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French Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte's Grande Armée occupied Moscow from 14 September to 19 October 1812 during the Napoleonic Wars. It marked the summit of the French invasion of Russia . During the occupation, which lasted 36 days, the city was devastated by fire and looted by both Russian peasants and the French.
Furthermore, a Moscow police officer was captured trying to set the Kremlin on fire where Napoleon was staying at the time. Brought before Napoleon, the officer admitted he and others had been ordered to set the city on fire, after which he was bayonetted by guardsmen on the spot on the orders of a furious Napoleon.
In the first days of the occupation, an enormous firestorm reduced much of Moscow to cinders. Houses that survived were looted by Napoleonic soldiers and Russian peasants, and the city was strewn with corpses and animal carcasses that rotted in the unusually warm weather.
The French invasion of Russia, also known as the Russian campaign (French: Campagne de Russie), the Second Polish War, and in Russia as the Patriotic War of 1812 (Russian: Оте́чественная война́ 1812 го́да, romanized: Otéchestvennaya voyná 1812 góda), was initiated by Napoleon with the aim of compelling the Russian ...
It was through this narrow pass that Napoleon and his officers and guard obtained their escape from the Kremlin. But what had they gained by this escape? Still nearer to the flames than before, they could neither go back nor stay where they were; and how was it possible to advance?
The presence of Napoleon’s troops in the Russian Empire was brief compared with the experience of some other European countries, but traumatic in terms of casualties suffered in major battles (Smolensk on 16–18 August and Borodino on 7 September), and the occupation of Moscow.
Moscow’s greatest disaster between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries was the occupation by Napoleon in 1812. Much of the population fled, and the city was looted by Napoleonic soldiers and Russian peasants and was largely destroyed in an enormous firestorm.
