Moscow Burns: Napoleon's Army Loses Its Shelter

The fire that consumed Moscow burned for three days before dying down on September 18, 1812, leaving Napoleon in possession of a charred skeleton where Russia’s ancient capital had stood. More than three-quarters of the city’s buildings were destroyed, including palaces, churches, hospitals, and the vast wooden neighborhoods where ordinary Muscovites lived. The Grande Armee, which had marched 600 miles to seize Moscow as a bargaining chip, found itself holding a ruin that offered neither shelter nor sustenance for the approaching winter. The fires began within hours of the French entry on September 14, and their origin remains a matter of debate. Napoleon blamed Russian incendiaries, and considerable evidence supports this: Moscow’s governor, Count Rostopchin, had ordered the evacuation of fire-fighting equipment, the opening of prisons, and the distribution of combustible materials before the French arrived. Russian patriotic tradition celebrates the burning as a deliberate sacrifice, though Rostopchin himself gave contradictory accounts over the years. French soldiers also contributed through looting and carelessness, and some fires may have started accidentally in a largely wooden city that had lost its firefighting capacity. Napoleon watched the conflagration from the Kremlin before being forced to evacuate to the Petrovsky Palace on the city’s outskirts when flames encircled the fortress. His officers described streets turned into tunnels of fire, with superheated winds creating tornado-like vortices that hurled burning debris across the city. When the fires finally subsided, an estimated 6,500 of Moscow’s 9,000 buildings had been reduced to ash. The destruction denied Napoleon everything he had expected from his conquest. He had anticipated wintering his army in the city, using Moscow’s food stores, hospitals, and warehouses to resupply his exhausted troops, and negotiating from a position of strength. Instead, his soldiers starved and froze in the ruins while Tsar Alexander ignored every peace overture. After five weeks of waiting, Napoleon ordered the retreat on October 19. The march back through the Russian winter killed the vast majority of his remaining soldiers and marked the beginning of the end for his empire.