11: Napoleon in Russia, Part II

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In September 1812, French soldiers found a written notice pasted to a pole just outside the lavish estate belonging to the governor of Moscow, which had been burnt down. The notice read, For eight years I have improved this land and I have lived happily here in the bosom of my family. To the number of 1,720, the dwellers on my estate are leaving it at your approach, while for my part...

I am setting fire to my mansion rather than let it be sullied by your presence. Frenchmen, in Moscow I have abandoned to you my two residences with furniture worth half a million rubles. Here you will find. only ashes." Theodor Rostopocian, 1812. 200 years ago, in the second decade of the 19th century, The world was a strange, fascinating, and precarious place. It was a time of global conflict and uneasy peace. A time of great environmental change.

A time of disaster and miracles, anomalies and mysteries. It was a time when our modern world began to emerge, and a time like almost no other in history. This podcast is about stories, true stories, of this remarkable era. This is the Second Decade Podcast. My name is Sean Munger. I'm a historian, an author, teacher.

and podcaster. You can visit the website for this podcast at seconddecade.net. Second Decade is spelled out, all one word, two D's in the middle. Thanks for joining me on this journey into the past.

Episode 11, Napoleon in Russia, Part 2. According to the memoirs of Armand de Calencourt, one of Napoleon's adjutants who accompanied him on the Russian campaign, On the morning of June 23, 1812, the day before the French army crossed the River Niemann into Russian territory, Napoleon, the Emperor of France, was trotting along on horseback up and down the bank of the river.

reconnoitering the places where his troops would cross the next day. He was riding through a wheat field when a small rabbit ran under the legs of Napoleon's horse. which was named Friedland after the famous 1807 victory that resulted in France and Russia temporarily becoming allies. The sight of the rabbit startled Friedland the horse, and he lurched.

Napoleon fell off the horse and landed hard on his hip, which eventually showed a pretty bad bruise. Nevertheless, he immediately got up and mounted his horse. None of the generals or adjutants gathered around said anything to him. but everyone had seen it happen. One of them, the Prince of Neuchâtel, grabbed Calaincourt's arm and said, We should do better not to cross the Niemann. That fall is a bad sign.

Napoleon was undaunted. After dinner in his tent that night, Napoleon sent for Colleen Court and they discussed the last-minute preparations for the invasion. As they sat there in the warm summer evening, listening to crickets and the sound of the river, Napoleon said this to his friend and advisor.

The great landowners will be terrified, some of them ruined. Tsar Alexander will be in a very awkward position, for at heart the Russians care nothing for the Poles, certainly not enough to face ruin for their sakes. Few people have ever been more deeply wrong about their own destinies and to greater cost. Napoleon was not innocently mistaken either. He was warned in no uncertain terms exactly how the disaster that awaited him would unfold.

In fact, the warning came directly from the lips of Tsar Alexander, the Russian ruler to whom Napoleon had sent Kalincourt as a peace envoy the previous summer. There was nothing secret or confidential about the military plans of the Russians. Alexander told Kalancourt to tell Napoleon in his exact words exactly what the Russian military strategy would be, and that no matter what happened, Alexander would refuse to surrender.

Alexander, as we saw in the previous installment of this series, was younger and less experienced in both war and diplomacy than Napoleon. But his explanation of how the Russian campaign unfolded turned out to be precisely what happened. against the whole of his military and political experience, against every instinct of better judgment that should have prevailed in the mind of a wise ruler and a responsible commander, Napoleon ignored this warning. Why?

How could somebody so smart, so powerful, and so lucky as Napoleon had been make one of the most colossal mistakes in world history? In this episode, we'll try to answer those questions. as we begin our descent into the bloody, fiery, and ultimately icy hell that destroyed Napoleon and the French Empire, one of the most important world events of the second decade.

As I take you along in this episode, the second of a three-part series on Napoleon in Russia, always keep in the back of your mind, he was warned.

Welcome to part two of my series on Napoleon in Russia. Just to recap briefly, as this is the first multi-part series I've done on this show, In part one, I went into the backgrounds of both Napoleon, the Emperor of France, and Alexander I, the Tsar of Russia. In 1805, Alexander, then on the Romanov throne only four years,

was suckered into joining a war against France by Napoleon's enemies, Austria and Britain. A massive defeat at Austerlitz in 1805 and another at Friedland in 1807 changed Alexander's mind, at least temporarily. In 1807, he decided to become Napoleon's ally, but things didn't go so well. The two rulers had a falling out mostly over a puppet state that Napoleon formed in Poland, called the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and Alexander's refusal...

to participate in Napoleon's continental system, a regime of economic warfare aimed at Britain. By 1811, war seemed inevitable. In early 1812, Napoleon amassed the largest army ever assembled in pre-industrial times, 600,000 men at least by one estimate, and he prepared to march on Russia. But things were already going badly wrong.

The army was simply too big and consumed too many resources. Mentally and militarily, Napoleon was slipping. I believe, and this is my own personal belief, I believe that Napoleon didn't really want to go through with it.

or at the very least that he had serious suspicions that this last war would prove to be a bridge too far there are two different kinds of decisions that leaders make when they take their countries to war two very different kinds of roads that lead to conflict One is a flashy, belligerent, enthusiastic charge dominated by emotions, usually anger and righteousness, totally devoid of self-doubt and reasoned reflection.

On this road to war, the leaders usually can't wait to get at it and they show exasperated impatience at having to exhaust or pretend to exhaust peaceful options before they finally get to pull the trigger. President George W. Bush and his decisions to invade Iraq in early 2003 are the paradigm examples of this kind of rush to conflict.

Napoleon's Russian invasion wasn't like this. As swaggering and arrogant as history makes him out to be, in reality Napoleon dithered for a year between summer 1811 and summer 1812 before he finally got down to business.

He believed he was in the right, and somehow he convinced himself, perhaps it was a hard sell, he convinced himself that he was going to win, or at least that there was a fair chance of winning. But in the run-up to the invasion in June 1812, Personally, I see a lot of clues that he really didn't want to go through with this, or that he believed there'd be some last-minute deliverance that would absolve him of it.

I can imagine him waking up on that famous camp bed in his tent on the bank of the Nieman River in East Prussia on June 24, 1812, and thinking to himself, damn, here I am, it's really going to happen, isn't it? Perhaps in that moment of reflection, he might even have been able to see what was going to happen, even though he'd never admit it to his advisors or observers. Napoleon was remarkably alone. He'd left his wife, Empress Marie Louise, behind in Dresden.

He couldn't really talk to her anyway. He divorced the woman he really loved, Josephine, the only woman he could truly confide in. The men who surrounded him were opportunists or cold military professionals or lackeys, but not really friends. it was probably pretty lonely waking up in that tent on that morning but even at that moment if he'd had the wisdom the moral courage to do it napoleon could have turned it all off only he could have turned it off but he didn't

For their part, the Russians had no illusions about what was going to happen to them. Being in the Russian army in 1812 was extremely depressing for most people. Men were drafted into the Russian army for a period of 25 years. This was effectively a death sentence. Less than 10% of the men who went in came out alive a quarter century later. And not just from battle. Disease, accidents, bad food, that sort of thing, that was usually a greater threat.

In fact, when a young man from a Russian village was drafted into the army, his family, and often the whole village, would give him a grand send-off that looked very much like a wake because they fully expected they'd never see him again. The ranks were full of ex-serfs, sometimes criminals and ne'er-do-wells, who used the army structures to pursue their criminal trades. Russian officers weren't much better.

Promotion in the army was almost always tied to who you knew, and especially who in the Tsar's court your family knew. If you didn't have those connections, you were screwed. Training and coordination was pretty bad. Part of the reasons the Russians lost at Austerlitz in Friedland was because the army didn't function very well. Alexander did what he could to beef up the army, especially in the year-long run-up to the invasion, but there was only so much he could do.

He modernized their weapons, especially artillery, and tried to reorganize the command structure but there was a lot of bureaucratic resistance. But he did have a lot of raw troops. By the time of the invasion, Tsar Alexander had about 900,000 men at his disposal. In other words, even with his gigantic army, Napoleon was outnumbered.

The Russians had three main commanders who were waiting to square off against Napoleon. The main commander, at least on paper, was General Barclay de Tully. Yes, he sounds French. A lot of high officers in the Russian army were foreigners, including French. There was a second army under the command of Prince Pyotr Bagration, who had served at Austerlitz. The smallest army was commanded by General Tormasov, who guarded the southern frontier.

These guys were generally jealous of each other, but Gratian had more experience than Barclay and thought he should be in command. When Tsar Alexander arrived in Vilnius in Lithuania, as Napoleon's invasion began, Bagration started communicating with him directly, cutting Barclay out of the loop.

Barclay. Every time I see his name, I think of the character Mr. Barclay from Star Trek Next Generation, played by Dwight Schultz. Anyway, Barclay wanted to strike first. He had a plan to advance on Russia and attack Napoleon directly. Alexander overruled him. There were other plans too, including one to retreat in front of Napoleon's army, regroup somewhere deep in Russia, then crush the French in one big battle. Alexander though dithered. He didn't commit to any one single plan.

He spent a lot of time whining and dining and attending lavish parties in Vilnius, and as a result, the army was almost paralyzed. The French crossed the River Niman into Russian territory, pretty much unopposed. Caught largely by surprise by the timing of the invasion, there was no excuse for that, but there it was, the other strategies, like Barclay's attack first plan, were pretty much moot. All there was to do now was retreat.

Barclay's First Army withdrew from Vilnius, burning warehouses full of military stores in the process. On June 28th, a Sunday, the French arrived in Vilnius. The warehouses were still burning. Napoleon even took up residence in the exact same palace where Alexander had been staying just two days before. He was puzzled. All his reports told him that the Russians were making preparations for the defense of Vilnius, and suddenly they were gone.

He was afraid they were setting a trap. Napoleon was in a trap, but not one sent by Alexander or Prince Bagration, not yet. As the French army was preparing to move out of Vilnius, a huge rainstorm struck. Freezing rain. Yes, in late June. Remember, the second decade was a period of global cooling. We talked about that in a previous episode. Anyway, the roads leading out of Vilnius, which had been dry and dusty before the storm, suddenly turned to mud.

The French army's carts and horses couldn't move very well, and more importantly, they couldn't resupply. Napoleon had a bunch of supplies back in Poland, but he couldn't get them to his front-line units. And there was nothing to take in Vilnius. Remember I said Barclay had set the storehouses on fire. Napoleon wrote, We are losing so many horses in this country that it will take all the resources of France and Germany to keep the present effectives of the regiments mounted.

Over 30,000 soldiers, sick and malnourished, streamed backwards from the front lines, crowding into makeshift field hospitals. The stragglers didn't do the French any favors. Because they were starving, wherever they went they tried to steal food and generally terrorize the local populace. Napoleon didn't have much goodwill left.

The month of July was even more frustrating for Napoleon. He sent various army corps in various directions, hoping to engage the Russians, or at least figure out where the main Russian armies were. Bagration retreated ahead of him. and Napoleon's generals couldn't get a good fix on where he was going. Finally, on July 27th, French forces began to close around Vitebsk, located in what's now Belarus.

The cavalry of Joachim Murat, king of Naples, he was Napoleon's brother-in-law, and the famous Marshal Ney were in this group, and they finally located the bulk of Barclay's troops, who looked like they were preparing for an engagement. The French commanders were elated.

At last, they had what they wanted, an opportunity for a battle that they hoped would knock out the center of gravity of the Russian army. Napoleon was relieved. He went around telling everyone that tomorrow, July 28th, would be the next Austerlitz. French officers polished up their buttons and put on their best uniforms. There had already been some minor skirmishes with Russian Cossack troops, and it certainly looked like the decisive engagement was about to happen.

During the night, the French could see distant campfires that they were sure were some of those Cossack soldiers. But then, on the morning of July 28, 1812, the sun rose. Napoleon and all his guys marched out in their finest, and nothing happened. Barclay had quietly retreated during the night. Those campfires...

Barclay had ordered a couple of Cossack regiments to stay and be sure to be seen by the French as cover for the retreat. Napoleon was mystified. Quite disappointed and a little apprehensive, the French occupied Vitebsk. In the meantime, Barclay, who wisely had been afraid of Napoleon destroying his army if he allowed a battle, fell back on Smolensk. Napoleon was sure he'd fight there at last. They continued advancing.

Conditions were getting worse for the French all the time. Part of their problem was geography. In other parts of Europe, Germany or Austria or Spain or wherever, the ground was level and solid. Troops could march through fields or on the sides of the roads. leaving the roads themselves for horses and carts and artillery. You couldn't do that in Russia. The roads were little thin ribbons of solid ground through acres of mud and marshes, and even then not so solid.

With tens of thousands of men marching down them and the horses and their poop and the guns, the roads became seas of sticky mud. There were mosquitoes. The roadsides were constantly filled with poorly fed soldiers going to the bathroom because they had dysentery or worms or something. The traffic on the roads inched along at a snail's pace. When it was hot, it was hot sometimes.

Soldiers would drop like flies from heat stroke. Remember, most of them are wearing heavy woolen clothes and carrying heavy packs. There was no fresh water. Some men resorted to drinking the urine of their horses. They literally drank. Horse piss. They had no shelter. Unlike the Russian troops, who could get some willing help, often a lot, from the local people, the French found no one to help them, and a lot of villages had been burned. One soldier described the scene in a letter to his wife.

Most of them have thatched roofs, and the old straw from these has been used as fodder for the horses. The houses have been destroyed or ransacked, and the inhabitants have fled, unless they're so poor that they've died of hunger. having had all their food taken away by the soldiers. The streets are strewn with dead horses, which give off an awful stink in the hot weather we're having, and every moment more horses collapse. It is a horrible war.

Near Smolensk, Barclay's forces had linked up with those of Prince Bagration, and there was a lot of discussion about giving a battle to Napoleon at last. Tsar Alexander was demanding one, if only to buck up the morale of the Russian troops, who were tired of retreating. At last, in the first two weeks of August, it appeared like both sides were getting ready for a decisive engagement. The city of Smolensk, which still had its old medieval walls, was the prize.

At this point in the story, there occurs a lot of military maneuvering. I admit as a historian, this isn't really my thing. Arrows sweeping across maps, cities marked with little icons of crossed swords to indicate a battle. You've seen all that in the history books. In any event, I couldn't really do that in an audio podcast. Suffice it to say, on August 16, 1812, there was finally a battle. It was very confused.

The Russian command structure broke down, and Bagration's resentment of Barclay being an overall command caused him, Bagration, to disobey a direct order from the other general. There was fierce fighting around the city. Barclay realized two things. One, that he was going to lose, and two, a conflicting reality, that politically he had to make some kind of stand for the city, however hopeless. He split the difference.

Napoleon was convinced that the majority of the Russian army was finally coming out to fight. He also had a plan for encircling them to the south and cutting off their escape so they'd have no choice. Barclay didn't oblige him. after the french had started bombarding the city setting much of it on fire he retreated and set the rest of it on fire himself what napoleon's army took possession of was not what they expected

The city was totally burnt and filled with corpses, as well as tens of thousands of wounded, Russian soldiers and civilians that Barclay had left behind. They had to ask Napoleon to organize hospitals for them, but they had no medicine and not many supplies. A few days later, a French force fought another battle just outside of Smolensk along the road to Moscow at a place called Lubino. The bloodiness of this battle shocked many of the French commanders.

It devolved into pretty much a massacre. When it was over, Napoleon held Smolensk, but the Russian army, though mauled, was still largely intact. 18,000 of Napoleon's troops were dead. Still, he tried to put the best face on it that he could. Kalancourt records that Napoleon said to him, quote, By abandoning Smolensk, which is one of their holy cities, the Russian generals are dishonoring their arms in the eyes of their own people.

That will put me in a strong position. We will drive them a little farther back for our own comfort. I will dig myself in. We'll rest the troops. The country will shape up around this pivot, and we'll see how Alexander likes that. Later on, I will choose, if necessary, between Moscow and Petersburg." There's something kind of self-delusional about Napoleon's speech, as if he was trying to convince himself of something he didn't really believe deep down.

Surely Napoleon understood he was in too deep to stop now, and the worst fighting was yet to come at a place on the road to Moscow called Borodino.

For a commander who told everyone around him that he was winning and that Alexander was within inches of surrender, Napoleon sure was in a bad mood. He was angry and irritable. He snapped at his people, which wasn't like him. A historian records one incident where he discovered that a wine merchant from Paris was selling wine to the troops and using carts, which should have been used for medical supplies, to ship the bottles. He had a total meltdown.

Imagine a Napoleonic version of the famous Hitler screaming fit depicted in the movie Downfall, you know, the one everybody was making memes out of a few years ago. Several of Napoleon's commanders thought it was time to pull the plug. At staff conferences, they argued that there was no way to win and that they should pull out now. Napoleon didn't want to hear it. He said, the wine has been poured. It must be drunk. The Grand Armée, what was left of it.

was eight days' march from Moscow. So close, yet so far. In the last week of August, the army was on the move again. Things should have been better for them. The road between Smolensk and Moscow was much wider, and they were out of the swamp country. But it was hot. The horses and carts kicked up great quantities of fine dust. People wrapped scarves around their heads to try to keep it out. The men in their clothes were infested with fleas and lice.

The smoke from villages and fields that the Russians had burned mixed with the dust and turned the sky red. A vision of hell. Although the scorched earth tactic was effective, the Russians knew that they were going to have to fight a battle eventually.

As news of the fall of Smolensk rippled through the countryside and the Russian court, people started to blame Barclay for botching it. He was born in Germany, and there were whispers of him being a German traitor. He was already, on terrible terms, with Prince Bagration. Alexander, who was in St. Petersburg, not Moscow, decided he had to go, and he fired Barclay as overall commander, though he remained in charge of his own troops. His replacement? Mikhail Kutuzov.

the one-eyed gargoyle who'd fought at Austerlitz, and whose advice there, which Alexander had at the time ignored, turned out to be right. Kutuzov quickly arrived at the Russian military headquarters, a place again on the road to Moscow called, and I'm sure I'm going to butcher this, Tsarevo-Zaimishki. One of Barclay's last acts in command was to order the army to dig in there and prepare for a big battle. Fortunately for Russia, it fell to Kutuzov to fight this battle.

However, after reconnoitering the area and taking stock of the army, which he thought was tired and worn out from all that retreating, Kutuzov decided he didn't like Tsarevo Zymyshe, after all, and he looked around for a better place to defend. The place he chose was a small village called Borodino, 70 miles west of Moscow. It was evident pretty quickly that the Russians were finally going to fight. They started digging earthworks called fleches,

and tearing down village buildings that impeded the light of artillery fire. On September 5th, there was quite a ferocious mini-battle on the outskirts of the village over a particular redoubt that both sides wanted. The French ended up with it, but Gtuzov managed to capture eight French artillery pieces. As both armies camped in and prepared, the great battle was about to get underway early on the morning of September 7, 1812. Napoleon happened to be sick that day.

Hell of a day to catch a cold, but he had one, and that aggravated a condition called dysuria, which is very painful urination. Supposedly his pee was full of sediment. So much about pee in this episode. Sorry, it's right there in the book. I'm not making this stuff up. It's important to remember that not the entire armies were engaged here. All of those 600,000 guys or whatever was left of them by that time.

Napoleon had been told he had about 134,000 men at Borodino, but this number is probably too high. Keep in mind these guys are not in top fighting strength. Far from it. They're weakened by hunger. They haven't slept well. Many of them don't have shoes. Some of them have been drinking horse piss. Anyway, Kutuzov had about 157,000 men.

His people were in much better shape. They had good food, generally good shelter, and they weren't fighting very far from home. At 6 o'clock in the morning, September 7th, the French cannons started firing. Napoleon, who'd been up most of the night, was sitting in a chair on the hill where he and his adjutants could see the whole battlefield. Usually during battles, Napoleon, according to witnesses, was very active and animated.

giving orders here, improvising there, coordinating the whole battlefield in his mind. He was a genius at that. But he didn't do that at Buradino. For the most part, he just sat there like a bump on a log. He didn't use his great powers of military improvisation, or maybe he simply couldn't do it anymore. The French had one battle plan, and they stuck to it, without modifications.

This was probably Napoleon's worst ever performance as a military commander. The fighting at Borodino was ferocious, especially the artillery barrages. Cannonballs and grapes shot were flying everywhere, cutting down whole lines of troops. Guts and body parts were splashing all over the landscape. I'm not making that up or emphasizing it for effect. I did used to be a horror writer.

It's right there in the eyewitness accounts, which are pretty horrific. I won't go into the strategy of the battle. That involves arrows and pins on maps, and as I said before, I'm not really good at that. Basically, neither side really won a clear victory, and it was awfully bloody. Prince Bagration took a bullet in the leg, he croaked.

At a key moment, when French units had torn a hole in the Russian lines, some generals recommended to Napoleon that he send in his elite troops, the Imperial Guard, to pursue them. he refused he was afraid they'd be destroyed this may well have saved the russian army at six in the evening after twelve hours of battle it was finally over September 7, 1812 was the bloodiest single day of the second decade and of the 19th century, surpassing even the death tolls of American Civil War battles.

About 35,000 French troops and 45,000 Russian troops were dead. Tens of thousands more were wounded or out of action. The French army was in such bad shape for food that live soldiers were rifling the pockets and haversacks of the dead ones, looking for stuff to eat. Russian wounded streamed back toward Moscow.

Ironically, both commanders, Napoleon and Kutuzov, thought they'd won Borodino or tried to convince others they had. Napoleon wrote a letter to his wife, Marie-Louise, declaring he'd won a great victory. Kutuzov wrote to Tsar Alexander saying he'd won, but it was kind of a hard sell. The Russian army had been mostly shattered and was retreating. Moscow was in danger. When one of his staff officers reminded him of this,

Kutuzov blew up at him, saying he must have been getting drunk with a prostitute while the battle was going on and he couldn't have seen what happened. Kutuzov quickly faced a tactical choice. to prevent his badly mauled army from completely disintegrating he had to get back close to some base of supply where his men could eat rest and regroup that place was not moscow if he went there he'd have to fight napoleon again

and he was in no shape to do that. The only way to shake Napoleon was to throw him a bone. To distract him with something else, and allow Kutuzov time to take his army south and patch it back together. The bone was Moscow itself. If he sacrificed Moscow, Napoleon would get drawn in and hopefully get stuck. Kutuzov said something like this in almost those words. He said,

Moscow is the sponge which will suck him in. Ordinary Russians as well as nobles had already been fleeing in large numbers as the French advanced. After Borodino, and especially after Kutuzov informed Rostopochin, the governor of Moscow, on September 13th that he would not be defending the city, the exodus grew more frenzied. The city was soon in chaos.

The streets choked with carts and horses, desperate nobles dragging along what valuables they thought they could save, and Russian soldiers trying mostly in vain to keep order. Many of the soldiers had a heyday. With their proprietors fleeing, troops tended to target liquor shops and wine cellars, looting everything and getting drunk. Discipline was falling apart in the Russian army. Many of the Russian soldiers considered the war over, and that they had lost.

At 10 a.m. on September 14, 1812, Napoleon stood on the heights overlooking Moscow, a famous location called the Sparrow Hills. He got a note from his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, the king of Naples, informing him that the Russians were in the process of evacuating the city, and would Napoleon please declare a truce while they finished leaving.

napoleon agreed and told his brother-in-law to tell the moscow city fathers to meet him at the city gate in two hours to surrender napoleon was there at the city gates at noon the mayor of moscow didn't show neither did anyone else napoleon got off his horse and paced around puzzled and nervous no one came out to surrender he sent officers into moscow to find out what was going on

the report came back they couldn't find a single person in the city with any kind of authority moscow wasn't exactly empty but all the officials and nobles were gone this is not how it was supposed to happen Kellencourt recorded Napoleon's reaction, quote, Never have I seen him so deeply impressed. he was already greatly disturbed and impatient at having to wait for two hours at the city gate and this report undoubtedly plunged him into the gravest reflections

His face, normally so impassive, showed instantly and unmistakably the mark of his bitter disappointment. Count Fyodor Rostopochen, the governor of Moscow, is something of a controversial figure. Exactly what he did... What orders he received or carried out, especially regarding the destruction of the city, remains controversial. He was either a genius or an idiot but probably nowhere in between. I think he was a genius.

Rostopochin was making preparations for the abandonment of Moscow even before Kutuzov told him that he wasn't going to fight for it. He arranged for the evacuation of civilians, all but some foreigners, some French-speaking people, and some assorted riffraff. Much of the riffraff came from Moscow's prisons, which Rostopochin opened and let everyone out, regardless of their crimes. Incidentally, Saddam Hussein also did this in Baghdad on the eve of the American invasion in 2003.

It proved as effective in Russia in 1812 as it did in Iraq in 2003. If the only people on the streets are hardened criminals, the invaders are going to have a tough time navigating the city. Actually, there were quite a few people left in Moscow at the time the French entered it, possibly as many as 100,000. This meant that there were more left than just the criminals or foreigners. However, the accounts I read of the event all referred to people cowering in their houses or cellars.

Certainly, if you couldn't get out of the city, it would make sense to take cover and try to avoid drawing attention to yourself. Rostoponchin made sure that anything that might be useful to the French army, especially food, would be beyond their reach.

He identified the main storehouses of food supplies and granaries and ordered them to be burned. He also ordered the destruction of warehouses and shops containing leather or clothing that the French could use to patch up their horses or uniforms. Most notably of all, he sabotaged the firefighting equipment. Fire engines were dismantled, as were pumps. Urban firefighting equipment was pretty primitive in 1812, so there wasn't too much of it.

but Rostopochen made sure anyone who had the duties of fighting fires in Moscow was evacuated. There are also reports that, on Rostopochen's orders, fuses were left in various parts of the city.

piles of combustible material with rags that could be lit quickly and would start fires in strategic locations was this rostopochen's own idea or did he have orders to do it we're not sure Kalein court cites various reports, always be wary of that phrase in history, various reports that Kutuzov had met with Rostopochin on September 13th, the day before the evacuation.

Rostopochin proposed to Kutuzov, according to these mysterious reports, that the city be destroyed, but Kutuzov didn't like this idea and stalked off in a huff. There are also reports that the various players really weren't in close contact with one another, that Rosypochin and Kutuzov never talked, or only hardly ever did, and that there was no grand plan for the torching of Moscow.

at least none that had been agreed upon by higher-ups. Then there's the theory that Rostopochen didn't do any of this. After the war, in 1823, Rostopochen, who was still alive, had a pamphlet printed and circulated in Paris in which he claimed he didn't really set fire to Moscow, and that he was totally innocent. Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, published in 1869, discusses the matter and takes the position that the fire was started accidentally and inevitably by the campfires of French soldiers.

most modern historians accept that rostopochen was the master-mind of the burning of moscow and that his chief lieutenant in this matter was the superintendent of police a man called who started burning supplies on the evening of September 14th. He may have lit only a couple of the fuses that night, and then the next day others, like the roving bands of criminals, might have carried on the arson. We'll never really know.

We do know that several fires broke out that evening, September 14th, where Napoleon was staying in a wooden tavern in the suburbs of Moscow. The fires were attributed, possibly mistakenly, to campfires by the French that got out of control. Some of Napoleon's men ordered more patrols on the streets to try to keep things under control. It's unclear to me where Voronenko was during this. He might have fled the city that night.

The next day, September 15, 1812, Napoleon entered Moscow proper and went to the Kremlin. You should keep in mind that at this time Moscow was not the political capital of Russia, that was St. Petersburg. but it clearly was the heart of the nation, and the Kremlin was the traditional residence of the Tsars. Indeed, Napoleon moved into the apartments where Alexander, his former ally and friend and now enemy, lived when he was in Moscow.

The furniture and artwork was all still there. Nothing had been removed. Even the clocks were still ticking. This must have been very eerie, wandering through the palace of the Tsar, footsteps echoing in the big empty rooms, and the whole city... mostly quiet around them. Napoleon was exhausted by this point. You can't blame him.

He's recovering from a cold, he hasn't been able to pee without excruciating pain, he's been up all night for several of the last nights dealing with military and state business, and he's terribly uneasy about where the Russian army is and whether this whole thing is a trap. Plus, it's been barely a week since he presided over the largest battle of his career, a mass slaughter of tens of thousands of human beings that he witnessed personally. He went to bed early in Tsar Alexander's bed.

Outside the walls of the Kremlin, though, the fires were spreading. There was no way this could be just a couple of campfires that got out of control. I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with Tolstoy.

Rostopochen and Voronenko had done their jobs well. Moscow, a city built overwhelmingly of wood, was on fire. Koleincourt wrote, the conflagration continued to spread from the borders of the burrows where it had started it had already reached the houses around the kremlin the wind which had veered slightly to the west fanned the flames to a terrifying extent

and carried enormous sparks to a distance where they fell like a fiery deluge hundreds of yards away, setting fire to more houses and preventing the most intrepid from remaining in the neighborhood with safety. the air was so hot and the pinewood sparks were so numerous that the beams supporting the iron plates which formed the roof of the arsenal all caught fire

The roof of the Kremlin kitchen was only saved by men being placed there with brooms and buckets to gather up the glowing fragments and moisten the beams. Only by superhuman efforts was the fire in the arsenal extinguished. At four o'clock on the morning of September 16th, Napoleon's adjutants, including Kalaincourt, decided to wake him up. They shook him awake and gave him the news that Moscow was burning to the ground.

and if the flames ignited the Kremlin arsenal, it would blow up. In the middle of the night, surrounded by his guards, Napoleon got on a horse and rode out through the burning streets, outside the gates of the city, to a place called Petrskoye. There, at an imperial country palace that was quickly appropriated for the use of the French emperor, Napoleon and his general stood there, watching the sheets of flames rise up into the sky over Moscow.

Napoleon later said it was the most grand, the most sublime, and the most terrific sight the world ever beheld. In the glow of the flames of Moscow, Napoleon had to know that his chances of winning this war, if they were ever very good at all, were rapidly melting into the ashes, along with one of the great cities of the world. The Great Fire of Moscow was bad enough.

But the worst was yet to come. The retreat. If you like this podcast, please share it, tell somebody about it. Mention it on your social media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram. Whatever you do. Leaving a star rating and a review on iTunes is especially helpful, because it's going to help other history buffs, just like you, find this podcast.

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My historical sources for this episode include 1812, Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow by Adam Zamoysky, HarperCollins Publishers London, 2004, and With Napoleon in Russia. The Memoirs of General Armand de Colleen Court, published by William Morrow and Company, New York, 1935. Music credits. The main theme of this podcast is titled String Impromptu Number One by Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com, used under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0 license.

Additional music. Selections from the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky from museopen.org public domain. This podcast was written and recorded by me, Sean Munger. Good night. If you're shopping while working, eating, or even listening to this podcast, then you know and love the thrill of a deal. But are you getting the deal and cash back? Rakuten shoppers do. They get the brands they love, savings, and cash back. And you can get it too.

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