On this day in 1812, a week after a bloody victory over the Russians at the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon Bonaparte's Grand Armée enters Moscow, only to see that the population has been evacuated, and once again, the Russians keep retreating. Moscow was the invasion's target, but there were no Tsarist officials staying to plead for peace, nor was there a food store or supply depot to reward the French soldiers after their long march. Fires broke out across the city shortly after midnight, most likely started by Russian patriots, leaving Napoleon's massive army with no way to survive the Russian winter.
Emperor Napoleon was still at his peak in 1812. Despite the fact that the Peninsular War against Britain was a thorn in his great European Empire's side, the emperor was confident that his generals would soon triumph in Spain. The Continental System—France's unilateral blockade of Europe designed to isolate the economy and force Britain into submission—required Russian cooperation to be completed. Following previous conflicts, Napoleon and Alexander I's peaceful relations were frail; the tsar was unwilling to submit to the Continental System because it would destroy the Russian economy. Napoleon concentrated his forces in Poland in the spring of 1812 to intimidate Alexander, but he was still rejected by the Tsar.
On June 24, Napoleon directed the Great Army, Europe's largest military force at the time, to attack Russia. The massive army, which included over 500,000 soldiers and personnel, came from Prussia, Austria, and other countries ruled by the French Empire. Napoleon's success was due to his ability to move his army flexibly and attack quickly, but he was forced to deal with an ever-retreating Russian army in the early months of his invasion of Russia. On the run, the Russians adopted a "scorched earth" strategy, seizing or burning down any support the French could scavenge from the countryside. Meanwhile, as Napoleon pushed deeper into Russia, his supply capacity gradually depleted.ư
Many in the Tsarist government criticized the Russian army's refusal to confront Napoleon directly. Under public pressure, Alexander appointed General Mikhail Kutuzov as supreme commander in August, but the man who had been defeated by Napoleon continued to withdraw. In the end, Kutuzov agreed to block the French at the town of Borodino, about 70 miles west of Moscow, directly fighting the French. The Russians began to build fortifications, and on September 7, the Grande Armée attacked. Napoleon was unusually cautious that day; he did not attempt to overwhelm the Russians and even refused to send the necessary reinforcements to the battlefield. The result was a bloody and close victory and another retreat of the Russian army.
Although dissatisfied with the progress of the campaign, Napoleon was convinced that once Moscow was captured, Alexander would be forced to surrender. On September 14, the French entered a deserted Moscow. Almost the entire population of the city's 275,000 people has disappeared. Napoleon stayed at a house on the outskirts of the city that night, but at two o'clock in the morning, the emperor was informed that a fire had broken out in the city. He rushed to the Kremlin, only to see the flames grow bigger and bigger. Unusual reports began to appear that it was the Russians who caused the fires. Suddenly, a fire broke out in the Kremlin; apparently, the culprit was a policeman from the Russian army, who was immediately executed. The firestorm spread, and Napoleon and his entourage were forced to flee the burning streets, retreating to the outskirts of Moscow to avoid suffocation. When the fire went out three days later, more than two-thirds of the city had been destroyed.
Napoleon hoped that after that disaster, Alexander would beg for peace. "My brother!" he wrote in a letter to the Tsar. "Moscow, once beautiful and magical, is no longer. "How could you allow the destruction of the world's most beautiful city, which took hundreds of years to build?" The fire is thought to have been ordered by Moscow Governor-General Feodor Rostopchin, though he later denied the claim. The burning of Moscow "lit my soul," Alexander said, and the Tsar refused to negotiate with Napoleon.
After a month of waiting for a surrender that would never come, Napoleon was forced to lead his starving army out of the ruined city. Suddenly, Kutuzo troops appeared to attack them on October 19 at Maloyaroslavets. The disbanded Great Army was forced to abandon the rich southern route they had chosen as their retreat, returning to the devastated route they had previously used to enter Moscow. During that disastrous retreat, Napoleon's soldiers were subjected to constant harassment from the Russian army. Stalked by famine, cold, and fatal blows by the Cossacks, the Great Army reached the Berezina River in late November, near the border with French-occupied Lithuania. However, the river suddenly thawed, and the Russians destroyed the bridges in Borisov.
On November 26, Napoleon's engineers were able to construct two makeshift bridges at Studienka, and the majority of his army began to cross the river. On November 29, the Russians applied pressure from the east, and the French were forced to burn the bridges, leaving about 10,000 remnant troops on the other side. The Russians almost gave up their pursuit after that point, but thousands of French soldiers still suffered from hunger, exhaustion, and cold. In December, Napoleon abandoned his army to return to Paris, where he was rumored to have died and a general had led an unsuccessful coup. He secretly crossed Europe with a small entourage of soldiers and arrived in Paris on December 18. Six days later, the Great Army finally broke out of Russia, with 400,000 casualties during that disastrous invasion.
After France's disastrous defeat in Russia galvanized Europeans, an allied force rose to defeat Napoleon in 1814. Exiled to Elba, he fled to France in early 1815 to build a new army. He had a few victories before his final defeat at Waterloo in June 1815. Napoleon was then exiled to Saint Helena, a remote island off the coast of Africa, where he died six years later.
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