On June 24, 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte launched the most audacious campaign of his career. With the most enormous army ever assembled in Europe, he made the fateful decision to invade Russia. With an army of over 600,000 soldiers, the thought of suffering defeat was a reality far from the French emperor’s mind.
The French were in high spirits, but as the weeks dragged on, the Russians refused to give the French battle. Retreating farther into the hinterland, the Russians avoided large, pitched battles, and instead concentrated on whittling down the enemy by whatever means necessary.
Battle, however, could not be avoided forever, and at Borodino, the Russians gave the French what they were looking for. The outcome was an extremely bloody affair.
The Invasion of Russia
The invasion of Russia was an incredibly audacious plan for the time. Napoleon’s Grande Armée was the biggest Europe had ever seen, and it was reasonable to assume that such a huge army would have few difficulties in forcing the Russian Empire to capitulate.
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Hoping to outmaneuver the Russians, the Grande Armée struggled in its attempt to force a conclusive battle. The Russians knew their weaknesses and slowly withdrew their forces to the interior, using scorched earth tactics as they pulled back. By doing so, Napoleon was forced to pursue the Russians deeper into hostile territory while logistics and supply lines stretched to breaking point. The Grande Armée began to feel the effects of lack of food and desperately searched for the victory it needed in order to avoid a disaster.
The Russians, however, could not run forever. Public opinion and morale were important. The armies needed to prove that they were actually willing to fight a pitched battle. The armies of Mikhail Barclay de Tolly and Prince Pyotr Bagration united at Smolensk.
From August 16 to 18, the Russians fought at Smolensk. The French gained a victory, but the casualties were high, and it was not enough to gain strategic control. For the Russians, the continued retreat and lack of any victory had a dire effect on morale, especially as the French had razed Smolensk and left little more than smoldering cinders.
The Russian retreat was well strategized, and Napoleon maneuvered to try and trap the Russian armies, but this proved a difficult task. After the Battle of Smolensk, Barclay de Tolly left a rearguard at Valutino to hamper the French advance. The French won the battle, but the action resulted in the main elements of the Russian army being able to escape, with the French suffering casualties they could ill afford. Napoleon was furious.
Tsar Alexander I realized that scorched earth had been an effective strategy in whittling down the French army, but the army still needed to present a victory to the Russian people.
Although his efforts had been monumental in setting the tone of the invasion and causing great casualties among the French, Barclay de Tolly had become unpopular with the Russian people as a result of his scorched earth policy. He was relieved of overall command and replaced with Mikhail Kutuzov, a man who was intent on giving a major fight.
Preparations
Kutuzov struck defensive positions near the village of Borodino, 75 miles west of Moscow. Realizing his left flank was exposed, he pulled his defensive line back but left troops to garrison the forward defenses at the village of Shevardino, where a redoubt had been built.
From this position, the troops at Shevardino could slow the French advance and relay French paths of attack back to Kutuzov in the rear, who could adjust his forces accordingly. Despite the preparations, the Russian left flank was still in danger.
The French launched a major attack on the redoubt on September 5, and bloody fighting ensued. Twenty thousand Russian defenders attempted to defend their position against 36,000 French who had seized an early opportunity to threaten the Russian left flank.
After a brutal battle, Shevardino was taken. The French suffered 4,000 casualties, and the Russians suffered 6,000.
A Day of Carnage: The Morning of September 7, 1812
With the Russian left flank exposed, the French saw their opportunity and pressed the attack. Despite holding the high ground, Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz argues that this high ground was negligible and provided little advantage for the Russians stationed there.
At his command, Napoleon had 130,000 soldiers with whom to attack the Russian defenders, who numbered around 120,000.
The Battle of Borodino began at dawn on September 7, 1812. A barrage from 102 French cannon sparked the beginning, followed by an assault on the village of Borodino by Prince Eugène de Beauharnais. The Russians fell back with heavy losses.
De Beauharnais continued through the village to the Great Redoubt on the heights around Gorki but was driven back by determined Russian resistance.
As this was happening, the center-left of the Russian line was beginning to feel the weight of 22,000 French soldiers under the command of Marshal Davout. Savage fighting broke out as the troops clashed in hand-to-hand fighting. Both sides took severe losses, and the Russians were forced to fall back, only to retake their positions after a successful counterattack. The defensive flèches that had been constructed here were critical to Russian success.
This section of the battlefield went back and forth, and the fighting was extremely vicious. The slaughter which occurred here was undoubtedly one of the bloodiest moments of the Napoleonic Wars.
Holding the line was a desperate endeavor. Bagration, in charge of the center, was able to draw on reinforcements from both left and right wings. This opened a weak point on the left flank, which the French attempted to exploit. Here, the village of Utitsa was the focal point, and 10,000 Polish troops under the command of Prince Józef Poniatowski were able to push the Russian defenders under the command of General Nikolai Tuchkov. Tuchkov led a successful counterattack but was killed in the process. Fighting for Utitsa continued throughout the day.
At the flèches in the center, a Russian cavalry charge was met by French cavalry charges under Joachim Murat and Michel Ney. To the north, De Beauharnais launched an attack on the Great Redoubt and captured it for a brief period before being driven back by a Russian counterattack. Russian artillery commander, General Kutaisov, was killed in the fighting, and lacking command, the effectiveness of the Russian cannon was tempered for the rest of the battle.
Meanwhile, the battle for the center went back and forth, and at around 10 am, Bagration was mortally wounded. With their commander out of action, Russian troops fell back to the town of Semenovskaya to the east, and the French took the Russian defenses in the center.
On the Russian right flank, all seemed quiet, and contingents were sent south to bolster the center, which had now formed defensive lines at Semenovskaya. The French brought cannon forward and pounded the Russian positions, but the Russians stood firm.
The Afternoon
On the Russian right, 8,000 Cossacks, under the command of generals Platov and Uvarov, swung around the Russian right flank and attacked the French left flank at Borodino. The French 3rd Cavalry Corps, under the command of Emmanuel de Grouchy, had to be pulled back from the center to drive the Russians off. Although successful, it delayed the next French attack on the center by two hours.
At around 3 p.m., the French assault on the Great Redoubt finally came. The French pushed through and took the redoubt, but a desperate cavalry charge from the Russians stopped their advance.
The French still had 20,000 troops of the Imperial Guard and another 10,000 fresh soldiers waiting for an order to advance, but Napoleon did not wish to commit these forces. He wanted fresh troops available in case there was another battle. His concession was to send more cannons forward to aid in the attempt to break the Russian center.
By the afternoon, French cannons were devastating the Russian defensive lines, but successive waves of French attacks failed to break the Russians. They still held their ground. Russian cannons were also active and wrought havoc on the French lines, which were bolstered by cavalry as there was a lack of infantry to fill the gaps. These cavalry elements made perfect targets.
The fighting continued for the next few hours, both sides utterly exhausted. Viewing the situation overall and the French failure to break the Russian line, Kutuzov sent word to the tsar that the battle had been won. However, upon reports of the massive casualties, Kutuzov ordered the army to withdraw. He realized that if the fighting continued, his army would likely be destroyed, and Moscow would be taken anyway.
In a conversation between Napoleon’s generals, Marshal Ney and Murat, Ney expressed profound surprise when he was informed that the Russians had withdrawn. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “How can that be after such a slaughter?”
Thus, Napoleon’s frontal assault in favor of flanking maneuvers allowed the Russians to withdraw in good order. What was a narrow victory for Napoleon has thus been challenged as a draw or even a Russian victory. The latter can certainly be supported by the overall strategic situation.
Casualties
Napoleon had won, but the carnage was horrendous. Accounts of losses suggest the French lost between 28,000 and 35,000 killed or wounded, while the Russians had lost between 40,000 and 53,000.
The Battle of Borodino on September 7, 1812, was the single bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars and remained the bloodiest day in European history until the First Battle of the Marne in 1914.
Outcome
It is certainly true that the Battle of Borodino was a massive battle. It involved a total of around 260,000 troops, of which at least 68,000 were killed or wounded. The losses were staggering on both sides and while it cannot be denied that the Russians lost more in the actual battle, the losses on a strategic level were disastrous for the French.
The Russian losses could be replaced. Far from home, the French could ill afford any more losses to an army already struggling to stay alive even outside combat. The gates to Moscow were open, giving the Grande Armée a brief morale boost. They and Napoleon fully expected Tsar Alexander I to surrender once Moscow was taken. This assumption proved to be a fatal error.
Moscow was empty and on fire. The Russians had fled the great city and set it ablaze rather than give Napoleon the satisfaction of any meaningful victory. The Grande Armée billeted in the city while Napoleon waited for the tsar to send word of a surrender.
For his efforts, Napoleon received nothing but silence. For one month, he sat and waited, but from the tsar, there was no word at all. Meanwhile, the notorious Russian winter was setting in.
With nothing left to do but retreat, the remnants of the Grande Armée began a most brutal retreat. Frozen by the bitter cold, starved by the lack of supplies, and harried at every turn by Cossacks and partisans, the French suffered monstrous casualties. At the front of the army were few soldiers in fighting order, while for miles behind, stragglers did what they could to survive.
In a few short months, the greatest army ever assembled in Europe was reduced to an embarrassing mess. Less than a sixth of Napoleon’s forces that entered Russia managed to leave and most of these survivors were reduced to beggars wearing rags, fighting for meager scraps of food.
Napoleon was completely defeated. His grandest campaign was, in no uncertain terms, a total disaster. The Battle of Borodino represents a massive moment that turned Napoleon’s fortunes into a string of defeats that would see the great powers of Europe throw off the yoke of French control and join together to put a final end to Napoleon’s empire.
Later in exile, Napoleon wrote of the Battle of Borodino: “The Frenchmen showed themselves deserving a victory, and the Russians merited the right to be invincible.”
Napoleon spent his career fighting battles in which his enemies made predictable decisions based on the conventions of war at the time. However, Russia was a completely different war from what Napoleon was used to. The result was a stunning blow to the French Empire and a nail in the coffin of Napoleon’s imperial plans.
Although Borodino was a close-run battle on the ground, its strategic implications made it a massive victory for the Russians. They continued to grind down the French forces, putting a sobering end to Napoleon’s imperial designs.
