On this day in 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte met his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, in Belgium.
Napoleon had been defeated previously by the Sixth Coalition and exiled to the island of Elba. But the allowance guaranteed to him by the Treaty of Fontainebleau was cut off and rumors circulated that he was to be transferred to a remote island in the Atlantic. Napoleon escaped from Elba and thus began the Hundred Days, as he tried to regain power in France.
By the start of June 1815 the armed forces available to him had reached 200,000, and he decided to go on the offensive to attempt to drive a wedge between the oncoming British and Prussian armies. The French Army of the North crossed the frontier into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, in modern-day Belgium
Napoleon and Michael Ney led the French army of around 69,000 troops against the Duke of Wellington who commanded 67,000 multinational — British, Dutch, Belgian, and German — troops, and the added forces of Gebhard von Blücher’s 48,000-strong Prussian army. Napoleon planned to attack each of them separately in the hope of destroying them before they could join in a coordinated invasion of France with other members of the Seventh Coalition.
On 16 June, Napoleon successfully attacked the bulk of the Prussian army at the Battle of Ligny with his main force, causing the Prussians to withdraw northwards on 17 June, but parallel to Wellington and in good order. Napoleon sent a third of his forces to pursue the Prussians, which resulted in the separate Battle of Wavre with the Prussian rear-guard on 18–19 June, and prevented that French force from participating at Waterloo. Also on 16 June, a small portion of the French army contested the Battle of Quatre Bras with the Anglo-allied army. The Anglo-allied army held their ground on 16 June, but the withdrawal of the Prussians caused Wellington to withdraw north to Waterloo on 17 June.
Upon learning that the Prussian army was able to support him, Wellington decided to offer battle on the Mont-Saint-Jean escarpment across the Brussels road, near the village of Waterloo. It had rained heavily on the night of June 17, so Napoleon delayed the start of the battle from early morning until midday, to give the ground time to dry out. That delay was a crucial miscalculation as it gave the Prussian army time to move toward the battlefield.
Wellington withstood repeated attacks by the French throughout the afternoon of 18 June, aided by the progressively arriving Prussians who attacked the French flank and inflicted heavy casualties. In the evening Napoleon assaulted the Anglo-allied line with his last reserves, the senior infantry battalions of the French Imperial Guard. With the Prussians breaking through on the French right flank, the Anglo-allied army repulsed the Imperial Guard, and the French army was routed.
Waterloo was the decisive engagement of the Waterloo Campaign and Napoleon's last battle. According to Wellington, the battle was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life". Napoleon abdicated four days later in favor of his son but that didn't last long. Coalition forces entered Paris on 7 July.
Allegedly, Napoleon tried to escape to North America, but the Royal Navy was blockading French ports to forestall such a move. He finally surrendered to Captain Frederick Maitland of HMS Bellerophon on 15 July. Louis XVIII was restored to the throne of France and Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena, one of the most isolated islands in the world, 2000 miles from anywhere. There he died in 1821. The Treaty of Paris was signed on 20 November 1815 imposing punitive indemnities on France for the cost of the war and subsequent occupation, and reducing its borders.
One of the articles of the Treaty addressed the issue of slavery. It reaffirmed the Declaration of the Powers, on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, of 8th of February 1815 (Which also formed ACT, No. XV. of the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna) and added that the governments of the contracting parties should "without loss of time, ... [find] the most effectual measures for the entire and definitive abolition of a Commerce so odious, and so strongly condemned by the laws of religion and of nature." The French Republic had repealed slavery but when Napoleon first seized power in 1799, he restored it to increase income from the French sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
To enforce the treaty, Britain began patrolling the Atlantic and the coast of Africa, stopping slave ships wherever they could. By 1840, the transatlantic slave was essentially dead. This loss of slave traffic was, in fact, one of the casus belli of the Civil War. The last slave ship, a smuggler, docked in Mobile, Alabama in 1859. Five years later, slavery was finally abolished in the United States.
The original topography of the battlefield is long gone, but here is a panorama of what it looks like today.
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