Napoleon's Glorious Defeat at Waterloo, 18 June 1815

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on the 18th of June 1815. It was a Sunday, preceded by rain that turned parts of the battlefield into mud unfit for the transport of cannon or the advance of cavalry troops. The battle was fought a mile from Waterloo and 10 miles from Brussels, in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by a Seventh Coalition Anglo-allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington, combined with a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard von Blücher. ~~~~~ On 13 March 1815, six days before Napoleon reached Paris after escaping from the Island of Elba, the European powers at the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw. Four days later, the United Kingdom, Russia, Austria, and Prussia mobilized armies to defeat Napoleon. Critically outnumbered and depending on volunteers from his prior armies to rejoin him, Napoleon knew that once he had failed to convince one or more of the Seventh Coalition allies from invading France, his only chance of remaining in power was to attack and defeat the Coalition armies separately. Napoleon planned to destroy the existing Coalition forces south of Brussels before they were reinforced, thereby driving the British back to the sea, knocking the Prussians out of the war and then turning his armies toward the Austrians and Russians. An additional consideration for Napoleon was that there were many French-speaking sympathisers in Belgium and a French victory might trigger a friendly revolution there. Also, Napoleon knew that the British troops in Belgium were largely second-line troops because most of the veterans of the Peninsular War had been sent to the United States and Canada to fight the War of 1812. ~~~~~ The Seventh Coalition had already assembled two large forces under Wellington and Blücher near the northeastern border of France. It was there that Napoleon chose to attack, hoping to destroy them before they could join in a coordinated invasion of France with other members of the Coalition. The Battle of Waterloo was the decisive engagement of the Waterloo Campaign and Napoleon's last battle. His defeat at Waterloo ended Napoleon's rule as Emperor of the French, and marked the end of his Hundred Days return from exile. Napoleon had reason to be optimistic. Two days before the Battle of Waterloo, Blücher's Prussian army was defeated by the French at Ligny. Wellington decided to engage Napoleon at Waterloo after learning that the regrouped Prussian army would join him. Wellington's army, positioned across the Brussels road on the Mont-Saint-Jean escarpment, survived repeated French attacks, until, in the evening, the Prussians arrived in force and broke through Napoleon's right flank. At that moment, Wellington's Anglo-allied army counter-attacked and drove the French army in disorder from the field. Coalition forces entered France and restored King Louis XVIII to the French throne. Napoleon abdicated, finally surrendering to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon, part of the British blockade of France, and was exiled to Saint Helena, where he died in 1821. ~~~~~ The Battle of Waterloo cost Wellington 15,000 dead or wounded and Blücher 7,000 -- 810 of which were suffered by just one unit. Napoleon's losses were 24,000 to 26,000 killed or wounded and included 6,000 to 7,000 captured, with an additional 15,000 deserting subsequent to the battle and over the following days. Major W. E. Frye toured the battlefield on June 22nd and wrote : "This morning I went to visit the field of battle, which is a little beyond the village of Waterloo, on the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean; but on arrival there the sight was too horrible to behold. I felt sick in the stomach and was obliged to return. The multitude of carcasses, the heaps of wounded men with mangled limbs unable to move, and perishing from not having their wounds dressed or from hunger, as the Allies were, of course, obliged to take their surgeons and waggons with them, formed a spectacle I shall never forget. The wounded, both of the Allies and the French, remain in an equally deplorable state." ~~~~~ Napoleon had created the Imperial Guard (divided into Young, Middle and Old Guards), an elite palace-based military group tasked to protect him and form the core of his personal military force. At Waterloo, despite their great courage and stamina, the Guards showed signs of wavering. Their evacuation of the strategic village of Plancenoit led to the loss of the position that was meant to be used to cover the withdrawal of the French Army to Charleroi. The Guard fell back from Plancenoit in the direction of Maison du Roi and Caillou. But, their panache was still evident as they raised the cry "Sauvons nos aigles!" (Let us save our eagles - their emblem.) Those Guard members surviving -- they took very heavy casualties -- left in semi-cohesive units and retreated towards La Belle Alliance, an inn where Napoleon was directing the battle. It was during this retreat that some of the Guards were invited to surrender, eliciting the famous, if apocryphal, retort "La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas!" (The Guard dies, it does not surrender!) ~~~~~ The Battle of Waterloo was decisive in more than one sense. Every generation in Europe, up to the outbreak of the First World War a hundred years later, looked back at Waterloo as the turning point that dictated the course of subsequent world history. In retrospect, it was seen as the event that ushered in an era characterized by relative peace, material prosperity and technological progress. The battle ended the series of wars that had convulsed Europe and involved many other regions of the world since the French Revolution of the early 1790s. It also ended the First French Empire and the political and military career of Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the greatest commanders and statesmen in history -- and the most studied, with more than 70,000 biographies and historical works about him. It was followed by four decades of international peace -- no further major conflict occurred until the Crimean War. Changes to the configuration of European states, agreed after Waterloo, included the formation of the Holy Alliance of reactionary governments intent on repressing revolutionary and democratic ideas, and the reshaping of the former Holy Roman Empire into a German Confederation increasingly marked by the political dominance of Prussia. The bicentenary of Waterloo this year has prompted renewed attention to the geopolitical and economic legacy of the battle and the century of relative transatlantic peace which followed. ~~~~~ General Antoine-Henri, Baron Jomini, one of the leading military writers on the Napoleonic art of war, gave four principal causes that led to Napoleon's disastrous defeat : (1) the most influential was the arrival of Blücher, (2) the admirable firmness of the British infantry, joined to the sang-froid and aplomb of its chiefs, (3) the horrible weather, that had softened the ground, and rendered the offensive movements so toilsome, and retarded until 1 p.m. the attack that should have been made in the morning, and (4) the inconceivable formation of the first corps, in masses very much too deep for the first grand attack. Many historians give a much simpler reason -- Napoleon had defeated Prussian, Russian and Austrian armies and he knew their mettle and methods, but he had never fought an English infantry and he badly under-estimated their skill and discipline. ~~~~~ Dear readers, when a staff officer suggested that it be called the battle of La Belle Alliance, Wellington said he would not name a battle after the defeated side and decided to call the encounter the Battle of Waterloo. But, history has decided that Waterloo belongs to Napoleon. And it is certainly the political deeds and reforms not of Wellington but of Napoleon that have shaped modern France and modern Europe -- the idea of a governing State Council, the Napoleonic civil code of laws, the deep reform of education to open it to all, the integration of Protestants and Jews into society, the meritocracy that replaced privilege -- these are Napoleon Bonaparte's legacy, never abandoned and never bettered. The French often call the Battle of Waterloo "La défaite glorieuse." It was indeed glorious, because even in defeat, Napoleon marked the collective memory and experience of the French, the English, and Europe, forever.