Hundred Days

In the spring of 1815 Napoleon escaped from exile on Elba, retook power in France without a battle and ruled again until his defeat at Waterloo. The period, which ran from his arrival in Paris on 20 March to the return of King Louis XVIII on 8 July, lasted about 110 days and is known as the Hundred Days. The fighting it provoked, the War of the Seventh Coalition, was the final chapter of the Napoleonic Wars and ended with Napoleon's permanent banishment to Saint Helena.

After defeats including the Battle of Leipzig and the fall of Paris in March 1814, Napoleon abdicated on 6 April 1814 and was sent to the small island of Elba off Tuscany. The Bourbon Louis XVIII took the throne. Napoleon watched as the restored monarchy alienated army veterans and as the victorious powers quarrelled at the Congress of Vienna, at one point coming close to blows over Poland and Saxony.

On 26 February 1815 he slipped away with about a thousand men and landed on the French coast between Cannes and Antibes on 1 March. Avoiding royalist Provence, he marched north through the Alps. Troops sent to stop him changed sides: regiments at Grenoble joined him, and on 14 March Marshal Ney, who had promised to bring him back in an iron cage, did the same. Louis XVIII fled, and Napoleon entered Paris on 20 March without a shot fired in his defence.

To widen his support, Napoleon presented himself as a constitutional ruler. A new constitutional act, drafted with the liberal writer Benjamin Constant, created an elected Chamber of Representatives alongside a hereditary upper house and guaranteed press freedom. It was approved in a plebiscite, though turnout was low. A royalist rising in the Vendée in the west was put down in June.

The powers in Vienna declared Napoleon an outlaw on 13 March, and on 25 March Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia each pledged 150,000 men against him, with Britain paying subsidies to make up for its smaller army. Huge Austrian and Russian armies began moving towards the Rhine, but the nearest threats were two forces in Belgium: an Anglo-allied army under the Duke of Wellington and a Prussian army under Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. Rather than wait to be invaded, Napoleon chose to strike them before the rest of the Coalition arrived.

On 15 June the French Army of the North crossed the Sambre at Charleroi, aiming to drive between the two allied armies. On 16 June Napoleon beat Blücher at Ligny while Ney held Wellington at Quatre Bras. Two days later, on 18 June, Wellington's army held its ridge south of Waterloo against repeated French attacks until Prussian corps reached the field in the evening and the French were routed at the Battle of Waterloo.

Napoleon hurried back to Paris, but the chambers refused to back further resistance, and on 22 June he abdicated in favour of his young son. He went to the coast at Rochefort hoping to sail for the United States, but British warships blocked the way, and on 15 July he surrendered to the captain of a Royal Navy ship. Allied troops entered Paris on 7 July and Louis XVIII returned the following day. Elsewhere, Austria had already defeated Napoleon's brother-in-law Joachim Murat, King of Naples, in a brief war that ended in May.

The second Treaty of Paris, signed on 20 November 1815, cut France back to its 1790 borders, imposed an indemnity of 700 million francs and placed an allied army of occupation in the north-east for up to five years. Napoleon was sent to the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died in May 1821.

Our 1815 map shows Europe as redrawn after Napoleon's final defeat, with France reduced to its older borders, and the Kingdom of Prussia, whose army helped decide Waterloo.