Original subtitles

On the evening of June 15,

1815, Brussels was still dancing.

At the Duchess of Richmond's ball,

senior officers from Wellington's army mixed with diplomats,

aristocrats, wives,

daughters, and the fashionable society that

had gathered in the Belgian capital.

Europe had spent months arguing over

what should come after Napoleon.

That night, at least for a few hours,

the war still seemed distant enough for music and candlelight.

Then reports began arriving.

French troops had crossed the frontier.

Napoleon had not waited for the Coalition

armies to finish assembling and invade France.

He had moved first,

driving north into Belgium and placing himself between

Wellington's Anglo-Allied army and Blücher's Prussians.

The change inside the ballroom was gradual,

then unmistakable.

Officers disappeared into adjoining

rooms to study dispatches and maps.

Others left to find their horses, staffs, and units.

Some would head for the front before they had even

found time to change out of their evening clothes.

Wellington examined the reports and

understood what Napoleon was attempting.

According to a later recollection,

he admitted that Napoleon had “humbugged”

him and gained roughly a day's march.

That was the disturbing part.

Only a year earlier,

Europe had forced Napoleon to abdicate and

sent him to a small Mediterranean island.

Now the same man had returned to France,

recovered an army,

reclaimed the throne,

and once again forced Europe's

generals to respond to his movements.

To understand how he reached the fields south of Brussels,

we have to go back to the point when

his career appeared to be finished.

In 1814,

the Sixth Coalition invaded France. Paris fell.

Napoleon still wanted to continue the war,

but support around him was collapsing,

including among senior commanders who no longer

believed the military situation could be recovered.

He abdicated.

At Fontainebleau,

Napoleon said farewell to the Imperial Guard.

Many of those men had followed him through years of campaigning.

Then, under Allied supervision,

he left France for Elba.

The arrangement contained an almost surreal contradiction.

Napoleon was allowed to keep the title of

emperor and maintain a small personal guard,

but the man who had once ruled an empire stretching

across much of Europe now governed a Mediterranean island.

France, meanwhile, brought back the Bourbons.

Louis XVIII returned to the throne at a

moment when the country was exhausted by war.

Peace was popular.

The restoration itself was far more complicated.

France could not simply be returned to the social and

political world that had existed before the Revolution.

Officers who had risen under the Republic

and Empire worried about their careers.

Veterans were retired or pushed aside.

Royalists returned to influence.

Property, status,

law, and administration had all been

transformed over the previous quarter-century.

For many Frenchmen,

Napoleon had been responsible for years of war.

But the Bourbon monarchy did not automatically

represent the France they had built their lives in either.

Napoleon watched those tensions from Elba.

He kept in contact with France,

received visitors and political information,

and eventually decided that the restored

monarchy was more vulnerable than it appeared.

By early 1815, waiting carried risks of its own.

The European powers were still deciding his future.

Napoleon chose to act before someone

else made that decision for him.

On February 26,

Napoleon left Elba with a small force.

He landed at Golfe-Juan on March 1 and began moving north.

He did not have enough men to reconquer

France in the usual military sense.

His return depended on something much less predictable:

whether soldiers ordered to arrest him would actually obey.

Near Laffrey,

troops from the 5th Line Infantry Regiment blocked his route.

Napoleon walked toward them.

In the famous account of the encounter,

he opened his coat and challenged the

soldiers to fire on their emperor

if that was what they intended to do.

They did not.

The soldiers broke into cheers and joined him.

As Napoleon moved farther north,

the Bourbon government faced the same problem again and again.

Units sent to stop him defected.

Officers reconsidered their loyalties.

Marshal Ney initially promised Louis XVIII that

he would bring Napoleon back in an iron cage.

Before long, Ney had joined him too.

The monarchy still had regiments on paper.

What it increasingly lacked was confidence that those

regiments would fight Napoleon. Louis XVIII

left Paris on the night of March 19.

Napoleon entered the capital the following day.

Soldiers carried him into the Tuileries Palace

while cries of “Long live the emperor” filled the building.

The Hundred Days had begun.

March 20 also happened to be the

fourth birthday of Napoleon's son,

the King of Rome.

While the father was being carried back into his palace in Paris,

the boy remained more than 1,000 kilometers away in Vienna.

Napoleon immediately began

reconstructing the machinery of government,

but the people he brought around him showed how

much had changed since the height of the Empire.

Davout became Minister of War.

Carnot, who had once opposed Napoleon's

establishment of hereditary imperial rule,

took the Interior Ministry.

Caulaincourt returned to foreign affairs.

And Joseph Fouché once again became Minister of Police. Fouché had

survived an extraordinary succession of regimes.

He had served the Revolution, Napoleon,

the restored Bourbons

and now Napoleon again.

During the Hundred Days,

even while holding office,

he continued to maintain contacts

beyond the imperial government.

Napoleon had recovered the Tuileries.

That did not mean everyone sitting around his council

table had tied his future to Napoleon's survival.

There was another sign that 1815 could

not simply reproduce the Empire of earlier years.

Benjamin Constant had been one of

Napoleon's prominent liberal critics.

Now Napoleon brought him into the constitutional work that

produced the Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire.

The new arrangement strengthened representative institutions,

established a two-chamber legislature

and recognized political liberties that did not fit comfortably

with the more authoritarian Empire of the previous decade.

Napoleon had not suddenly become a conventional liberal.

His circumstances had changed.

A ruler who had returned through the support of

soldiers and popular enthusiasm now needed to persuade

a politically changed France that his restoration

would not simply restore the old system with him.

Napoleon also needed peace.

He sent messages indicating that France would

respect the existing European settlement and that

he had no intention of reopening a general war.

Caulaincourt looked for room to negotiate.

For Napoleon, even a few quiet months would have mattered.

France needed men, horses,

equipment and time to make the restored government function.

The other European powers were not

interested in granting him that opportunity.

On March 13,

the powers gathered at Vienna declared Napoleon

outside normal civil and political relations

and treated his return as a threat to European peace.

On March 25, Britain, Austria, Prussia

and Russia renewed their alliance against him.

They did not intend to wait for Napoleon to demonstrate what

kind of emperor he might become the second time around.

Once that became clear,

the military problem could no longer be postponed.

Napoleon placed much of that problem in

the hands of Louis-Nicolas Davout.

Davout, often called the Iron Marshal,

would have preferred a field command.

Napoleon needed him in the War Ministry.

The job was enormous.

Men who had left the army had to be recalled.

Regiments had to be brought up to strength.

Muskets, ammunition,

artillery pieces, uniforms,

wagons and supplies had to be gathered or produced.

Horses were especially difficult;

the shortage ran into the tens of thousands.

And none of this was happening in isolation.

France still had other borders to defend.

Royalist unrest inside the country could not be ignored.

The army had to be expanded while a functioning

supply system was being rebuilt around it.

By June, Napoleon could once again put

a large field army into Belgium.

That achievement said a great deal about

Davout's administrative ability and about the

military resources France still possessed.

It did not mean that the Grande Armée of Austerlitz

had somehow been recreated in three months.

There were excellent veterans,

experienced officers

and some formidable formations.

There were also units assembled under severe pressure,

shortages that had not disappeared,

and a command structure pieced back together in weeks.

No formation carried more symbolic

weight than the Imperial Guard.

The requirements for joining the Old Guard changed over time,

so there was never one permanent

checklist that applied throughout the Empire.

In its stricter periods, however,

service in the unit generally meant years in the army,

substantial campaign experience,

a strong disciplinary record

and demanding physical standards.

The tall bearskin caps made them instantly recognizable.

Their reputation was not based on ceremony alone.

At Eylau in 1807,

when the French center was in serious danger,

Guard units were used to help stabilize the situation.

Over years of campaigning,

the Guard became more than a reserve formation.

French soldiers watched it.

If the Guard was still behind the line,

Napoleon still had experienced

troops that had not yet been spent.

That idea acquired its own mythology.

Later stories exaggerated parts of it,

and many of the sayings attached to

the Guard are difficult to verify.

The reputation itself, however, mattered.

At Waterloo, Napoleon would eventually have to test it.

Napoleon was also trying to restore

something the army could not provide:

the appearance of a functioning dynasty.

His wife, Marie-Louise,

did not return to France.

Their son remained in Vienna.

That mattered personally,

but it also had political consequences.

A Napoleon standing alone in the Tuileries could be

presented as a soldier who had seized power again.

A Napoleon accompanied by an empress who was

the Austrian emperor's daughter, and by a

recognized heir, presented a different image.

It would not have forced Austria to accept the restoration.

It would at least have complicated the symbolism

of a completely isolated Bonaparte regime.

Instead, Marie-Louise remained within the Habsburg world.

The King of Rome stayed in Vienna,

and parts of the French household

around the boy were gradually removed.

Madame de Montesquiou,

the governess to whom he was deeply attached,

was eventually separated from him.

The situation produced several stories and suspicions.

A journey involving Anatole de Montesquiou and a

carriage near Vienna's Prater led Austrian authorities

to suspect that someone might try to remove the child.

No firm evidence has established that an

actual kidnapping attempt was underway.

There were also rumors involving Fouché and the

possibility of a regency centered on Napoleon's son.

Those stories remain uncertain.

What can be established is that Napoleon sent Goswin

de Stassart toward Austria as an intermediary.

The mission did not bring Marie-Louise

or the boy back to France.

By June, Napoleon had recovered the capital,

a government and an army.

His family had not returned,

Europe had refused his peace overtures,

and Coalition forces were preparing to invade.

The next move would be military.

Napoleon's strategic problem was straightforward

even if solving it was not.

Wellington's Anglo-Allied army was

concentrated in Belgium to the west.

Blücher's Prussians were farther east.

If the two armies combined,

their numerical advantage would make

Napoleon's situation far worse.

So he moved between them.

On June 16,

Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Ligny.

It was the last battlefield victory of his career.

But Blücher's army was beaten,

not destroyed.

On the same day at Quatre Bras,

French forces failed to gain the kind of decisive result

that would have removed Wellington from the campaign.

Marshal Grouchy was then sent with a

substantial force to follow the Prussians.

For two centuries,

Grouchy has often been made the simple

explanation for what happened next.

The reality is less convenient.

Orders, distances, roads

and the movements of the Prussian army all mattered.

The central fact was that Blücher still had an army.

Wellington withdrew to the ridge at

Mont-Saint-Jean, south of Waterloo.

The Prussians moved with the intention of supporting him.

Then it rained.

The night before the battle soaked the roads and fields.

Napoleon delayed the main attack the next morning, in part to

allow the ground to improve for movement and artillery.

That choice had a practical military reason.

It also meant the Prussians had more time to approach.

Wellington used the ground carefully.

Much of his infantry stood behind the crest of the ridge, where

the slope gave it some protection from French artillery.

Ahead of the main line were several

positions that complicated any French advance.

Hougoumont stood on the Allied right.

La Haye Sainte sat near the center.

Farther east were positions around Papelotte.

These were farms and buildings,

but on the battlefield

they functioned as strongpoints.

An attacker could not simply ignore them without

creating danger on his flank or in his rear.

Napoleon's problem was not merely to push Wellington backward.

He needed to break his army before Prussian

numbers changed the battle completely.

The fighting began around Hougoumont.

What may initially have been intended to draw

Wellington's attention and reserves toward his

right developed into a battle of its own.

The woods, walls,

gardens and buildings broke formations apart.

French troops kept attacking.

The defenders kept holding.

At one point,

the French reached the northern gate.

An officer named Legros became associated with

one of the most famous episodes of the battle.

Wielding an axe,

he helped create an opening

and a group of French soldiers forced their way inside.

For a brief moment,

they had done what repeated attacks had failed to do.

Then James Macdonell and other defenders

managed to force the gate shut again.

The Frenchmen who had entered were trapped inside the compound.

Roughly thirty had broken through.

Most were killed.

According to the National Army Museum's account,

a young French drummer was spared.

The episode is memorable because the whole

struggle at Hougoumont can almost be seen in that doorway.

The French got close enough to taste success.

They committed more men.

Yet the position remained in Allied hands.

Hour after hour,

Hougoumont continued to demand French troops without

producing the breakthrough Napoleon needed elsewhere.

The main infantry attack came against Wellington's left-center.

After artillery preparation,

d'Erlon's I Corps advanced in deep,

heavy formations.

The mass gave the attack momentum,

but it also made maneuver difficult once the French

reached the upper ground and came under close fire.

Waiting among the Allied troops was

Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton,

commander of the 5th Division.

Picton had already been wounded at Quatre Bras two days earlier.

At Waterloo he was not dressed in the

standard uniform expected of a general.

He wore civilian clothes and a round hat.

On a battlefield crowded with military dress,

he was an unusual sight.

Not for long.

As the French attack pressed forward,

Picton brought his infantry into the fight.

A musket ball struck him in the temple.

He was killed almost immediately.

The battle moved on around him.

British heavy cavalry then hit parts of d'Erlon's infantry.

The initial effect was devastating.

French formations broke, and eagles were taken.

Then the cavalry continued too far.

The horses were tiring,

formations were losing order,

and French cavalry,

including lancers, struck back.

It became one of the recurring patterns of Waterloo:

a successful local action could become dangerous

very quickly when troops pursued beyond support.

d'Erlon had failed to break Wellington's line.

The Allies had not escaped cheaply.

Picton was dead,

British cavalry had taken serious losses,

and many units had already been fighting hard for hours.

But the ridge was still held.

By the afternoon,

Marshal Michel Ney believed he saw signs

of movement behind Wellington's ridge.

He appears to have concluded that part of

the Allied army might be withdrawing.

Ney was no coward.

That has never been the serious charge against him.

What followed was a problem of judgment and coordination.

French cavalry began moving up the slope.

More formations joined them until large numbers of

horsemen were attacking Wellington's position.

The Allied infantry formed squares.

A square gave cavalry no exposed rear or flank.

Muskets and bayonets faced outward on all sides.

Cavalry was extremely dangerous against infantry

that had broken formation or begun to run.

Against disciplined infantry holding a square,

the problem was different.

The horsemen could ride around the formation.

They could threaten it,

fire into it with pistols,

and force the men to remain tightly packed.

But destroying it usually required

support from artillery or infantry.

At Waterloo, that coordination was not

sufficient to produce the collapse Ney needed.

The French cavalry rode among the squares again and again.

If guns could be moved close enough,

the packed Allied formations offered excellent targets.

But the opportunity was never turned

into a decisive combined attack.

Ney remained close to the action.

A famous tradition, repeated by the Royal Armouries, says

that five horses were killed under him during the battle.

The exact figure belongs to the part of

Waterloo where fact and battlefield legend meet,

which is why it is better treated as “it is said”

rather than as an administrative certainty.

There is little doubt, however, about

Ney's personal exposure to danger.

That is precisely why his performance is

difficult to reduce to a simple judgment.

He was exceptionally brave.

The cavalry attacks were still costly and controversial.

Personal courage could keep Ney in the fight.

It could not by itself solve the

tactical problem in front of him.

While the fighting continued against Wellington,

the eastern side of the battlefield began to change.

The Prussians were arriving. Plancenoit, a village

behind and to the right of Napoleon's main position,

became critical. If the Prussians broke through there,

they could threaten the French flank and the line of retreat.

Napoleon had to send troops to stop them.

Some Guard formations were drawn into that fight.

At the same time,

there was finally good news in the center.

La Haye Sainte fell to the French after a long defense.

French skirmishers and artillery could

now work closer to Wellington's line.

The Anglo-Allied army had been under pressure for hours.

Some formations were exhausted.

Ammunition was becoming a concern in parts of the line.

The battle was not yet settled.

But Napoleon was now trying to break Wellington while

also containing a second army arriving on his right.

The forces required at Plancenoit were

forces unavailable for the main attack.

Late in the day,

Napoleon committed Guard battalions against Wellington's center.

Not every unit of the Old Guard was

marching forward in one formation.

Guard troops had different assignments across the battlefield,

including the struggle against the Prussians.

For the French soldiers watching,

the technical distinction mattered

less than the sight in front of them.

The Guard was going forward.

These were troops Napoleon had usually preserved for

moments when other formations had already been used.

They advanced up the slope under fire.

The Allied defenders waited.

Then came close-range volleys.

The Guard attack slowed.

Some battalions recoiled.

Others tried to hold together

as the situation around them deteriorated.

The military effect of a few battalions

falling back was serious enough.

The psychological effect was worse.

French soldiers were accustomed to seeing the Guard

as the formation still available

when other solutions had failed.

Now men could see Guard units coming back down the slope.

Wellington ordered a general advance.

The Prussians were still pressing from the east.

French formations began to pull back.

In places, the retreat became a rout.

The army that Napoleon had rebuilt over the

previous months was leaving the field.

The Guard's last resistance produced one of the

best-known quotations in military history.

General Pierre Cambronne was later credited

with answering a demand to surrender:

“The Guard dies,

but does not surrender.”

Another version reduced his response to a single word: “Merde.”

Both stories have problems.

Cambronne did not consistently support

the words later attributed to him,

and historians of the Napoleonic period have long

questioned the elegant first version in particular.

That does not make the story useless.

It tells us something about how quickly

Waterloo began to be rewritten in memory.

A confused final resistance became a dramatic last stand.

A disputed exchange became the perfect

final sentence for Napoleon's Guard.

The process of turning the battle into legend had already begun.

Victory did not protect the men standing on Wellington's

side from the physical reality of the battlefield.

Near the end of the fighting, Henry Paget,

Earl of Uxbridge and commander of Wellington's cavalry,

was close to Wellington when artillery fire shattered his leg.

The damage was too severe to save the limb.

It was amputated.

The National Army Museum still holds the

surgical saw associated with the operation.

Accounts of the episode describe

Uxbridge as remarkably composed.

He is even said to have commented that the

saw did not seem particularly sharp.

It is one of those details that makes the distance between

modern memory and nineteenth-century battlefields suddenly

disappear.

A senior cavalry commander could spend the day

directing thousands of horsemen and finish it on a table

while a surgeon removed his leg without modern anesthesia.

After the fighting,

Wellington and Blücher met near La Belle

Alliance. Blücher liked the idea of naming the battle after the place.

“La Belle Alliance” carried an obvious symbolism:

the alliance of armies that had combined to

defeat Napoleon. Wellington used another name. Waterloo.

It was the village where he had

established his headquarters before the battle.

His choice endured.

A relatively ordinary Belgian place-name became

attached to Napoleon's final military defeat and

eventually entered English, and other languages, as a

way of describing a decisive personal disaster.

The battle could have been remembered under another name.

It was not. Napoleon returned to Paris after the defeat.

The political conditions were no longer those of March.

Another march from the coast could not restore the situation.

Coalition armies were approaching,

political support was weakening,

and the army that had been expected to

defend the restored Empire had been defeated.

On June 22,

Napoleon abdicated for the second time.

He declared that the imperial title

passed to his son, Napoleon II.

The boy was four years old.

He was still in Vienna.

There is a harsh symmetry in that ending.

Napoleon had entered Paris on his son's birthday and

spent part of the Hundred Days trying to restore a

dynasty whose heir remained outside France.

When the regime collapsed,

that absent child became emperor in name.

Napoleon himself would eventually surrender

to the British and be sent to Saint Helena.

There would be no second escape like the one from Elba.

Waterloo therefore ended more than a campaign.

It ended Napoleon's practical career as a ruler and commander.

But the battle did not end his presence in European culture.

If anything, it changed its form.

The Napoleon who could appoint ministers,

issue orders and move armies was disappearing.

In the years that followed,

another Napoleon became larger:

the exile, the military genius,

the dictator,

the revolutionary heir,

the tragic emperor,

the man who returned from Elba and forced

Europe to defeat him one final time.

Some of the stories that accumulated around Waterloo were true.

Others were exaggerated.

A few were probably invented. Together

they helped turn a defeated ruler into a historical legend.

Napoleon lost at Waterloo.

His rule ended soon afterward.

His legend did not.