Waterloo Ends Napoleon: The Duke of Wellington Triumphs

Napoleon's last gamble ended on a rain-soaked field near Waterloo in present-day Belgium on June 18, 1815, when Prussian reinforcements under Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher struck his right flank just as the Duke of Wellington's battered Anglo-allied line was on the verge of breaking. The convergence of two enemy armies, each of which Napoleon had planned to defeat separately, produced the most consequential single day of combat in nineteenth-century European history. Napoleon had escaped exile on Elba and returned to Paris in March 1815, rallying an army of roughly 72,000 veterans for a campaign against the coalition forces assembling in Belgium. His strategy was characteristically aggressive: drive between Wellington's Anglo-Dutch-German force and Blucher's Prussians, defeat each in turn before they could unite. He came close. At Ligny on June 16, Napoleon defeated Blucher's army, but the Prussians retreated in good order rather than being destroyed. Marshal Grouchy, sent to pursue them, lost contact. At Waterloo, Napoleon delayed his main attack until midday to let the waterlogged ground dry, a decision that gave Blucher time to march his battered corps toward the sound of the guns. Wellington's army held a ridge along the Brussels road, centered on the fortified farmhouses of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. The battle raged for nine hours. French infantry and cavalry assaults repeatedly struck the allied line without breaking it. By early evening, Napoleon committed the Imperial Guard, his elite reserve, in a final desperate push. Wellington's troops repulsed them, and when the Guard broke, the entire French army collapsed. Napoleon abdicated four days later and surrendered to the British, who exiled him to Saint Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic where he died in 1821. The Congress of Vienna's redrawn map of Europe held for nearly a century.