Battle of Waterloo

The Battle of Waterloo, fought in 1815 in what is now Belgium, ended the career of Napoleon Bonaparte and closed more than two decades of almost continuous warfare in Europe. A coalition army under the Duke of Wellington, together with Prussian forces led by Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, defeated the French emperor on 18 June, ending his brief return to power known as the Hundred Days.

Napoleon had been forced to abdicate in 1814 after the allied powers of Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia defeated him, and he was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba. While diplomats gathered at the Congress of Vienna to redraw the map of Europe, he slipped away from Elba in early 1815 and landed in France. Troops sent to stop him largely joined him instead, and King Louis XVIII fled Paris. The allies declared Napoleon an outlaw and began mobilizing again, while he moved quickly to strike the forces gathering on his northeastern frontier before they could unite.

In mid-June Napoleon advanced into Belgium and fought the Prussians and Wellington's army in separate engagements, defeating Blücher at Ligny while Wellington held at Quatre Bras. The Prussians retreated but were not destroyed, and a detachment of French troops sent to pursue them failed to prevent their return. At Waterloo, south of Brussels, Wellington's mixed British, Dutch, Belgian and German army took up a defensive position along a ridge. Rain had soaked the ground, and the French assault began later than planned. Repeated attacks, including large cavalry charges, failed to break the allied line, and the farmhouse of Hougoumont became the focus of fierce fighting. As Prussian troops arrived on the French right flank in the afternoon and evening, the French position collapsed, and the army fell into retreat. Casualties on all sides were very heavy.

Napoleon abdicated again days later and surrendered to the British, who sent him to the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821. Louis XVIII was restored to the French throne, and a harsher peace settlement was imposed on France than in 1814.

The Congress of Vienna, whose final act was signed just before the battle, shaped European politics for decades. Its leaders sought a balance of power and the suppression of revolutionary upheaval, and the long period without a general continental war that followed is often credited partly to their efforts. Historians still debate how far that stability reflected diplomacy and how far it reflected exhaustion after years of conflict. Waterloo itself passed into language and memory as a byword for decisive defeat.