Hundred Days

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hundred Days is one of history's most compressed political and military dramas. On the 20th of March 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte rode back into Paris after eleven months of exile, and the French king fled without firing a shot. What followed was 110 days of constitutional promise, desperate military mobilisation, and ultimately catastrophic defeat. How did a single man walk off an island and reclaim an empire? And why did it all collapse so completely, so fast? Those questions run through everything that happened between that March morning and the 8th of July 1815, when the prefect of Paris, Gaspard, count of Chabrol, stood before Louis XVIII and began his welcoming address: "Sire, one hundred days have passed away since your majesty, forced to tear yourself from your dearest affections, left your capital amidst tears and public consternation." Those words gave the episode its name. They also glossed over an enormous amount of blood.

• 2. The Congress in Crisis

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  Napoleon spent only 9 months and 21 days on Elba, watching the continent from his island retirement. What he saw gave him reason for optimism. At the Congress of Vienna, the four Great Powers had come dangerously close to war with each other. Tsar Alexander I of Russia insisted he would absorb much of Poland and install a puppet state, the Duchy of Warsaw, as a buffer. Prussia demanded all of the Kingdom of Saxony. Austria refused both. Castlereagh of the United Kingdom backed France and Austria, and the Tsar reminded him that Russia had 450,000 men near Poland and Saxony. Alexander declared, bluntly: "I shall be the King of Poland and the King of Prussia will be the King of Saxony." When a British diplomatic back-channel suggested Castlereagh had overstepped his authority, the Prussian king had already repeated the offer in public. Alexander challenged the Austrian foreign minister Metternich to a duel, and only the intervention of the Austrian crown stopped it.

  Napoleon read every scrap of news that reached Elba and reasoned correctly that his return would trigger a popular rising as he moved through France. He also calculated that tens of thousands of French prisoners returning from Russia, Germany, Britain, and Spain would give him an experienced army almost instantly. Royalists in Paris and delegates at Vienna discussed deporting him to the Azores or to Saint Helena. Others hinted at assassination. Napoleon moved first.

• 3. The March on Paris

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  On the 26th of February 1815, with British and French guard ships absent, Napoleon slipped away from Portoferraio aboard the brig Inconstant, four small transports, and two feluccas, with roughly 1,000 men. He landed at Golfe-Juan, between Cannes and Antibes, on the 1st of March. Rather than risk royalist Provence, he swung inland through the Alps along a route marked today as the Route Napoleon.

  Troops deployed to stop him simply switched sides. On the 5th of March, the 5th Infantry Regiment at Grenoble went over to Napoleon en masse. The day after, they were joined by the 7th Infantry Regiment under Colonel Charles de la Bedoyere, who would be executed for treason by the Bourbons once the campaign ended. Before Grenoble, at Laffrey, Napoleon stepped out alone in front of royalist troops, tore open his coat, and said: "If any of you will shoot his Emperor, here I am." The men joined him.

  Marshal Ney had promised Louis XVIII he would bring Napoleon to Paris in an iron cage. On the 14th of March, at Lons-le-Saulnier in the Jura, Ney instead handed over 6,000 men and joined Napoleon's cause. Ney was arrested on the 3rd of August 1815, tried on the 16th of November, and executed on the 7th of December 1815.

• 4. Reform and the New Constitution

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  At Lyon, on the 13th of March 1815, Napoleon issued an edict dissolving the existing chambers and ordered a national mass meeting, the Champ de Mai, to modify the constitution of the Empire. To Benjamin Constant, the man he charged with drafting it, Napoleon reportedly said: "I am growing old. The repose of a constitutional king may suit me. It will more surely suit my son."

  The resulting Acte additionel created a hereditary Chamber of Peers and a Chamber of Representatives elected by the empire's electoral colleges. The writer Chateaubriand dismissed it as a "slightly improved" version of Louis XVIII's own constitutional charter. Later historians, including Agatha Ramm, pushed back: the new constitution extended the franchise and explicitly guaranteed press freedom in a way the royal charter had not. Napoleon put it to a national plebiscite. Only 1,532,527 votes were cast, less than half the turnout in the plebiscites of the Consulat, suggesting either public indifference or the distraction of military preparation. Napoleon treated the large majority as constitutional sanction.

  He was nearly prevented from accepting the plebiscite result cleanly. Napoleon had to be talked out of quashing the 3rd of June election of Jean Denis, comte Lanjuinais, the liberal who had repeatedly opposed him, as president of the Chamber of Representatives. In his final communication to the chambers, Napoleon warned them not to imitate the Greeks of the late Byzantine Empire, who held subtle debates while enemy rams battered at their gates.

• 5. Mobilisation for War

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  When Napoleon reclaimed the throne, Louis XVIII had left him a depleted military: 56,000 soldiers, of which only 46,000 were fit for campaign. By the end of May, Napoleon had rebuilt the total armed forces to 198,000, with another 66,000 in depots still training. He formed L'Armee du Nord, the Army of the North, which he personally commanded for the Waterloo campaign. The remaining forces were parcelled across France: Rapp's Army of the Rhine near Strasbourg, Suchet's Army of the Alps at Lyon, and several smaller observation corps guarding the Pyrenees, the Var coast, and the Vendee.

  The Coalition response was vastly larger. Tsar Alexander I mustered 250,000 Russian troops and sent them rolling toward the Rhine. Austria assembled multiple armies. Wellington commanded the Anglo-allied force south-west of Brussels, headquartered in Brussels itself. Blücher's Prussian army stood south-east of Brussels, headquartered at Namur. The invasion of France was set for the 1st of July 1815, later than Wellington and Blücher preferred: both their armies were ready in June, ahead of the Austrians and the Russians, who were still marching to the theatre.

  Napoleon's health added a variable that neither side could fully predict. Observers including Carnot, Pasquier, and Lavalette believed he had aged prematurely during his exile. At Elba, Sir Neil Campbell had noted he had become inactive and corpulent. His hemorrhoids, a condition that had troubled him for years, had become severe enough to prevent him from remaining on horseback for more than short periods. During the Battle of Waterloo, that limitation would directly affect his ability to observe his troops and exercise command.

• 6. The Waterloo Campaign

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  Hostilities opened on the 15th of June 1815, when French forces drove in Prussian outposts and crossed the Sambre at Charleroi, seizing the junction between Wellington's army to the west and Blücher's army to the east. On the 16th of June, Marshal Ney held Wellington at the Battle of Quatre Bras while Napoleon defeated Blücher at the Battle of Ligny. The French had the initiative.

  On the 17th of June, Napoleon sent Grouchy east with the right wing of the army to pursue the Prussians, and took the reserves himself to push Wellington north toward Brussels. That night, the Anglo-allied army turned and took up a defensive line about a mile south of the village of Waterloo on a gentle escarpment. On the 18th of June, French attacks broke repeatedly against Wellington's line. In the early evening, several Prussian corps arrived on the east of the battlefield. Together, the Anglo-allied and Prussian forces routed the French army.

  Grouchy won a tactical victory the same day at Wavre against a Prussian rearguard, but his failure to prevent the Prussians from marching to Waterloo contributed to the French defeat. On the 19th of June he began a long retreat to Paris. Napoleon himself chose not to stay with the army and attempt to rally it; he returned to the capital to seek political support for continued resistance.

• 7. Abdication and Its Aftermath

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  On arriving in Paris three days after Waterloo, Napoleon still hoped for a national resistance. The chambers of Parliament and public opinion refused. Napoleon and his brother Lucien Bonaparte stood nearly alone in believing that dissolving the chambers and declaring Napoleon dictator could still save France. Even Davout, his own minister of war, told Napoleon the destiny of France now rested with the chambers. When Lucien pressed him to act boldly, Napoleon replied: "Alas, I have dared only too much already." On the 22nd of June 1815, he abdicated in favour of his son, Napoleon II, who was four years old and living in Austria.

  A provisional government under Joseph Fouche as President of the Executive Commission took nominal authority in Napoleon II's name. On the 25th of June, Napoleon received word from Fouche, his former police chief, that he must leave Paris. He withdrew to Malmaison, the former home of Josephine, where she had died shortly after his first abdication. Within days, the advancing Prussians, who had orders to seize him dead or alive, forced him westward toward Rochefort, where he hoped to sail for the United States. Vice Admiral Henry Hotham's Royal Navy warships were waiting offshore with orders to prevent any escape. On the 15th of July 1815, Napoleon surrendered to Captain Frederick Maitland and was transported to England, then to Saint Helena, where he died in May 1821.

  Paris fell without a final set-piece battle. On the 7th of July, von Zieten's Prussian I Corps led the two Coalition armies into the city. The Chamber of Representatives protested and their president, Lanjuinais, resigned his chair. The following day, the doors were closed and Coalition troops guarded the approaches.

• 8. Treaty and Reckoning

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  Fighting elsewhere did not stop with Waterloo. The last pitched battle of the Napoleonic Wars was fought on the 28th of June at La Suffel, where General Rapp's Army of the Rhine checked the 40,000 men of Austrian General Württemberg's III Corps in a French tactical victory, before retreating to Strasbourg. The Neapolitan War, triggered by Napoleon's brother-in-law Joachim Murat on the 15th of March 1815, ended on the 20th of May with the signing of the Treaty of Casalanza and the reinstatement of Ferdinand IV as King of Naples. Austria's intervention in Italy generated lasting resentment that helped fuel the later drive toward Italian unification.

  The Treaty of Paris was signed on the 20th of November 1815, formally ending the Napoleonic Wars. France was pushed back to its 1790 boundaries, losing the territorial gains the Revolutionary armies had won in 1790-1792. It was ordered to pay 700 million francs in indemnities across five yearly installments and to house a Coalition army of occupation of 150,000 soldiers along its eastern border territories for a maximum of five years, entirely at French expense. On the same day, Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia renewed the Quadruple Alliance, establishing in treaty language "relations from which a system of real and permanent balance of power in Europe is to be derived." The phrase coined at a welcoming ceremony for a returning king carried, in the end, far heavier freight than Count Chabrol could have intended.