Battle of Borodino

West of Moscow, around the village of Borodino, Napoleon's Grande Armée and the Russian army of Mikhail Kutuzov fought the largest and bloodiest single-day battle of the Napoleonic Wars on 7 September 1812. Roughly a quarter of a million men took part, and tens of thousands fell on each side. The French took the Russian fieldworks and the road to Moscow, but the Russian army withdrew intact, and the campaign ended in disaster for Napoleon.

The French invasion of Russia began on 24 June 1812, when the Grande Armée crossed the Niemen. Heavily outnumbered, the Russian commander Barclay de Tolly retreated eastwards, avoiding a decisive battle. After the loss of Smolensk, Tsar Alexander I replaced him with Kutuzov, who judged that the army and the country would not accept further retreat without a fight. By then hunger and disease had reduced Napoleon's main force, which had entered Russia with 286,000 men, and the odds had narrowed considerably.

Kutuzov chose a position at Borodino that blocked both roads from Smolensk to Moscow. From 3 September his troops built earthworks, among them a large central battery known as the Raevsky redoubt and three arrow-shaped fieldworks on the left, the Bagration flèches. On 5 September the French stormed an advanced redoubt at Shevardino, at a cost of several thousand casualties on each side.

The battle opened at six in the morning with a French grand battery of 102 guns. Napoleon rejected Marshal Davout's proposal to outflank the weak Russian left and instead ordered frontal assaults on the flèches. They changed hands repeatedly in savage fighting amid dense smoke; the French attacked them seven times. Around 11 o'clock Prince Pyotr Bagration, leading counter-attacks, was hit in the leg by shell fragments, and the morale of his army faltered. By about 11.30 the French held the position.

Eugène de Beauharnais took the village of Borodino and attacked the great redoubt, which the Russians lost and then retook with the bayonet. Around midday a raid by Cossacks under Matvei Platov and cavalry under Fyodor Uvarov appeared behind the French left. It achieved little directly, but it delayed the next assault by about two hours, giving the Russians time to reinforce their battered centre. At 2 p.m. the French attacked the redoubt again. General Auguste de Caulaincourt was killed leading cuirassiers against it, but Saxon and Polish horsemen broke in from the rear, and the redoubt fell at about 3.30 p.m. On the southern flank, Polish troops under Józef Poniatowski fought for the village of Utitsa without decisive result.

With the Russians battered but holding a new line, Napoleon's generals urged him to commit the Imperial Guard, about 18,500 men. He refused, unwilling to risk his last reserve so far from France, and turned instead to a massive artillery bombardment. Historians have often criticised the decision. The Russian Guard stood in its exposed squares under fire from four to six in the evening, and on 8 September Kutuzov withdrew towards Moscow.

Figures remain disputed and were manipulated at the time and later. French losses are put at between 30,000 and 42,000 and Russian losses at between 40,000 and 53,000, with dozens of generals killed or wounded on both sides; Bagration died of his wounds on 24 September. Most historians describe the battle as a tactical French victory that was strategically indecisive, or a Pyrrhic one. After a council of war at Fili on 13 September, Kutuzov abandoned Moscow without another battle. Napoleon occupied a burned and deserted city, waited for a peace offer that never came, and then retreated through the Russian winter. Of the more than 600,000 soldiers who invaded, only 112,000 returned.

In Russia the battle became a symbol of national resistance, celebrated in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, Lermontov's poem Borodino and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. It is re-enacted every year on the first Sunday of September.

Our 1800 map shows the Russian Empire before Napoleon's campaigns, and our 1815 map the Europe that emerged after his defeat.