June 18, 1815 – Napoleon Meets His Waterloo

As “National Geographic History Magazine” (January/February 2018) summarized:

In the early 1800s Napoleon Bonaparte stormed across Europe, swallowing up territory for his French Empire and challenging the supremacy of Britain on the seas. From 1804 to 1814, the Napoleonic Wars raged, as Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia all fought to hold back the fiery emperor of France. In 1814 it looked as though they had succeeded. Napoleon had abdicated and was exiled to the island of Elba. In France the Bourbon king Louis XVIII had been restored to power.”

But in February 1815, the shocked Europeans learned that Napoleon was back. Recent Napoleon biographer Andrew Roberts argued that Napoleon was not at all the quintessential warmonger he is commonly accused of being; not only was war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others, but it was clear there were many times Napoleon tried his best to abide in peace, only to have other leaders unwilling to tolerate his presence in Europe.

Napoleon; painting from 1814

This was certainly the case in 1815. The government of Britain, in particular, had no intention ever of letting Napoleon rule in peace, and regrouped their army in concert with the Germans, Belgians, Dutch, and Prussians against the perceived threat of Napoleon.

Napoleon was forced to raise a formidable army of his own, which he did in record time. His primary goal was to prevent his opponents from combining their armies before he could defeat them in sequence. To begin, Napoleon would need to attack the British commander, the Duke of Wellington, whose forces were massed Waterloo in present-day Belgium. Napoleon sought to time the battle before Wellington could be reinforced by Gebhard von Blücher’s Prussian forces. Napoleon’s plan might have worked, but for the weather, which prevented him from making an early start on the assault.

Sir Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

On this foggy, muddy day in history, a battle was fought as soon as Napoleon could organize it, sometime after 11 a.m. Still, Blücher was not yet there, and Wellington thought the engagement would be lost by the British. Finally, around 4 p.m., Blücher’s forces arrived and started to attack the French. Napoleon had made the mistake of splitting up his Imperial Guard, and the usual fearsome force was ineffective. The French were forced to retreat.

While no one knows how many actually died at Waterloo because the French Army never had a chance to make a count, the best estimates suggest that of the 200,000 or so who fought there, some 50,000 lay dead or wounded at the battle’s end, along with 10,000 horses dead or dying.

The Battle of Waterloo

The results were even more momentous than a consideration of the casualty numbers. Waterloo brought the career of Napoleon Bonaparte to an end; no small matter. He abdicated in favor of his son on June 22. He then gave himself up to the British, who banished him to a cruel and insalubrious location in the middle of the Atlantic, in St. Helena. Thus was the map of Europe redrawn, and the Concert of Europe established, a balance of power and system of dispute resolution that restored peace and enabled Britain to grow to be the dominant global power of the 19th Century.

The national boundaries within Europe as set by the Congress of Vienna, 1815