Battle of Tarutino, 1812: the attack that sent Napoleon out of Moscow

Tarutino was not a big battle, but it came at the turning point of the 1812 campaign. Since mid-September Napoleon had sat in Moscow waiting for the Tsar to make peace, while the Russian army rested and grew stronger southwest of the city. On 18 October that army struck. Within a day the Grande Armée was on the road out of Moscow.²

Moscow and the camp at Tarutino

Napoleon entered Moscow on 14 September, Ségur records, and waited there for Alexander I to answer his offers of peace. The Tsar never answered. Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov kept up friendly appearances with the French while he gathered recruits, and moved his army to Tarutino, on the Kaluga road southwest of the city. There it stood between Moscow and Kaluga, covering what Kutuzov, in his report to the Tsar on the loss of Moscow, called "the fertile provinces of the south".³ › Napoleon Bonaparte

Facing it was Marshal Joachim Murat with the French vanguard: cavalry corps and Prince Józef Poniatowski's V Corps, the Polish corps of the Grande Armée. Bogdanovich puts it at no more than 20,000 men, up to 8,000 of them cavalry, with 187 guns, camped on both banks of the Chernishnya river near Vinkovo, some sixty versts from Moscow. Ségur writes that an armistice proposed by Kutuzov held at the outposts until a Cossack fired at Murat and Murat declared it at an end. According to Ségur and Bogdanovich, Murat himself warned Napoleon that his position was dangerous; Ségur writes that the wooded country on his left lay open to an attack on his flank and rear.⁴

The plan

According to Bogdanovich, the plan was drawn up by Kutuzov's quartermaster general, Colonel Karl Toll, after he had reconnoitered the woods on the French left, and Kutuzov agreed to it only after long hesitation. General Levin von Bennigsen was given command of the troops that were to turn the French position, the main forces under Kutuzov himself were to attack in front, and the partisan detachments of Dorokhov and Figner were to march on Voronovo, in the French rear. It depended on the columns arriving together. They did not: Bogdanovich writes that the 2nd Infantry Corps took about twelve hours to cover less than 15 versts in the night and reached the edge of the woods only at seven in the morning.⁵

18 October: surprise at Teterinka

The battle began at about seven in the morning, when Cossacks under General Orlov-Denisov, fearing discovery, charged out of the woods near Teterinka. Bogdanovich writes that they fell on Sebastiani's bivouacs, surprised the cuirassier division, threw three of its regiments back and took 38 guns, but then began to plunder the French baggage instead of pursuing, which gave the cuirassiers time to recover. Ségur writes that Russian troops already held the high road in Murat's rear, his only line of retreat.⁶

The French did not panic. Ségur writes that Poniatowski made a glorious resistance on the right, and that Murat and his carabiniers, "by supernatural exertions", checked General Karl Baggovut's attack on the French left. Baggovut himself, Bogdanovich writes, was killed by one of the first shots. Murat gathered his troops at Spas-Kuplya and fell back to Voronovo. On the left wing, where Kutuzov was, the troops were ordered to halt at the Chernishnya, and the field marshal refused Miloradovich's and Yermolov's pleas to let them attack.⁷

A victory, or a missed chance?

The sources disagree on losses. Bogdanovich warns that nothing reliable can be said, but gives the figures found in most accounts: 500 to 1,000 French killed and wounded and 1,500 taken prisoner, with a standard, 38 guns and 40 ammunition wagons taken; Generals Déry and Fischer were among the dead. The Russian loss, by a return signed by Colonel Kikin, came to up to 1,200 men. Ségur, on the French side, records the first report that reached Napoleon in Moscow: twelve guns, twenty ammunition wagons and thirty train wagons taken, two generals killed and three or four thousand men lost.⁸

The plan had failed. Bogdanovich writes that the Russian generals, Konovnitsyn and Toll above all, were very dissatisfied, believing that the whole French vanguard could have been destroyed, although the battle had a very favorable effect on the Russian troops. Ségur, for his part, concedes that "the victory in short" was the Russians'. The quarrel began at once. Bennigsen suspected Kutuzov of holding back the left wing on purpose to rob him of a decisive success. According to Bogdanovich, when the field marshal congratulated him on the victory he received it coldly and did not even dismount, pleading a contusion, and his report began by claiming the honor of having started, continued and finished the battle.⁹

Why Tarutino mattered

Whatever the count, the effect was clear. Napoleon was already preparing to leave Moscow, Bogdanovich writes, and Ségur describes how at the news of Tarutino orders burst from him and the army was on the move before nightfall. Napoleon himself left Moscow before daylight on 19 October; Ségur counts a hundred thousand combatants, in a column of 140,000 men, and upwards of 550 guns. Napoleon meant to march south on Kaluga, by Bogdanovich's account, and then either winter there or retreat through country not yet laid waste, but after a hard-fought battle at Maloyaroslavets on 24 October he turned back to the devastated road he had come by.¹⁰ › Battle of Maloyaroslavets, 1812

Kutuzov celebrated the battle as a decisive victory, and Alexander I rewarded him with a gold sword set with diamonds and laurels; Bennigsen received the diamond insignia of the Order of St Andrew and 100,000 roubles. For the Poles of the V Corps, who had held the line, the long and terrible retreat was about to begin. Their commander's story ends a year later at Leipzig, told in our life of Józef Poniatowski.¹¹