Battle of Borodino (1812): The Bloodiest Day of Napoleon's Wars

The Battle of Borodino was fought on 7 September 1812 near the village of Borodino, about 110 kilometres west of Moscow, between Napoleon’s Grande Armée and the Russian army of Mikhail Kutuzov. With around 70,000–80,000 men killed or wounded in a single day, it was the bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars. The French captured the Russian positions, but the Russian army escaped destruction, and the battle opened the road to Moscow without winning Napoleon the war.

Background

Napoleon began the French invasion of Russia on 24 June 1812, hoping to destroy the Russian armies quickly. Instead, the Russians retreated deep into their own country. Under pressure from the army and public opinion to stop retreating, Tsar Alexander I appointed the veteran general Mikhail Kutuzov as commander-in-chief in August.

Kutuzov decided to make a stand on the road to Moscow. He chose a position near Borodino, where the Kolocha river and a series of ravines protected the right of his line, and his engineers built field fortifications in the centre and on the left.

On 5 September the French attacked and captured the Shevardino Redoubt, an advanced Russian position. Both armies then spent 6 September preparing for battle.

The armies

Napoleon had roughly 130,000–135,000 men and nearly 590 guns. The Russian army is usually estimated at about 120,000–130,000 regular troops and Cossacks, plus up to 30,000 poorly armed militia, with more than 600 guns. It was one of the greatest concentrations of artillery yet seen.

Kutuzov placed Barclay de Tolly’s First Army on the stronger right and centre and Bagration’s smaller Second Army on the more open left, where the ground offered fewer natural obstacles. Napoleon saw this weakness. Marshal Davout proposed a wide flanking march around the Russian left through the woods near Utitsa, but Napoleon rejected it as too risky and opted for a series of direct frontal assaults supported by massive artillery fire, with only Prince Józef Poniatowski’s Polish corps sent along the old Smolensk road to threaten the Russian flank.

What happened

The battle began around 6 a.m. on 7 September. On the French left, Eugène de Beauharnais’s troops took the village of Borodino. The main fighting, however, took place to the south, in the centre and on the Russian left.

There, Marshals Davout and Ney, supported by Murat’s cavalry, repeatedly attacked the Bagration flèches, a group of arrow-shaped earthworks held by General Pyotr Bagration’s army. The flèches changed hands several times in fierce close combat. Bagration was badly wounded in the leg and carried from the field, and the Russian left fell back after his troops began to waver. He died of his wound on 24 September.

The other key position was the Great Redoubt, also called the Raevsky Redoubt after the general whose corps defended it. It was attacked repeatedly through the morning. In the afternoon, after a heavy bombardment, French infantry and cuirassiers stormed it in a famous assault in which General Auguste de Caulaincourt was killed.

Elsewhere, Poniatowski’s Poles fought a separate battle around the village of Utitsa and a nearby hill against Russian troops under General Nikolay Tuchkov, who was mortally wounded. Around midday, Russian cavalry under Fyodor Uvarov and Cossacks under Matvei Platov rode around the French left flank. Their raid achieved little in itself, but it alarmed Napoleon and delayed the final assault on the Great Redoubt by about two hours, giving Kutuzov time to reinforce his centre.

By late afternoon the Russians had been pushed back about a kilometre, but their new line held. Napoleon’s marshals urged him to commit the Imperial Guard to finish the Russian army. He refused, apparently unwilling to risk his last intact reserve so far from France. Fighting died down at dusk.

Victory or defeat?

Both sides claimed success. Kutuzov’s first report to St Petersburg described the battle as a victory, and a thanksgiving service was held in the capital before news arrived that Moscow was to be abandoned. Napoleon’s bulletins also announced a triumph, and he had indeed captured the key positions.

Most historians describe Borodino as a tactical French victory that was strategically indecisive. Napoleon had failed to destroy the Russian army, which was his main purpose, while his own army, far from its bases, could not easily replace its losses in men and horses. Russian historians have traditionally emphasised that the army stood its ground and inflicted crippling casualties, which helped to make the later counter-offensive possible.

Key people

• Napoleon – who was reportedly unwell on the day and directed the battle from a distance.
• Mikhail Kutuzov (1745–1813) – Russian commander-in-chief, who reported the battle to the tsar as a success and was promoted to field marshal.
• Pyotr Bagration (1765–1812) – defender of the Russian left, whose death made him a national hero.
• Michel Ney – French marshal prominent in the attacks on the flèches, later made Prince of the Moskva after the French name for the battle.
• Nikolay Raevsky – Russian general whose corps defended the Great Redoubt.

By the numbers

Consequences

Kutuzov withdrew during the night and the following day. At a council of war at Fili on 13 September he decided to abandon Moscow rather than risk the army in another battle. Napoleon entered the city on 14 September, but fire destroyed much of it, and the tsar refused to negotiate. In October the French began the retreat that would destroy the Grande Armée.

Borodino thus gave Napoleon his objective but not victory. His army had lost tens of thousands of men, including dozens of generals, and the Russians could replace their losses far more easily. The French called the battle the Battle of the Moskva, after the nearby river.

Legacy

In Russian memory Borodino became a symbol of national sacrifice and endurance. Mikhail Lermontov’s poem Borodino (1837) and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace made it central to Russian literature. For the centenary in 1912 the painter Franz Roubaud created a huge panoramic painting of the battle, now displayed in Moscow. The battlefield, with its many monuments, including a memorial column on the Raevsky Redoubt and a French monument to the fallen of the Grande Armée erected in 1913, is a museum-reserve, and a large re-enactment is held there each year in early September.

The battle is also remembered in the wider history of the Napoleonic Wars as a sign of how bloody they had become, a scale of slaughter matched only at the Battle of Leipzig the following year.

Timeline

• 1812, 24 June: Grande Armée crosses the Niemen into Russia.
• 1812, 29 August: Kutuzov takes command of the Russian armies.
• 1812, 5 September: French capture the Shevardino Redoubt.
• 1812, 7 September: Battle of Borodino.
• 1812, 13 September: Council of Fili decides to abandon Moscow.
• 1812, 14 September: Napoleon enters Moscow.
• 1812, 24 September: Bagration dies of his wounds.

Why it matters

Borodino was the only great set-piece battle of the 1812 campaign and one of the deadliest days in European history before the First World War. By failing to destroy the Russian army there, Napoleon lost his best chance of ending the war on his terms, and the campaign moved towards catastrophe.