Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

Another plan, to march on Alexander’s court nearly four hundred miles away in St Petersburg itself, was proposed, but Berthier and Bessières quickly convinced Napoleon on logistical grounds ‘that he had neither time, provisions, roads, nor a single requisite for so extensive an expedition’.32 Instead they discussed marching south nearly 100 miles to Kaluga and Tula, the granary and arsenal of Russia respectively, or retreating to Smolensk. Napoleon eventually chose what turned out to be the worst possible option: to return to the Kremlin, which had survived the fire, on September 18 to wait to see whether Alexander would agree to end the war. ‘I ought not to have stayed in Moscow more than two weeks at the utmost,’ Napoleon said later, ‘but I was deceived from day to day.’33 This was untrue. Alexander didn’t deceive Napoleon into thinking he was interested in peace; he simply refused to reply either positively or negatively. Nor was Napoleon self-deceived; the burning of Moscow confirmed him in his belief that there was no hope of peace, even though he would probably have accepted as little as Russia’s return to the Continental System as the price.34 The reason he stayed in Moscow for so long was that he thought he had plenty of time before he needed to get his army back to winter quarters in Smolensk, and he preferred to live off the enemy’s resources. On September 18, Napoleon distributed 50,000 plundered rubles to Muscovites who had lost their houses and he visited an o...