Battle of Maloyaroslavets, 1812: the fight that turned Napoleon back

Maloyaroslavets is a small town southwest of Moscow, where the road to Kaluga crosses the little Luzha river. In 1812 it had about 1,500 inhabitants and a few hundred mostly wooden houses. It saw one day of fighting that lasted some eighteen hours, and that day decided which road the Grande Armée would take out of Russia, and so much of what happened to it in the snow that followed.⁶

Background: leaving Moscow

Napoleon entered Moscow on 14 September 1812 and waited there in vain for the Tsar to make peace. On 19 October (7 October in the Russian calendar) his army began to leave the city, heading southwest. He meant to fall back on his base at Smolensk, but not by the road he had come by, which two armies had already stripped bare; he would go through Kaluga, where the Russians had gathered great stores of food, and through country the war had not yet touched.⁷

The Russian army had spent the weeks since Borodino in its camp at Tarutino, south of Moscow, while partisan detachments watched the French roads. When General Ivan Dorokhov reported that Napoleon's columns were moving toward Borovsk and the new Kaluga road, Kutuzov sent General Dmitry Dokhturov's 6th Corps to reach the crossing at Maloyaroslavets first, and in the evening of 23 October his main army followed.⁸ › Battle of Tarutino, 1812

Armies and commanders

Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, led the French advance with his IV Corps, much of it Italian: General Alexis Delzons's 13th Division, Broussier's 14th, Domenico Pino's Italian 15th, which had not yet fought in the campaign, and the Italian Royal Guard. Two divisions of Davout's corps came up in the evening.⁹

On the Russian side Dokhturov fought from dawn; General Nikolay Raevsky's 7th Corps came in during the afternoon, and more corps after it, while Kutuzov brought the rest of the army onto the heights south of the town. More than half the Russian infantry who fought in the streets, Vasilyev writes, were recruits and militiamen who had never been under fire.¹⁰

How many men fought depends on whom one reads. Ségur wrote that 18,000 French and Italians beat 50,000 Russians. The Russian historian Aleksey Vasilyev, working from the regimental reports, counts about 20,000 French and Italians against some 30,000 Russian infantry and gunners by the evening, with larger forces of both armies waiting close by.¹¹

The battle in phases

23 October: the empty town. Delzons's division reached Maloyaroslavets in the evening, took the crossing over the Luzha and found the town empty of troops. Two battalions went into the town while the rest of the division camped on the near bank.¹²

Before dawn on the 24th: Dokhturov strikes. Dokhturov's troops arrived in the dark and attacked at once, driving the two battalions out of the town and down to the river. Russian guns on the heights began to sweep the low ground where Delzons's men stood.¹³

Morning: Delzons falls. Eugène hurried up and ordered an attack. Delzons led his brigade up the ravine into the town and was shot dead; his brother, who served as his aide-de-camp, ran to lift the body and was mortally wounded beside him. The town was taken and lost again.¹⁴

The French kept one anchor even when the streets were lost. Ségur tells of grenadiers who loopholed the walls of a church beside the main road and fired into the flank of every Russian column that passed; Vasilyev describes how the French held on to the monastery and the old earthworks of the Gorodishche each time the town itself fell.¹⁵

Midday to evening: the burning town. Through the day both sides fed fresh troops into the streets. Pino's Italians took the town, Raevsky's regiments threw them out, the Italian Guard under Colonel Peraldi charged back in, and the wooden houses burned around them. Ségur describes men fighting hand to hand among the flames until they fell together into the fire. The sources disagree on when the town was finally won: Rickard has the Russians giving it up soon after midday, while Vasilyev, working from the Russian reports, has the last Russian troops driven out only after dark, when two of Davout's divisions had come up. The fighting lasted some eighteen hours in all.¹⁶

Fire did as much damage as the guns. Shells set the wooden houses alight, and both Ségur and Vasilyev describe wounded men burned where they fell.¹⁷

Where Napoleon was during all this is itself disputed. Vasilyev places him on a hill north of the river by eleven in the morning, watching the fight through a telescope; Ségur writes that he and Davout reached the field only at dark, when the firing was dying down.¹⁸

No one agrees how often Maloyaroslavets changed hands. Kutuzov reported to the Tsar that the town had been taken by his troops eight times and given up as often, and the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia also says eight; Rickard writes at least seven and possibly twelve times, and Ségur counts five French assaults on the heights.¹⁹

Turning point: the road to Kaluga

The French held the ruins, but Kutuzov held the road. During the evening the Russian army formed a half circle south of the town, across every road leading south and southwest, and the next night fell back a little farther to a strong position on the heights. Napoleon was left looking at a blocked road.²⁰

On the morning of 25 October Napoleon rode out to look at the Russian position. Cossacks of Platov's corps swept across the road behind the French advance guard and very nearly took him prisoner: one came within about twenty yards by Rickard's account, forty paces by Ségur's.²¹

That day Napoleon held a council of war with his marshals in a peasant's hut at Gorodnya. He could force his way south past Kutuzov, swing west through Medyn, or turn north and go back past Borodino to Smolensk along the road he had come by. He chose the last.²² › Napoleon Bonaparte

Aftermath: the losses

The cost was heavy for so small a field. Eugène reported about 3,500 men lost, including 400 killed, and the Italian officer Laugier more than 4,000; Ségur gives seven generals and 4,000 Italians killed or wounded, Rickard 4,000 to 6,000 casualties, and Vasilyev, reasoning from the officers lost, estimates the true French and Italian loss at up to 7,000.²³

Russian figures vary just as much. Kutuzov reported 3,000 men; the army's own loss returns, as Sergey Shvedov and Vasilyev show, give 6,665 to 6,887. The Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia sums it up as more than 5,000 on each side. Almost the whole town burned down.²⁴

Legacy and memory

Both sides claimed the day. The French and Italians held the field and counted it their victory, and Ségur, writing years later, still called it one. Russian historians call it a strategic victory for Kutuzov: the Grande Armée never reached Kaluga and its stores.²⁵

The road north ran through land that two armies had already stripped of food. The Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia says that the turn toward Vyazma, instead of the untouched country around Kaluga, hastened the destruction of Napoleon's army; on the way the army marched back across the battlefield of Borodino, which Rickard and Ségur both describe as a terrible blow to the army's spirit. What had begun as a planned withdrawal became the retreat from Moscow.²⁶

Maloyaroslavets has not forgotten. Since the 1990s historians have gathered in the town every year for conferences on the war of 1812, and the papers of those meetings, by Vasilyev, Shvedov and others, go back to the Russian army's own reports and returns.²⁷ › The Greatest Napoleonic Battles