre.’63 Mortier carried off all the wounded who could be moved, though 4,000 had to be left behind in the Foundlings Hospital. Just before he left, Napoleon had ten Russian prisoners-of-war shot as arsonists.64 It was hardly Jaffa, but it was an inexplicable act of cruelty and unlikely to help the chances of the French wounded he was compelled to abandon.

  The battle of Maloyaroslavets, the third largest of the campaign, fought high above the River Luzha on October 24, had consequences far in excess of its immediate result. The French ultimately captured and held the town and Kutuzov withdrew down the Kaluga road, but the extremely bitter fighting – in which the town changed hands nine times over the course of the day – convinced Napoleon, who arrived only at the very end, that the Russians would contest the southern route bitterly. (‘It’s not enough to kill a Russian,’ went the admiring saying in the Grande Armée, ‘you have to push him over too.’) Although the Emperor described Maloyaroslavets as a victory in his bulletin, the cartographer Captain Eugène Labaume, who was a bitter critic, recalled the men saying: ‘Two such “victories” and Napoleon would have no army left.’65 Maloyaroslavets burned down during the battle – only the stone monastery remains today, complete with bullet holes in its gate – but from the positions of the piles of calcinated corpses the Emperor could tell how obstinately the Russians had fought.