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After Borodino: How Napoleon Won the Battle and Lost the War
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Napoleon's Grande Armée crushed Russia's forces at Borodino and marched into Moscow — yet somehow lost everything. This episode charts the fatal decisions that turned the greatest military machine in history to ash.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What does it take to destroy the greatest army in the world? Not defeat it on a battlefield.
To understand what was lost in Russia, you have to understand what was there before it. The Grande Armée that crossed into Russian territory in June of eighteen twelve wasn't just large.
The invasion didn't happen in a vacuum. By eighteen twelve, the relationship between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander had collapsed.
The Grande Armée crossed the Niemen River on June twenty-fourth, eighteen twelve. It was a massive, meticulously organized operation.
The battle Napoleon had been waiting for finally came on September seventh, at a village called Borodino, roughly seventy miles west of Moscow. Kutuzov, who had replaced Barclay de Tolly in command, had chosen a strong defensive position on high ground.
Napoleon entered Moscow on September fourteenth. He rode expecting the city's governor or a delegation of nobles to meet him with keys and terms.
The retreat from Moscow is one of the defining catastrophes of military history, not because of a single battle, but because of what sustained, unrelenting conditions do to men over hundreds of miles. The army initially moved south, hoping to find an unravaged supply route.
The logistics failure was real. The supply system couldn't sustain an army of that size across distances that long, and Napoleon had not properly solved that problem before departing.
Napoleon left the army in December and raced back to Paris in secret. The reason was partly political: a coup attempt by General Malet had briefly convinced parts of the Paris government that Napoleon was dead.
There's a detail worth sitting with before we move on. Napoleon reportedly said, years later on Saint Helena, that the Russian campaign was the greatest mistake of his life.
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