Hundred Days

The Hundred Days
Part of the Napoleonic Wars
The Battle of Waterloo, by William Sadler
Date 10 March-8 July 1815 Location France, Belgium Result Allied victory, exile of Napoleon
Belligerents
Prussia United Kingdom Austrian Empire Russian Empire Kingdom of Sweden United Kingdom of the Netherlands German Confederation Kingdom of Spain Kingdom of Portugal Kingdom of Sardinia	France Kingdom of Naples

For other uses, see Hundred Days (disambiguation).

The Hundred Days (or the Waterloo Campaign or the War of the Seventh Coalition) was the period between Napoleon Bonaparte's return to Paris (20 March 1815) from his exile on Elba, and the restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty under King Louis XVIII (8 July 1815). The phrase les Cent Jours was first used by the prefect of Paris, the comte de Chabrol, in his speech welcoming the King.

Bonaparte returned during the Congress of Vienna. On 13 March, seven days before Bonaparte reached Paris, the powers at the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw; four days later the United Kingdom, Russia, Austria and Prussia, members of the Seventh Coalition, bound themselves to put 150,000 men each into the field to end his rule. This set the stage for the last conflict in the Napoleonic Wars and for the defeat of Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo — one of the most famous battles in history — the restoration of the French monarchy for the second time and the permanent exile of Bonapart to the island of Saint Helena where he died in May 1821.

Background

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars pitted France against various coalitions of other European nations nearly continuously from 1792 onward. The overthrow and subsequent execution of Louis XVI in France had greatly disturbed other European leaders, who vowed to crush the French Republic. Rather than lead to France's defeat, the wars allowed the revolutionary regime to expand beyond its borders and create client republics. The success of the French forces made a hero out of its top commander, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1799, Napoleon staged a successful coup d'état and became France's de facto dictator. Five years later, he crowned himself Emperor Napoleon I.

The rise of Napoleon troubled the other European powers as much as the earlier revolutionary regime had. Despite the formation of new coalitions against him, Napoleon's forces continued to conquer much of Europe. The tide of war began to turn, however, after a disastrous French invasion of Russia in 1812 that caused Napoleon to lose much of his army. The following year, during the War of the Sixth Coalition, Coalition forces defeated the French in the Battle of Leipzig.

Following its victory at Leipzig, the Coalition vowed to press on to Paris and depose Napoleon. In the last week of February 1814, Prussian Field Marshal Blucher seized the initiative and advanced on Paris with his forces. Napoleon's two marshals in the immediate vicinity, Édouard Mortier and Auguste Marmont, were covering the city with two detached corps, but they only had 10,000 men and would be unable to hold out against Blucher's larger force. Napoleon hurried westwards to their rescue with around 30,000 troops, hoping to trap Blucher against the Marne river.

Blucher unsuccessfully attacked Marmont and Mortier along the Ourcq river in late February and early March and ordered a retreat north to regroup when he heard of Napoleon's advance. Prussian troops crossed the swollen Aisne River and arrived at Soissons on 4 March. There they linked up with reinforcements that brought Blucher's total force to 100,000. On 7 March, a clash ensued at the Battle of Craonne as Napoleon attacked westwards along the Chemin des Dames. Blucher's outflanking maneuver did not materialize in time and the Prussians were forced to withdraw towards Laon, leading to the Battle of Laon and the defeat of Napoleon.

On 6 April 1814, Napoleon abdicated his throne, leading to the ascession of Louis XVIII of the House of Bourbon a month later. The defeated Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba, while the victorious Coalition sought to redraw the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna.

Events of 1814

Dates	Synopsis of key events
29 January	French army of Emperor Napoleon I of France wins the Battle of Brienne.
14 February	Napoleon wins the Battle of Vauchamps.
18 February	Napoleon wins the Battle of Montereau.
7 March	Napoleon wins the Battle of Craonne.
10 March	Napoleon is defeated at the Battle of Laon in France.
12 March	Louis-Antoine, Duke of Angouleme enters Bordeaux, marking the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty.
30 March–31st	Napoleonic Wars: Sixth Coalition forces march into and occupy Paris.
6 April	Emperor Napoleon abdicates. Louis XVIII notionally becomes King of France.
10 April	The Duke of Wellington wins the Battle of Toulouse.
3 May	Duke of Provence, Louis XVIII of France returns to Paris.
17 May	Occupation of Monaco so it changes from French to Austrian hands.
30 May	The First Treaty of Paris is signed returning France's borders to their pre-French Revolutionary War 1792 extent. Napoleon I of France is exiled to Elba on the same day.

Exile in Elba

Napoleon spent only nine months and 21 days in uneasy retirement on Elba (1814–1815), watching events in France with great interest as the Congress of Vienna gradually gathered. As he foresaw, the shrinkage of the great Empire into the realm of old France caused intense dissatisfaction, a feeling fed by stories of the tactless way in which the Bourbon princes treated veterans of the Grande Armée and the returning royalist nobility treated the people at large. Equally threatening was the general situation in Europe which had been stressed and exhausted during the previous decades of near constant warfare.

The conflicting demands of major powers were for a time so exorbitant as to bring the powers at the Congress of Vienna to the verge of war with each other. Thus every scrap of news reaching remote Elba looked favorable to a bold move by Napoleon to retake power as he correctly reasoned the news of his return would cause a popular rising as he approached. He also reasoned that the return of French prisoners from Russia, Germany, Britain and Spain would furnish him instantly with a trained, veteran and patriotic army far larger than that which had won renown in the years before 1814. So threatening were the symptoms that the royalists at Paris and the plenipotentiaries at Vienna talked of deporting him to the Azores or to Saint Helena, while others more than hinted at assassination.

The Congress of Vienna

At the Congress of Vienna the various nations had very different and conflicting goals. The Tsar of Russia had expected to absorb much of Poland and to leave a puppet state Duchy of Warsaw as a buffer against further invasion from Europe. The renewed Prussian state was demanding all of the Kingdom of Saxony. Austria wanted neither of these things to happen while it expected to regain control of northern Italy. Castlereagh of the United Kingdom, supported France and Austria and was at variance with his Parliament. This almost caused a war to break out when the Tsar pointed out to Castlereagh that Russia had 450,000 men near Poland and Saxony and he was welcome to try and remove them. Indeed he stated "I shall be the King of Poland and the King of Prussia will be the King of Saxony. The King of Prussia was approached by Castlereagh offering to back Prussia's annexation of Saxony by Britain and Austria in return for Prussia's backing of an independent Poland. Fredrick reputed this offer in public and the Tsar was so offended he challenged Metternich of Austria to a duel. Only the intervention of the Austrian crown stopped this. This breach was avoided when when members of Britain's Parliament got word to the Russian Ambassador that Castlereagh had exceeded his authority. The affair left Prussia deeply suspicious of anything Britain was involved in.

Return to France

Napoleon solved the problem in characteristic fashion. On 26 February 1815, when the British and French guardships were absent, he slipped away from Portoferraio with some 600 men and landed near Antibes on 1 March 1815. Except in royalist Provence, he received everywhere a welcome that attested to the attractive power of his personality and the nullity of the Bourbons. Firing no shot in his defence, his little troop swelled day by day until it became an army. On 5 March, the nominally royalist 5th Infantry Regiment went over to Napoleon, transferring its strength en masse from one army to the other. The next day they were joined by the 7th Infantry Regiment under its colonel Charles-Angélique-François Huchet de la Bedoyère, who would be executed by the Bourbons for treason after the campaign ended. An old anecdote illustrates either Napoleon's charisma or popularity, or (if untrue) the propaganda that operated in his lifetime and ever since: his army was confronted by troops sent by the king to stop him; the men on each side formed into lines and prepared to fire. Before fighting began, Napoleon walked between the two forces, faced the king's men, ripped open his coat and said "If any of you will shoot your Emperor, shoot him now." The men supposedly all joined his cause. This occurred at Leon and it would seem the "opposing" troops were too loudly cheering him for Napoleon to have actually said anything that could be heard One of his key commanders, Marshal Ney, who had said that Napoleon ought to be brought to Paris in an iron cage, joined him with 6,000 men on 14 March; five days later the emperor triumphantly entered the capital to the acclaim of gathered crowds, from whence Louis XVIII had recently fled.

Napoleon was not misled by the enthusiasm of the provinces and Paris. He knew that love of novelty and contempt for the gouty old king and his greedy courtiers had brought about this bloodless triumph; and he felt instinctively that he had to deal with a new France, which would not tolerate despotism. On his way to Paris, he had been profuse in promises of reform and constitutional rule. It remained to be seen whether he could make good those promises and whether he could take effective actions to disarm the fear and jealousy of the great powers, for there to those in power, he represented the overthrow of the old authoritarian order—a living icon perpetually destabilizing the world of the privileged in favor of the common.

Return to power

This was the work he set before himself in the Hundred Days. One may doubt whether his powers, physical as well as mental, could equal the task. Certainly the evidence as to his health is somewhat conflicting. Carnot, Pasquier, Lavalette Thiéhault and others thought him prematurely aged and enfeebled. Others again saw no marked change in him; while Mollien, who knew the emperor well, attributed the lassitude which now and then came over him to a feeling of perplexity caused by his changed circumstances. This explanation seems to furnish a clue to the likely truth.

Napoleon felt cramped and chafed on all sides by the necessity of posing as a constitutional sovereign; and, while losing something of the old rigidity, he lost very much of the old energy, both in thought and decisive action. His was a mind that worked wonders in well-worn grooves and on facts that were well understood. The necessity of devising compromises with men who had formerly been his tools worried and wore on him both in mind and body. Nonetheless, when he left parliamentary affairs behind and took the field on campaign to face the allies threatening France, he showed nearly all the powers of initiative and endurance that had marked his masterpiece, the campaign of 1814.

Thus, to date his decline, as Chaptal does, from the cold of the Moscow campaign is not fully correct. The time of lethargy at Elba seems to have been more unfavourable to his powers than the cold of Russia. At Elba, as Sir Neil Campbell noted, he became inactive and proportionately corpulent. There, too, as sometimes in 1815, he began to suffer intermittently from bowel problems, but to no serious extent. On the whole it seems safe to assert that it was the change in France far more than the change in his health which brought about the manifest constraint of the emperor in the Hundred Days. His words to Benjamin Constant— "I am growing old. The repose of a constitutional king may suit me. It will more surely suit my son"— shows that his mind seized the salient facts of the situation, but his instincts struggled against them. Hence the malaise both of mind and body.

Popular discontent

The royalists gave him little concern: the duc d'Angoulême raised a small force for Louis XVIII in the south, but at Valence it melted away in front of Grouchy's command; and the duke, on 9 April 1815, signed a convention whereby they received a free pardon from the emperor. The royalists of the Vendée moved later and caused more trouble. The chief problem was the constitution. At Lyon, on 13 March 1815, Napoleon issued an edict dissolving the existing chambers and ordering the convocation of a national mass meeting, or Champ de Mai, for the purpose of modifying the constitution of the Napoleonic empire.

That work was carried out by Benjamin Constant in concert with the emperor. The resulting Acte additionel (supplementary to the constitutions of the empire) bestowed on France an hereditary chamber of peers and a chamber of representatives elected by the "electoral colleges" of the empire, which comprised scarcely one percent of the citizens of France. As Châteaubriand remarked, in reference to Louis XVIII's constitutional charter, the new constitution — La Benjamine, it was dubbed — was merely a slightly improved charter. Thus its incompleteness displeased the vocal liberals, who still had a constituancy in the newly awakened nationalism amongst the common men; hence, it garnered only 1,532,527 votes in the plebiscite, less than half of those of the plebiscites of the Consulate.

Not all the gorgeous display of the Champ de Mai (held on 1 June 1815) could hide the discontent at the meagre fulfilment of the promises given at Lyon. Napoleon ended his speech with the words "My will is that of the people: My rights are its rights." The words rang hollow.

Napoleon was with difficulty dissuaded from quashing the 3 June election of Lanjuinais, the staunch liberal who had so often opposed the emperor, as president of the chamber of deputies. In his last communication to them, Napoleon warned them not to imitate the Greeks of the later Empire, who engaged in subtle discussions when the ram was battering at their gates. Later, at his exile in Saint Helena, he told Gourgaud that he intended in 1815 to dissolve the chambers as soon as he had won a great victory. This may be an indication that even Napoleon misunderstood the nationalism he'd played such a large part in engendering amongst the world's population, and was certainly an indication that he was as ruthless as ever.

On 12 June 1815 he set out for the northern frontier where the allies were gathering to invade. His spirits rose at the prospect of rejoining the army.

War Begins

In point of fact, the sword alone could decide his fate, both in internal and international affairs. Neither France nor Europe took seriously his rather vague declaration of his contentment with the role of constitutional monarch of France. Only a very small fraction of the public believed that he would be content with the "ancient limits". So often had he declared that the Rhine and the Netherlands were necessary to France that everyone looked on his present assertions as a mere device to gain time. As far back as 13 March, six days before he reached Paris, the powers at the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw; four days later the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Russia, Austria and Prussia bound themselves to put 150,000 men into the field to end his rule. Their recollection of his conduct during the congress of Châtillon was the determining fact at this crisis; his professions at Lyon or Paris had not the slightest effect; his efforts to detach Austria from the coalition, as also the feelers put forth tentatively by Fouché at Vienna, were fruitless. The coalitions, once so brittle as to break at the first strain, had now been hammered into solidity by his blows. If ever a man was condemned by his past, Napoleon was so in 1815.

Napoleon knew that, once his attempts at dissuading one or more of the Seventh Coalition armies from invading France had failed, his only chance of remaining in power was to attack before the coalition put together an overwhelming force. If he could destroy the existing coalition forces in the Southern Netherlands before they were reinforced, he might be able to drive the British back to the sea and knock the Prussians out of the war. This was a successful strategy he had used many times before.

Map of the Waterloo campaign.

Deployments

See also: Order of Battle of the Waterloo Campaign

French forces

Upon assumption of the throne, Napoleon found that he was left but little by the Bourbons and that the state of the Army was 56,000 troops of which 46,000 were ready to campaign.

By the end of May Napoleon had deployed his forces as follows:

• I Corps (D'Erlon) cantoned between Lille and Valenciennes.
• II Corps (Reille) cantoned between Valenciennes and Avesnes.
• III Corps (Vandamme) cantoned around Rocroi.
• IV Corps (Gerard ) cantoned at Metz.
• V Corps (Rapp), 20,000 strong near Strassburg.
• VI Corps (Lobau) cantoned at Laon.
• Cavalry Reserve (Grouchy) cantoned at Guise.
• Imperial Guard (Mortier) at Paris.

A further 18,500 more troops under Suchet, Brune and Lecourbe guarded the south east frontier from Basel to Nice, and covered Lyons; 8,000 men under Clausel and Decaen guarded the Pyrenean frontier; whilst Lamarque led 10,000 men into La Vendee to quell a Royalist insurrection in that region.

By the 1 June the total armed forces available to Napoleon had reached 198,000 with 66,000 more in depots training up but not yet ready for deployment.

Coalition forces

Archduke Charles gathered Austrian and allied German states, while the Prince of Schwartzenberg formed another Austrian army. King Ferdinand VII of Spain summoned English officers to lead his troops against France. Tsar Alexander I of Russia mustered an army of 250,000 troops and sent these rolling toward the Rhine. Prussia mustered two armies, one under Blucher that sat aside Wellington's British army and its allies. The other was Prussian and North German allies under General Kleist.

Wellington and Blucher were disposed as follows in the early days of June:

Wellington's Anglo-allied army of 93,000 with headquarters at Brussels were cantoned:

• I Corps (Prince of Orange), 30,200, headquarters Braine-le-Comte, disposed in the area Enghien-Genappe-Mons.
• II Corps (Lord Hill), 27,300, headquarters Ath, distributed in the area Ath-Oudenarde-Ghent.
• Reserve cavalry (Lord Uxbridge) 9,900, in the valley of the Dendre river, between Grammont and Ninove.
• The reserve (under Wellington himself) 25,500, lay around Brussels.
• The frontier in to the west of Leuze and Binche was watched by the Dutch light cavalry.

Blucher's Prussian army of 116,000 men, with headquarters at Namur, was distributed as follows:

• I Corps (Zieten), 30,800, cantoned along the Sambre, headquarters Charleroi, and covering the area Fontaine-l'Évêque-Fleurus-Moustier.
• II Corps (Pirch I), 31,000, headquarters at Namur, lay in the area Namur-Hannut-Huy.
• III Corps (Thielemann), 23,900, in the bend of the river Meuse, headquarters Ciney, and disposed in the area Dinant-Huy-Ciney.
• IV Corps (Bülow), 30,300, with headquarters at Liege and cantoned around it.

The frontier in front of Binche, Charleroi and Dinant was watched by the Prussian outposts.

Thus the Coalition front extended for nearly 90 miles across what is now Belgium, and the mean depth of their cantonments was 30 miles. To concentrate the whole army on either flank would take six days, and on the common centre, around Charleroi, three days.

Maneuver

Napoleon moved two armies, the Army of the North (AotN) and the Reserve Army (RA) 128,000 men, up to the French Belgium frontier without alerting the coalition forces. The left wing of the Army of the North (I and II corps) was under the command of Marshal Ney, and the right wing (III and IV corps) under the command of Marshal Grouchy. Napoleon was in direct command of the Reserve (French Imperial Guard, VI Corps, and the I, II, III, and IV cavalry corps). During the initial advance all three elements remained close enough to support each another.

Moving up to the frontier without alerting the Coalition, Napoleon crossed the frontier at Thuin near Charleroi, the French drove in Coalition outposts and secured Napoleon's favoured "central position" - at the junction between Wellington's Allied army to his north-west, and Blücher's Prussian to his north-east. Wellington had expected Napoleon to try to envelop the Allied armies by moving through Mons to the west of Brussels. Napoleon encouraged this view with false intelligence. A message from Wellington's intelligence chief, Sir Colquhoun Grant, was delayed by General Dörnberg, and Wellington first heard of the capture of Charleroi at 15:00 shortly followed by another message from the Prince of Orange. Wellington ordered his army to collect at their divisional headquarters, but was still unsure whether the attack in Charleroi was a feint and the main assault would come from Mons, and Wellington only found out with certainty Napoleon's intentions and sent out orders for the mustering of his army near Nivelles and Quatre Bras just before midnight on the 15 June.

The Prussians were not taken unaware and began to concentrate, so Napoleon considered the Prussians the greater threat, and so he moved against them first with the right wing of the Army of the North and the Reserves, attacking their outposts at Thuin near Charleroi, before advancing through Charleroi. His scouts reached Quatre Bras that evening. Ziethen's I Corps rearguard action held up Napoleon's advance, giving Blücher the opportunity to concentrate his forces in the Sombreffe position, which had been selected earlier for its good defensive attributes. Napoleon sent Marshal Ney, in charge of the French left wing, to secure the crossroads of Quatre Bras, towards which Wellington was hastily gathering his dispersed army. Once Quatre Bras was secured, Ney could swing east and reinforce Napoleon.

16 June: Ligny and Quatre Bras

Main articles: Battle of Ligny and Battle of Quatre Bras

Ney, advancing on 16 June, found Quatre Bras lightly held by Allied troops, but having previously experienced Wellington's skill at concealing his strength, he overestimated the forces opposing him. Despite outnumbering the Allies heavily throughout the day, he fought a cautious and desultory battle which failed to capture the crossroads. By the middle of the afternoon, Wellington had taken personal command of the Allied forces at Quatre Bras. The position was reinforced steadily throughout the day as Allied troops converged on the crossroads. Finally, they were able to advance and drive the French back.

Napoleon, meanwhile, the right wing of the army and the reserve and defeated the Prussians, under the command of General Blücher, at the Battle of Ligny on the same day. The Prussian centre gave way under heavy French attack, but the flanks held their ground. Several heavy Prussian cavalry charges proved enough to dissuade the French pursuit and indeed they would not pursue the Prussians until the morning of, 18 June. D'Erlon's I Corps wandered between both battles contributing to neither Quatra Bra nor to Ligny. Napoleon wrote to Ney warning him that allowing D'Erlon to wander so far away had crippled his attacks on Quatra Bra and made no move to recall D'Erlon when he could have easly done so. The tone of his orders leave it that he believed he had things well in hand at Ligny without assistance (as in fact he did).

17 June

The Prussian defeat at Ligny made the Quatre Bras position untenable. On 17 June Wellington duly fell back to the north. His control of Quatre Bras enabled the Prussians to fall back parallel to his line of retreat and not, as Napoleon had hoped, away from him.

This was part of Napoleon's strategy to split the much larger Coalition force into pieces that he could outnumber and attack separately. His theory was based on the assumption that an attack through the centre of the Coalition forces would force the two main armies to retreat in the direction of their respective supply bases, which were in opposite directions.

The general retreat of the Prussian army took it to the town of Wavre, and this by default became the marshalling point of the army. The Prussian chief of staff, General August von Gneisenau, planned to rally the Prussian Army at Tilly, from where it could move to support Wellington, but control was lost, with part of the army retreating toward the Rhine, but the majority rallied at Wavre. General Blücher arrived at Wavre - having fallen under his horse whilst leading a counter charge, and then been ridden over by French cavalry twice - and after a meeting Gneisenau was persuaded to march upon Wellington's left flank at dawn with the I, II and IV Corps. The IV Corps, under the command of General Bülow von Dennewitz, had not been present at Ligny, but arrived to reinforce the Prussian army during the nights of the 17th and 18th. III Corps formed the rearguard, to hinder the pursuing French.

Napoleon set off via Quatre Bras with the Reserves and combined his forces with the left wing of the Army of the North to pursue Wellington's forces, which were retreating toward Brussels. Just before the small village of Waterloo, Wellington deployed most of his forces on the rear side of an escarpment. He placed some of his forces in front of the main deployment in two fortified farmhouses at the base of the escarpment, which guarded the two roads to Brussels.

Marshall Groucy with the right wing of the Army of the North moved to Grannape and assimilating intelligence provided him by his outpost services. Indications that three Prussian corps had moved through the area were received were believed to be concentrating near Brussels to support Wellington. This information was collected and sent by Marshall Groucy at 22:00 on the night of 17 June. In this letter Groucy noted the collection of the Prussians in and around Warve.

18 June: Waterloo & Wavre

Main articles: Battle of Waterloo and Battle of Wavre

It was at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 that the decisive battle of the campaign took place. The start of the battle was delayed for several hours as Napoleon waited until the ground had dried from the previous night's rain. By late afternoon the French army had not succeeded in driving Wellington's allied forces from the escarpment on which they stood. Once the Prussians arrived, attacking the French right flank in ever increasing numbers, Napoleon's key strategy of keeping the Seventh Coalition armies divided had failed and his army was driven from the field in confusion, by a combined coalition general advance.

On the morning of 18 June 1815 Napoleon sent orders to Marshal Grouchy, commander of the the right wing of the Army of the North, to harass the Prussians to stop them reforming. These orders arrived at around 06:00 and his corps began to move out at 08:00, by 12:00 the cannons could be heard from the Battle of Waterloo. Grouchy’s corps commanders especially Gérard, advised that they should "march to the sound of the guns". As this was contrary to Napoleon's orders "you will be the sword against the Prussian's back driving them through Wavre and join me here" Grouchy decided not to take the advise. It becomes apparent that neither Napoleon nor Marshal Groucy understood that the Prussian army was neither routed nor disorganized. Any thoughts to joining Napoleon were dashed when a 2^nd order repeating the same instructions arrived around 16:00.

Following Napoleon's orders Grouchy attacked the Prussian III Corps under the command of General Johann von Thielmann near village of Wavre. Grouchy believed that he was engaging the rearguard of a still-retreating Prussian force. However only one Corps remained — the other three, Prussian Corps (I, II and the still fresh IV) had regrouped after the Prussians defeat at Ligny and were marching toward Waterloo.

The next morning the Battle of Wavre ended in a hollow French victory. Grouchy's wing of the Army of the North withdrew in good order and other elements of the French army were able to reassemble around it. However, the army was not strong enough to resist the combined coalition forces, so it retreated toward Paris.

End of Napoleon's career

On arriving at Paris, three days after Waterloo, Napoleon still clung to the hope of concerting national resistance; but the temper of the chambers and of the public generally forbade any such attempt. Napoleon and his brother Lucien Bonaparte were almost alone in believing that, by dissolving the chambers and declaring Napoleon dictator, they could save France from the armies of the powers now converging on Paris. Even Davout, minister of war, advised Napoleon that the destinies of France rested solely with the chambers. Clearly, it was time to safeguard what remained; and that could best be done under Talleyrand's shield of legitimacy.

Napoleon himself at last recognized the truth. When Lucien pressed him to "dare", he replied "Alas, I have dared only too much already". On 22 June 1815 he abdicated in favor of his son, Napoléon Francis Joseph Charles Bonaparte well knowing that it was a formality, as his son was in Austria. On 25 June he received from Fouché, the president of the newly appointed provisional government, an intimation that he must leave Paris. He retired to Malmaison, the former home of Josephine, where she had died shortly after his first abdication.

On 29 June the near approach of the Prussians, who had orders to seize him, dead or alive, caused him to retire westwards toward Rochefort, whence he hoped to reach the United States. The presence of blockading Royal Navy warships with orders to prevent his escape forestalled this plan.

Finally, unable to remain in France or escape from it, he surrendered himself to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon and was transported to England. The full restoration of Louis XVIII followed the emperor's departure. Napoleon Bonapart was exiled to the island of Saint Helena where he died in May 1821.

Last Battles

Marshal Davout, Napoleon's minister of war, was defeated by Blücher at Issy on 3 July 1815.[89] With this defeat, all hope of holding Paris faded. This was the last mobile battle of the 100 days. There was a campaign against hold out French fortresses that ended with the capitulation of Longwy on 13 September 1815. The Treaty of Paris was signed on 20 November, 1815 bringing to a close the 100 days.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Waterloo Campaign". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Chesny, Charles A: Waterloo Lectures:A Study Of The Campaign Of 1815 ISBN 1428649883
• David Cordingly, The Billy Ruffian: The Bellerophon and the Downfall of Napoleon (Bloomsbury USA, 2003) ISBN 1-58234-468-X