Fire of Moscow (1812)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Fire of Moscow shocked Napoleon Bonaparte into an uncharacteristic silence. A witness recorded him as remaining transfixed while watching the blaze from the Kremlin, saying: "What a terrible sight! And they did this themselves! So many palaces! What an incredible solution! What kind of people! These are Scythians!" The flames he watched were visible 215 km away.

  Almost all of the Russian capital was destroyed in September 1812. Whether the destruction was deliberate policy or the chaos of war remains a contested question. What is certain is that it exposed a fatal flaw in Napoleon's strategy. He believed capturing a capital would force a peace. Not one negotiator ever arrived from Saint Petersburg.

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• 2. The Abandoned City

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  At the beginning of 1812, a contemporary police survey put Moscow's population at around 270,184 people. When the French army arrived in September, the city was nearly empty. Somewhere in the range of 6,200-10,000 civilians had chosen to remain, along with 10,000-15,000 Russian soldiers too sick or wounded to travel.

  On the 13th of September, the Russian military council met at Fili and agreed to abandon Moscow without a fight. Kutuzov organized the withdrawal, keeping a low profile and using side streets. General Miloradovich directed the civilian evacuation. The troops began departing at two o'clock in the morning and kept moving until two in the afternoon the following day.

  On the 14th of September, the last Russian soldiers crossed the Moskva River near Sparrow Hills. They marched southeast toward Ryazan, with masses of civilians alongside them. Murat's cavalry was the first French force to ride into the city, taking the Kremlin that afternoon. That evening, the first fires broke out.

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• 3. The Question of Blame

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  Before leaving Moscow, Count Rostopchin, the city's governor-general, supposedly gave orders to the head of police and to released convicts. They were instructed to set fire to the Kremlin and major public buildings, including churches and monasteries.

  Rostopchin's own accounts never settled the question. He sometimes appeared to boast about sacrificing Moscow for Russia's greater good. At other times he denied direct responsibility, portraying the destruction as the chaotic consequence of French occupation. Germaine de Stael, who had left Moscow several weeks before Napoleon arrived, later corresponded with Kutuzov about the events. She reported that Rostopchin had ordered his own mansions burned so that no Frenchman could lodge in them.

  A captured Moscow police officer, found trying to set the Kremlin ablaze while Napoleon was staying there, told a starker story. Brought before Napoleon, the officer admitted that he and others had been ordered to set the city on fire. Napoleon had him bayoneted by his guardsmen on the spot.

  Tolstoy took a different view in War and Peace. He held that the fire was neither ordered by the Russians nor caused deliberately by the French. Any large deserted city, placed in the hands of soldiers who cook fires, smoke pipes, and burn possessions in the streets, would inevitably burn. Most historians, however, trace the initial fires to Russia's scorched-earth strategy.

  On the 5th of October, Robert Wilson was present when Rostopchin set fire to his own estate near Tarutino.

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• 4. A Wooden City Burns

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  Larrey, the surgeon attached to the French army, reported that the catastrophe began as many small fires spreading from the northeast. These fused into a single massive blaze. Most structures in Moscow were built of wood, with the exception of the German Quarter. Rostopchin had ordered the fire brigade's equipment removed or destroyed before the French arrived, leaving no means to contain the spreading flames.

  On the 15th of September, the wind picked up and the fires multiplied rapidly. Napoleon arrived at the Kremlin that day. Six or seven thousand little shops caught fire. By four in the morning of the 16th, the firestorm had grown close enough to threaten the Kremlin itself.

  Sergeant Adrien Bourgogne recorded what happened to those caught starting fires: "Orders had been given to shoot everyone found setting fire to houses. This order was executed at once. A little open space next to the Place du Gouvernement was called by us the Place des Pendus, as here a number of incendiaries were shot and hung on the trees."

  Napoleon relocated that afternoon to the Petrovsky Palace, a suburban residence on the road to Saint Petersburg. The flames reached the Kremlin's arsenal, though French guardsmen managed to extinguish them. By the 18th of September, the fire had consumed three quarters of the city. When rain began to fall, Napoleon returned to the Kremlin. The fires finally subsided on the 21st of September, but Tsar Alexander I had still sent no reply.

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• 5. Napoleon's Gamble

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  On the 20th of September, Napoleon sent a peace proposal to Tsar Alexander I in Saint Petersburg and heard nothing back. Napoleon had counted on the loss of Moscow to force a negotiation. Russia's government continued functioning from Saint Petersburg and refused to yield.

  On the 5th of October, Napoleon dispatched his ambassador Jacques Lauriston to meet Kutuzov at his headquarters near Tarutino. Kutuzov agreed to a meeting, despite orders from the Tsar to refuse. Nothing came of the conversation.

  The plan to advance on Saint Petersburg was abandoned on the 4th of October. Forage was gone, and horses were dying on the spot. Cossacks and armed peasants were killing isolated French soldiers throughout the surrounding countryside. On the 18th of October, Murat's camp in a forest near Winkovo was surprised at dawn by a force under Bennigsen. Murat lost 12 guns, 3,000 men, and 20 baggage carts in a single morning.

  On the 19th of October, after 36 days in Moscow, around 108,000 French troops left the city at seven in the morning. Napoleon had ordered Marshal Mortier to blow up the Kremlin before departing. Mortier ran out of time and managed only a partial explosion. Heading southwest, Napoleon was stopped at Maloyaroslavets on the 24th and forced to turn north on the 26th.

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• 6. The Ruins

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  Before September 1812, Moscow contained approximately 4,000 stone structures and 8,000 wooden houses. After the fire, only around 200 stone buildings and some 500 wooden houses remained standing. Of the city's roughly 1,600 churches, approximately half survived total destruction, though nearly every one was damaged to some extent.

  Napoleon organized a systematic sweep for surviving church silver, which was added to his mobile war chest. Many churches had been partially preserved by their own value to looters. The precious metals in altar implements had drawn thieves before the flames could consume the buildings entirely.

  Moscow's churches were turned into stables and latrines, according to Russian sources. Priests who refused to surrender sacred objects were murdered, and ancient icons were burned for heat. Monasteries were destroyed and architectural monuments blown up. Napoleon ensured, meanwhile, that food was delivered to every Russian civilian still in the city, regardless of sex or age.

  General Marcellin Marbot, a French officer, later challenged the idea that the fire had been the campaign's fatal blow. He argued that enough houses, palaces, churches, and barracks survived to house the entire French army for a full month. The French army left with Napoleon's war chest filled with church silver. Behind it lay a city whose rebuilding would not begin for another two years.

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• 7. After Moscow

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  The Kingdom of Prussia watched as the Grande Armee retreated from Russia in ruins. Prussia recognized a new vulnerability in France and began turning decisively against Napoleon. Other powers followed the same path, eventually helping to form the coalition that would defeat him.

  Kutuzov had designed a campaign that struck Napoleon at his most vulnerable point: military logistics. Scorched earth denied shelter and supplies. This was the kind of war without major battles that eroded French strength from within. No decisive engagement was necessary; the sustained pressure on French supply lines achieved what a single battle could not.

  Only a little more than a year after the French army left Moscow, Russian troops entered Paris.

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• 8. Fire in Memory

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  Leo Tolstoy placed the fire and the occupation at the heart of Book XI of War and Peace. He used them to challenge the great man theory of history. That theory holds that events can be explained by the actions of a single king or commander. Tolstoy used the example of Kutuzov giving the order to abandon Moscow to show how difficult it was to pin events to a single decision-maker.

  Louise Fusil had been living in Russia for six years at the time of the fire. The French actress described the experience in her memoir, including her account of the subsequent retreat.

  The 1943 Russian film Kutuzov, produced with English subtitles for international viewers, depicted the events of September 1812. The most ambitious cinematic treatment came from the 1965-1967 Soviet adaptation of War and Peace. The crew planned the fire sequences for ten months and shot them using six ground cameras while also filming from helicopters. The fire appeared again in the 1955 French film Napoleon and in the 2023 film Napoleon.

  The rebuilding of Moscow began in 1814 under military governor Alexander Tormasov, who served until 1819. Dmitry Golitsyn continued the reconstruction through approximately 1840. That trajectory meant Moscow took nearly three decades to rebuild after seven days of fire in September 1812.

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