The day the Russians burned Moscow to leave a scorched earth for Napoleon and the tragic end of the French army

The general Armand de Caulaincourt he was sleeping soundly when his assistant woke him up in the middle of the night. “The city is on fire”, he said alarmed. The soldier, a 38-year-old nobleman, was the one who most insisted on Napoleon Bonaparte not to invade Russia. He already knew the country and its people when he was sent years ago by the Emperor himself as a bit of a diplomat and a bit of a spy. Now it was too late: the city of Moscow, practically abandoned by its inhabitants, would be reduced to ashes.

On September 13, in a squalid hut in the city of Phili on the outskirts of Moscow, General Mikhail Kutuzov, a 67-year-old military expert who had previously fought the Napoleonic armies, convinced his staff to burn the city down, to the continuation of the scorched earth strategy in the face of the approaching giant French army. “That Napoleon enters Moscow does not mean that he has conquered Russia”, he wrote to the tsar Alexander I, with whom he didn’t have much chemistry. He had never liked this intelligent, cold and calculating general, devoid of the right eye which he had lost in the wars against the Ottoman Empire. The Tsar had appointed him to boost the morale of the Russian army.

Moscow had not fallen into the hands of an invading army for 200 years. The last time was in 1612, when the Poles seized it.

Russia had broken an alliance it had with France to maintain a continental blockade of Britain and Poland. The Tsar authorizes the entry of English goods, contradicting what he had agreed with France in Tilsit in 1807. And Napoleon – rejecting the advice of his military advisers – decides to invade the country. He gathered an army of 691,500 men who left on June 23, 1812. They were a thousand kilometers ahead.

Although the march took place in the summer, the army had problems with logistics and water supply for its thirsty troops, and it was moving slowly. On August 17 they fought first in Smolensk and on September 7 they faced the Russians at Borodino, a bloody battle in which 40,000 Russians and 20,000 French died. This victory opened the way for Napoleon to Moscow.

The Russians have adopted the scorched earth strategy. The peasants destroyed the crops, burned the huts, the mills, got rid of the fodder, destroyed the bridges. The Russians avoided a battle in an open field.

When Napoleon entered Moscow, he found it abandoned, without food and with few places to take refuge. Illusionist, he asked where the civil authorities were to receive him. He even thought that he would be given the keys to the city. Far away, behind the city walls, the sounds of the departing Russian rearguard could be heard.

Not only was he unwelcome. Between September 14 and 18, the city burned down.

At first, the French emperor spent a night in the Kremlin, the doors of which were open. Reluctantly seeing the danger of fires, he moved to Petrovsky Castle on the outskirts. His own troop surprised a Russian trying to set the Kremlin on fire, and he was bayoneted in an inner courtyard. Napoleon will return to this palace four days later.

In the city, everything was out of control. The houses, for the most part made of wood, were reduced to ashes. Its 275,000 inhabitants were gone and there were only about 6,000 left, mostly foreigners, criminals and the sick.

To count Rostopchin, the military governor of Moscow was in charge of the fire operation, and ordered that the churches also be burned down. The French found flammable detonators in different parts of the city.

Napoleon he sent three letters to Alexander I, who was in St. Petersburg, offering him an agreement, but always on his terms. The Tsar never answered them. Additionally, when he learned of the fires, he said they had illuminated his soul.

Bonaparte he allowed his troops to loot, steal and rape. Saint Basil’s Cathedral was used as a stable. Napoleon he had the gold cross dismantled to take it to Paris but was disappointed when he found that it was made of wood with a gold plating.

They say some of the fires were started by French soldiers themselves, in their quest to make cooking fires. The truth was that out of 9,000 buildings, around 6,500 were destroyed.

He spent his days locked up, leafing through books in a library. For a few nights, he played French plays by a troupe of actors who happened to be in town.

Before leaving, Bonaparte ordered the Kremlin to be blown up, but they could not. They only managed to bring down one of his towers.

It was a miscalculation to have been six weeks in a burning Moscow, abandoned, with nothing to eat and with winter on its way. The general Kutuzov he was astonished that his adversary had not suspected the trap into which he had fallen. On October 19, he ordered the withdrawal. On that day, the temperature was already four degrees below zero, which would drop to minus 30 degrees in December. On October 24, the Russians defeated them in Maloyarolavets.

And hell began.

His soldiers did not have winter clothes. Starving, sick with typhus, many with frozen limbs, subjected to continual guerrilla attacks, they lost discipline and everything became a man to itself. It was dangerous to fall asleep because you might not wake up.

Cross the frozen river Beresina it was a martyrdom. The Russians had destroyed the bridges and those built by the French, precarious, ended up giving way. At the end of December of the same year, the few thousand who had managed to survive arrived somehow in Königsberg, capital of East Prussia. Those who died were buried in various mass graves open at various places along the way.

If you are visiting Moscow, you can order the mille feuille dessert in a pastry shop. There it is called dessert Napoleon. This delicacy of puff pastry and pastry cream received this name in 1912, on the occasion of the centenary of the time when an emperor dreamed of being the master of the world.

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