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. For a month Napoleon had sat in Moscow waiting for the Tsar to make peace, while the Russian army rested and grew stronger a few days' march away. 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 and began sending peace proposals to Alexander I. The Tsar never answered. Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov let the French believe peace was near while he gathered fresh troops, and moved his army to Tarutino, on the Kaluga road south-west of the city. There it stood between Napoleon and the rich provinces of southern Russia.³ › Napoleon Bonaparte

Facing it was Marshal Joachim Murat with the French vanguard: cavalry screens and Prince Józef Poniatowski's V Corps, the Polish corps of the Grande Armée. The Russian Presidential Library puts Murat's strength at about 26,000 men, 8,000 of them cavalry, camped along the Chernishnya river about eight kilometers north of Tarutino. For weeks the outposts lived side by side on almost friendly terms. Murat himself warned Napoleon that his position was a bad one: his center and right were covered by rivers, but his left lay open to a forest through which Russian infantry and cavalry could pass.⁴

The plan

Kutuzov was under pressure to attack, and he agreed to strike Murat. According to the Presidential Library, the plan, drawn up by Quartermaster General K. F. Toll, aimed to surround and destroy the vanguard. General Levin von Bennigsen was to deliver the main blow against the French left, Miloradovich was to attack the center with support from the main army, and partisan detachments under Dorokhov and Figner were to get into the French rear. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives the main blow instead to Miloradovich's cavalry on the left wing, with Bennigsen leading the three columns of the right. It depended on the columns arriving together. They did not.⁵

18 October: surprise at Teterinka

The battle began at seven in the morning with a surprise attack by Cossack regiments near the village of Teterinka. Cossacks under General Orlov-Denisov fell on General Sebastiani's cavalry on the French flank, routed it and overran its camp, and then, Rickard notes, stopped to plunder it. Bennigsen's infantry followed. They took a defile behind Murat's position and for a while threatened to cut him off.⁶

The French did not panic. Poniatowski's Poles held their ground and gave the vanguard a firm base. Murat led his carabiniers and cuirassiers in a series of counterattacks, broke through and pulled his troops back in good order toward Spas-Kuplya and Voronovo. On the Russian side, General Karl Baggovut, who led the attack on the French center and left, was killed by a cannonball. Kutuzov decided not to throw his main forces into the fight, and by about four in the afternoon the battle was over.⁷

A victory, or a missed chance?

The sources disagree sharply on losses. The Presidential Library says the French vanguard lost about 2,500 killed, 2,000 prisoners, 38 guns and all its baggage, and gives Russian losses of 300 by Kutuzov's report to 1,200 by the estimate of the military historian M. I. Bogdanovich. Rickard gives almost the reverse balance: as many as 1,000 Russians and only about 250 French, among the French wounded General Lefebvre-Desnouettes.⁸

Both agree that the plan failed. The Presidential Library says the aim of the operation was not achieved and the French suffered only a partial defeat; Rickard calls the attack unsuccessful because the Russians did not exploit their early success. The quarrel began at once. Bennigsen blamed Kutuzov for holding back the main army. According to contemporaries, when the field marshal congratulated him on the victory he did not even dismount, and in his own report he claimed the honor of having started, continued and finished the battle himself.⁹

Why Tarutino mattered

Whatever the count, the effect was clear. By mid-October Napoleon already knew he would have to leave Moscow, and after Tarutino he sped up his plans. On the morning of 19 October the first units of the Grande Armée marched out of the city, about 95,000 men with 500 guns in Rickard's figures. Napoleon meant to retreat south through untouched country, 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

For the Russian army the battle had a great moral value on the eve of its counter-offensive, and Alexander I rewarded Kutuzov, Bennigsen and the men who fought there generously. 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