Introduction
Napoleon Bonaparte’s retreat from Moscow in 1812 is one of the epic tales of history, and a generous one. It has given music Tchaikovsky’s unforgettable Overture, it has given rhetoric that stern officer ‘General Winter’, and it has given us all an object lesson in the deserts of excessive political ambition.
FROM the days of Peter the Great, Russia’s Emperors looked admiringly towards the political and cultural world of Western Europe, and Tsar Alexander I was no exception. Even the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, in which Russian and Austrian forces were overwhelmingly defeated by Napoleon Bonaparte, only made Alexander admire the French Emperor the more; and on July 7th, 1807, master and disciple met aboard a raft moored in the River Nemen near Sovetsk, to share out Europe between them.*
The understanding did not last. Alexander hesitated to place the economic sanctions on Britain demanded by Napoleon; and to remind the Tsar of his loyalties, Napoleon led the Grand Army towards Russia in June 1812. At first it seemed a masterstroke. The Russians retreated before him as far as Smolensk,* offering no resistance, though the French found the city a burnt-out shell. The two armies clashed at Borodino, west of Moscow, on September 7th,* but after a day of savage bloodshed the Russians retreated again.
This was the Treaty of Tilsit, now Sovetsk in Kaliningrad by the Lithuanian border. All dates in this account are New Style. The terms of the treaty were humiliating in the eyes of Alexander’s nobles; but Alexander and Napoleon even discussed a marriage between the French Emperor and Alexander’s sister Catherine, plans the dowager Empress, Maria Feodorovna (Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg), firmly blocked.
Smolensk lies roughly a hundred miles southwest of Moscow.
The battle took place atBorodino, some seventy miles west of Moscow. The battle did not go as well for the French as Napoleon’s admirers would have wished; indeed, throughout the campaign the French Emperor was not his usual ruthless self. His admirers regarded this as sufficient explanation for France’s failure, whereas others, such as Tolstoy, reminded them that there were in fact one or two other people involved (e.g. the Russians) and that they might have played some small part in frustrating his genius. See The Sneeze of History.
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