The Battle of Waterloo

The short analysis

On a rain-soaked ridge south of Brussels, the fate of Europe was settled in a single afternoon. Napoleon Bonaparte had escaped exile on Elba, reconstituted an army, and forced the great powers into a race to concentrate forces against him before he could pick them apart. He very nearly succeeded. At Waterloo, he faced a mixed Allied army under the Duke of Wellington holding a defensive line, with Prussian forces under Gebhard von Blücher marching hard from the east after their bruising encounter with Napoleon two days earlier at Ligny. The French attacks were fierce and at moments looked likely to break Wellington's line, but a combination of disciplined Allied defence, the late arrival of the Imperial Guard's repulse, and the accelerating Prussian pressure on Napoleon's flank turned near-victory into catastrophe. The French army collapsed as evening fell, and Napoleon abdicated shortly afterward. He spent the rest of his life in remote exile on Saint Helena. What followed mattered as much as the battle itself. The Congress of Vienna's architects, working through the summer and autumn of 1814 and into 1815, produced a settlement built on balance rather than revenge, and the European order it established held, with significant stresses but without general war, until 1914. Waterloo was not simply a military event; it was the hinge on which two centuries turned.