Before retreating from Moscow, Napoleon’s marshal Mortier ordered that the Kremlin and Saint Basil’s Cathedral be destroyed on October 23, 1812.
During his last exile on Saint Helena Napoleon remarked that he would have been better off dying immediately after entering Moscow. There was a grain of truth in those words, for there was little sense in many of his subsequent actions. Let’s take his order to blow up the Moscow Kremlin, for example. It’s understandable that Napoleon felt no piety towards the Russian culture – it would suffice to recall the French stables in the Kremlin’s Assumption Cathedral or a bedroom of Marshal D’Avout in the Cathedral of Chudov Monastery. Napoleon himself often slept in the altars of Russian churches. But as an ambitious politician, Napoleon could not but realize that the destruction of Moscow’s sanctuaries would smack down his reputation of a “civilized” conqueror in Europe.
This plan is known to have failed – all memoirists mention the fact that a heavy rain put out many fuses on October 23 and Russian guerillas did not slumber either. In addition, the French apparently undervalued the quality of the masonry laid by old Moscow craftsmen – the charge under the Belfry of Ivan the Great went off but caused almost no harm, save for a few cracks in its rather shallow foundation. For all that, its “younger” neighbors – the bell-tower and Philaret’s annex blew up so that Joseph Bove had to restore them actually from scratch. Peter’s Arsenal was also seriously damaged.
As the saying goes in Russia, one should not look for a plot where there are elementary slovenliness and perfect mess. Alas, these are the most accurate definitions of what was going on in the French Army and in the heads of its commanders in late October of 1812. What did they expect? Boyars with keys, the end of war, rich booty and warm apartments, but got the cindered city with its remaining dwellers instead.
The army discipline was gone and fights between comrades-in-arms in the streets for some junk were quite frequent. News from the war fields was not very inspiring either: the Russian Army, which the French lost sight of for almost a fortnight (!) after they occupied Moscow, was gaining strength and arms on the quiet at Tarutinsky Camp. This did not hinder Napoleon from sending his next military report to Paris, which said, among other things, that he had seized great riches in Moscow and that the enemy beaten to sticks was rapidly retreating to the banks of Volga.
It’s quite symptomatic that even in that situation Napoleon did not have the guts to use his ultimate argument: the abolition of serfdom. Probably the class solidarity with his “friend Alexander” outweighed all other considerations. Maybe he was also afraid of a possible mess which even ten emperors would not be able to clear up.
So most likely the nerves of the impulsive and hot-tempered Corsican simply snapped at that point…
Georgiy Osipov
