Why Did Britain Austria and Russia Declare War on France Again After Napoleon Was Crowned

Illustration by Tim O'Brien

"Come general, the affair is over, nosotros accept lost the day," Napoleon told one of his officers. "Let the states be off." The day was June 18, 1815. By near 8 p.m., the emperor of France knew he had been decisively defeated at a hamlet called Waterloo, and he was now peachy to escape from his enemies, some of whom—such as the Prussians—had sworn to execute him.

Less than an hour earlier, Napoleon had sent eight battalions of his elite Majestic Guard into the attack up the principal Charleroi-to-Brussels road in a desperate try to interruption the line of the Anglo-Allied regular army commanded by the Knuckles of Wellington. But Wellington had repulsed the assault with a massive concentration of firepower. "Bullets and grapeshot left the road strewn with dead and wounded," recalled a French eyewitness. The baby-sit stopped, staggered and fell back. A shocked—indeed, astounded—cry went up from the remainder of the French Army, one unheard on any European battlefield in the unit'south 16-twelvemonth history: "La Garde recule!" ("The Guard recoils!")

The next cry spelled disaster for any hopes Napoleon might have had for an orderly retreat: "Sauve qui peut!" ("Relieve yourselves!"). Across the three-mile battlefront men threw downwardly their muskets and fled, terrified of the Prussian lancers who were beingness ordered to pursue them with their eight-pes spears. In mid-June, darkness would not descend on that office of Europe for hours. Soon general panic set in.

"The whole army was in the most appalling disorder," recalled Gen. Jean-Martin Petit. "Infantry, cavalry, artillery—everybody was fleeing in all directions." Napoleon had ordered 2 squares of the Royal Guard to form up on both sides of the highway to cover such a rout, and he took refuge inside ane of them equally his army complanate. "The enemy was close at our heels," wrote Petit, who commanded the squares, "and, fearing that he might penetrate the squares, nosotros were obliged to fire at the men who were being pursued."

Taking a few trusted aides with him, besides equally a squadron of light cavalry for personal protection, Napoleon left the square on horseback for the farmhouse at Le Caillou where he had breakfasted that forenoon, full of hopes for victory. There he transferred into his carriage. In the crush of fugitives on the road exterior the boondocks of Genappe he had to abandon it for a horse one time once more, although there were so many people that he could inappreciably go at much more a walking step.

"Of personal fright there was not the slightest trace," one of Napoleon's entourage, the Comte de Flahaut, wrote afterward. But the emperor was "so overcome by fatigue and the exertion of the preceding days that several times he was unable to resist the sleepiness which overcame him, and if I had non been there to uphold him, he would take fallen from his equus caballus." By 5 a.thousand. on June 19 they stopped by a burn some soldiers had made in a meadow. As Napoleon warmed himself he said to 1 of his generals, "Eh bien, monsieur, we have washed a fine affair." It's a sign of his extraordinary sangfroid that even and then, he was able to joke, nevertheless glumly.

Timeline of Napoleon's Life

1769 - Birth

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Letizia di Bunoaparte barely makes it home from church building in time to give nascence to Napoleon, her fourth kid, on August fifteen (right, his birth certificate).

1785 - Commissioning as Second Lieutenant

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Napoleon completes the ii-twelvemonth artillery program at the École Militaire in one year; is commissioned a second lieutenant at age sixteen.

1789 - Storming of the Bastille

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"Calm will return" in a calendar month, he writes, but the storming of the Bastille unleashes a decade of violence.

1791 - King Louis XVI Captured

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King Louis XVI is captured trying to escape French republic. "This country is full of zeal and burn," writes Napoleon, now a first lieutenant and a proponent of the French Revolution.

1793 - French Authorities Guillotines Louis

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The French government guillotines Louis; Napoleon laments, "Had the French been more moderate and non put Louis to death, all Europe would accept been revolutionized."

1793 - Liberation of Toulon

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Even with his horse shot out from under him, Napoleon liberates the French port of Toulon from monarchist forces; is promoted to brigadier general at age 24.

1794 - Imprisonment on Suspicion of Treason

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As some of his patrons are executed during France's Reign of Terror, Napoleon is imprisoned on suspicion of treason but released 11 days later for lack of bear witness. He remains faithful to the ethics of the Revolution.

1795 - Insurrection in Paris

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He uses artillery to quell an insurrection in Paris, proverb, "The rabble must exist moved by terror."

1796 - Wedlock to Joséphine de Beauharnais

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He marries Joséphine de Beauharnais, a widow with two children, and leaves two days subsequently to conquer Italy; she cuckolds him inside weeks.

1799 - Becoming Start Delegate

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Afterwards a coup, Napoleon becomes start consul; in 1804 he is declared emperor, to exist succeeded past an heir.

1809 - Wedlock to Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise

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"You have children, I accept none," he tells Joséphine as they divorce; he shortly marries the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise, who bears an heir.

1814 - Exile to Elba

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Enemy forces have Paris and restore the monarchy every bit Napoleon retreats from Moscow; he is exiled to Elba, which he calls an "operetta kingdom."

1815 - Escape to Paris

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Napoleon escapes to Paris; King Louis Xviii flees; Europe's monarchies call Napoleon "a disturber of the world" and unite to crush him.

1821 - Death

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He dies of cancer at age 51 on St. Helena; while in exile there, he had said, "If I had gone to America, we might have founded a Land at that place."

There was no denying that the Battle of Waterloo had been catastrophic. Except for the Boxing of Borodino, which Napoleon had fought in Russia in his disastrous 1812 entrada, this was the costliest single day of the 23 years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Between 25,000 and 31,000 Frenchmen were killed or wounded, and vast numbers more were captured. Of Napoleon'south 64 well-nigh senior generals, no fewer than 26 were casualties. The losses for the Allies were astringent, too—Wellington lost 17,200 men, the Prussian commander Marshal Gebhard von Blücher a further 7,000. Within a month, the disaster toll Napoleon his throne.

Walking the battlefield today, it'southward all also easy to understand why he lost. From the 140-pes-high Lion'south Mound, which was congenital in the 1820s on top of Wellington'south front line, ane tin can see what Napoleon could non: the woods to the east from which 50,000 Prussians started to emerge at 1 p.k. to stave in the French right flank, plus the two stone farmhouses of La Haie Sainte and Hougoumont, which disrupted and funneled the French set on for most of the day.

A vast amount of literature has explored why Napoleon fought such an unimaginative, error-prone boxing at Waterloo. Hundreds of thousands of historians accept pored over the questions of why he attacked when, where and how he attacked. Even so 200 years later the fact, a different question must be asked: Why was the Battle of Waterloo even fought? Was it really necessary to secure the peace and security of Europe?

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The future emperor of the French didn't learn to speak their linguistic communication until he was sent to boarding school at the historic period of nine. It was not his 2d language, but his third. Napoleone di Buonaparte was born on August 15, 1769, on the island of Corsica; for centuries a backwater province of Genoa, it had been sold to the French the previous year. He grew up speaking the corsicano dialect and Italian, and his name was Gaulified to Napoleon Bonaparte every bit he and his family painfully accommodated themselves to French rule. In fact, he was extremely anti-French until the age of 20, going through a period of adolescent angst in which he identified them equally the enemy of his beloved freedom-loving Corsica.

Napoleon's charming just indolent father, Carlo, died of cancer when Napoleon was only 15; the schoolboy had to mature early to aid take care of his near bankrupt family unit. Yet at the military academy at Brienne he still had fourth dimension to read and reread Goethe's romantic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, identifying with its honest but tragic hero. He later wrote his own melodramatic novel, Clisson and Eugénie, whose protagonist is a brilliant soldier crossed in love by a gorgeous just faithless beauty, clearly based on Eugénie Désirée Clary, a girlfriend who had recently refused his offer of wedlock.

His contempt for the French nevertheless, the youthful Napoleon primarily identified with the Enlightenment and the dreams of Rousseau and Voltaire. That both were forced into exile past the French State only increased their appeal for him, every bit did their praise for the Corsican experiment that had been snuffed out the twelvemonth before Napoleon was born. He besides drew inspiration from the American Revolutionaries, who finally triumphed when Napoleon was an impressionable 14. (After George Washington died, in 1799, the recently installed French leader ordered that his nation get into ten days of mourning, compared with a mere two days after his outset wife, the empress Joséphine, died xv years later.) The French Revolution broke out with the autumn of the Guardhouse when Napoleon was nearly 20; he eagerly embraced the Enlightenment ideas it at to the lowest degree initially represented.

Napoleon's years at Brienne and then at the École Militaire in Paris (nigh where the Eiffel Tower is today) taught him the essence of modern warcraft. He put that knowledge to invaluable use in defence of the Revolution at the Battle of Toulon in 1793, which won him promotion to a generalship at the age of 24. Overall, he would win no fewer than 48 of the threescore battles he fought, cartoon five and losing only vii (three of which were comparatively minor), establishing him as 1 of the greatest military commanders of all time.

Nevertheless he said he would be remembered not for his military victories, but for his domestic reforms, particularly the Code Napoleon, that brilliant distillation of 42 competing and often contradictory legal codes into a single, easily comprehensible torso of French law. In fact, Napoleon's years as showtime consul, from 1799 to 1804, were extraordinarily peaceful and productive. He besides created the educational system based on lycées and grandes écoles and the Sorbonne, which put French republic at the forefront of European educational accomplishment. He consolidated the administrative arrangement based on departments and prefects. He initiated the Council of State, which still vets the laws of France, and the Court of Inspect, which oversees its public accounts. He organized the Banque de France and the Légion d'Honneur, which thrive today. He besides built or renovated much of the Parisian compages that we still savor, both the useful—the quays along the Seine and four bridges over information technology, the sewers and reservoirs—and the beautiful, such as the Arc de Triomphe, the Rue de Rivoli and the Vendôme column.

Not to the lowest degree, Napoleon negotiated the 1803 sale to the nascent U.s. of the vast territory called the Louisiana Buy. Americans are familiar with their side of the deal: It doubled their territory overnight at less than four cents an acre and instantly established the country "amidst the powers of first rank," as Robert R. Livingston, President Thomas Jefferson's chief negotiator, put it. But the French averted war with the Usa over its inevitable expansion west, and the fourscore million francs they received allowed Napoleon to rebuild France, peculiarly its regular army.

Napoleon crowned himself emperor on December 2, 1804, turning the French Commonwealth into the French Empire, with a Bonaparte line of succession. He felt that this provision for continuity was prudent, given that the Bourbons launched a series of assassination attempts on him—30 in all. Yet this return to monarchy did not alleviate the ancien régime powers' rancor over the French occupation of lands in Germany and Italy that had belonged to Austria for decades. In September 1805, Republic of austria invaded Napoleon'southward ally Bavaria, and Russia declared state of war on French republic as well. Napoleon swiftly won the ensuing War of the Third Coalition with his finest victory, at Austerlitz in 1805. The adjacent yr the Prussians also declared war on him, but they were soundly defeated at Jena; Napoleon'southward peace treaty of Tilsit with Russia and Prussia followed. The Austrians declared state of war on French republic once more in 1809, only were dispatched at the Battle of Wagram and signed yet some other peace treaty.

Napoleon started none of those wars, but he won all of them. After 1809 there was an uneasy peace with the three other Continental powers, simply in 1812 he responded to France's being cut out of Russian markets—in violation of the Tilsit terms—by invading Russian federation. That ended in the catastrophic retreat from Moscow, which cost him more than half a meg casualties and left his Grande Armée too vitiated to deter Austria and Prussia from joining his enemies Russia and Britain in 1813.

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Napoleon'due south relationship with Joséphine was not the Romeo-and-Juliet story often told. Before long before their marriage, in March 1796, he was appointed commander in principal of the Army of Italy, where he won an astonishing serial of more than a dozen victories against Austria, the papacy and local states, all the while writing her scores of erotic, emotionally needy love letters, even while nether enemy burn down. Merely within weeks his bride took a lover in Paris—the dandyish cavalry officer Lt. Hippolyte Charles, whom one of their contemporaries said "had the elegance of a wigmaker'due south boy." When Napoleon finally found out virtually the affair two years subsequently, he was in the center of the Egyptian desert, on his way to Cairo. He responded past bedding Pauline Fourès, the wife of one of his junior officers—the first of no fewer than 22 mistresses over the adjacent 17 years.

When he returned to Paris a year subsequently, Napoleon unexpectedly forgave Joséphine, and they created what amounted—his mistresses excepted—to a loving bourgeois family environment in which to raise Joséphine'due south children past an earlier wedlock at their palaces of Malmaison, Fontainebleau, the Tuileries and elsewhere. Information technology was only in 1809, when it had become clear that Joséphine could not comport the son Napoleon needed to proceed the Bonaparte dynasty, that he reluctantly divorced her and the next year married the Archduchess Marie Louise von Habsburg, the girl of Emperor Francis I of Austria. She quickly bore a son, the king of Rome.

Napoleon later said he greatly regretted non marrying instead the sister of Czar Alexander I of Russian federation, assertive—probably wrongly—that he would not have had to invade Russia in 1812. In any effect, after he retreated from Moscow, the Continental powers and the British pursued his army into France. The emperor's military machine skill was intact—he won four victories in five days in the Champagne region in February 1814—simply he could non forestall his boyhood friend and longtime comrade in arms Marshal Auguste de Marmont from surrendering Paris to the Austrians, Prussians and Russians the adjacent month. Napoleon abdicated rather than plunge France into a civil war. He was exiled to the tiny Mediterranean isle of Elba in May.

That calendar month Louis XVIII, the head of the Bourbon family, returned to French republic "in the baggage train of the Allies," equally the contemptuous but essentially accurate Bonapartist phrase put information technology. The Bourbons began ruling in France for the first fourth dimension since Louis' elder blood brother Louis XVI and his sister-in-law Marie Antoinette had been guillotined some 21 years earlier. As Napoleon adjusted to life ruling a much-reduced domain, he kept a shut heart on what was happening in France.

It was said of the Bourbons that they "had learned nil and forgotten nothing" when they returned to power. They had non learned from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire that the French people had changed profoundly and at present took for granted meritocracy, low straight revenue enhancement, secular teaching and a certain degree of military glory. Nor had the Bourbons forgotten the expropriations and executions suffered past the royal family unit, the aristocracy and the Cosmic Church during the Reign of Terror in the 1790s. As a upshot, they returned to French republic ill-prepared to effect a grand settlement that could reconcile the contesting demands of the army, clergy, elite, peasantry, merchants, Bonapartists, liberals, ex-revolutionaries and conservatives.

Perhaps the chore was impossible, but after 9 months it became clear, even on distant Elba, that Louis Xviii had failed. Napoleon was emboldened to take the concluding and greatest gamble of his life.

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"Is this fair? Is this useful?" Napoleon asked every bit he led the discussions that modernized France's legal organisation. Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Fine art Resource, NY

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As gainsay at Waterloo ground on, "ane saw on Napoleon's face a await of disquietude," an aide wrote. Pictured here is a re-enactor in an aide-de-camp's uniform, photographed by Sam Faulkner for "Unseen Waterloo," his exhibition and book of portraits marking the battle's bicentennial. ©Sam Faulkner / NB Pictures-Contact press images

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Hulton Annal / Getty Images

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Victor Hugo wrote of the Waterloo battleground (seen from atop the Lion'south Mound) as a "morne plaine"—a "dreary plain." VPC Travel Photo / Alamy

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On February 26, 1815, he secretly boarded the largest ship in his tiny fleet and sailed to Golfe-Juan, on the south coast of France. The British and Bourbon frigates in the expanse didn't learn of his escape until it was too late. Landing on March 1, Napoleon struck north with the 600 Majestic Guardsmen he had brought with him, over mount passes and through tiny villages, sometimes on pes when the paths were too steep and narrow to ride downwards. The route he took from Cannes to Grenoble—today mapped out every bit the Route Napoleon for tourists, hikers and cyclists—is one of the loveliest (if more vertiginous) trails in the state.

Of class Louis XVIII sent armies to arrest him. But the commanders, Marshals Nicolas Soult and Michel Ney, and their men switched sides the moment they came into contact with the charisma of their quondam sovereign. On March twenty, Napoleon reached the Tuileries Palace in Paris—on the site of the Louvre today—and was acclaimed by the populace. Col. Léon-Michel Routier, who was chatting with fellow officers nearby, recalled: "Suddenly very simple carriages without any escort showed upwardly at the wicket-gate by the river and the emperor was announced....The carriages enter, we all rush around them and we see Napoleon get out. And then everyone's in delirium; we spring on him in disorder, we surround him, we squeeze him, we almost suffocate him." It was a "magical arrival, the consequence of a road of over two hundred leagues traveled in eighteen days on French soil without spilling ane drop of blood."

That nighttime Napoleon sabbatum down to eat the dinner that had been cooked for Louis XVIII, who had fled Paris only hours before. Not 1 shot had been fired in the Bourbons' defense. "Never earlier in history," said Parisian wags, "has an emperor won an empire simply by showing his hat." (Napoleon'south bicorn hat had long been one of his many instantly recognizable symbols. This by November, one of his hats was auctioned to a South Korean businessman for $two.4 one thousand thousand.)

The Allies reacted with shocked disbelief. They were gathered at a congress in Vienna when news of his escape reached them on March 7, but initially the representatives of Republic of austria, Russia, Britain and Prussia had no thought where he had gone. Once they established four days later that Napoleon had returned to French republic, they issued what has been called the Vienna Declaration: "Past actualization again in France with projects of defoliation and disorder, he has deprived himself of the protection of the constabulary and has manifested earlier the world that there can be neither peace nor truce with him. The Powers consequently declare that Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself beyond the stake of civil and social relations, and that every bit an enemy and disturber of the repose of the world, he has delivered himself up to public vengeance."

This linguistic communication, which seems extremely tough to modern ears, was a compromise from a draft offered by the French government, "which virtually called Napoleon a wild fauna and invited any peasant lad or maniac to shoot him downwardly at sight," every bit the historian Enno Due east. Kraehe afterward put information technology. The Austrian chancellor, Prince Klemens von Metternich, softened the diction because Napoleon was still the son-in-law of the emperor of Republic of austria, and the Duke of Wellington denounced the linguistic communication as encouraging the bump-off of monarchs. All the same, the declaration clearly foreclosed any negotiation.

On Apr 4 Napoleon wrote to the Allies, "After presenting the spectacle of not bad campaigns to the world, from now on information technology will be more pleasant to know no other rivalry than that of the benefits of peace, of no other struggle than the holy conflict of the happiness of peoples." By then the Allies had already formed the Seventh Coalition to destroy him and restore the Bourbons to the French throne, in defiance of the wishes the French people had expressed in a referendum. Thus they made the Waterloo entrada as inevitable every bit it was ultimately unnecessary.

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The foremost motive that the British, Austrians, Prussians, Russians and lesser powers publicly gave for declaring state of war was that Napoleon couldn't be trusted to keep the peace. As one British member of Parliament put it, peace "must e'er be uncertain with such a human, and...whilst he reigns, would require a constant armament, and hostile preparations more intolerable than war itself." That may have been true during his royal menstruation, simply this time effectually Napoleon's beliefs suggested that the Allies could have taken him at his discussion.

He told his council that he had renounced any dream of reconstituting the empire and that "henceforth the happiness and the consolidation" of French republic "shall be the object of all my thoughts." He refrained from taking measures against anyone who had betrayed him the previous yr. "Of all that individuals take done, written or said since the taking of Paris," he proclaimed, "I shall forever remain ignorant." He immediately set about instituting a new liberal constitution incorporating trial by jury, freedom of spoken language and a bicameral legislature that curtailed some of his ain powers; it was written by the quondam opposition politician Benjamin Constant, whom he had one time sent into internal exile.

Napoleon well knew that after 23 years of almost constant state of war, the French people wanted no more of information technology. His greatest hope was for a peaceful menses similar his days as get-go consul, in which he could re-institute the legitimacy of his dynasty, return the nation'due south battered economic system to strength and restore the ceremonious lodge the Bourbons had disturbed.

And so he resumed building various public works in Paris, including the elephant fountain at the Bastille, a new marketplace at St. Germain, the foreign ministry at the Quai d'Orsay, and the Louvre. He sent the actor François-Joseph Talma to teach at the Conservatory, which the Bourbons had closed, and also returned to their government jobs Vivant Denon, the director of the Louvre; the painter Jacques-Louis David; the architect Pierre Fontaine; and the physician Jean-Nicolas Corvisart. On March 31, he visited the orphaned daughters of members of the Légion d'Honneur, whose schoolhouse at Saint-Denis had had its funding cutting by the Bourbons. That aforementioned day he restored the University of French republic to its old basis, appointing the Comte de Lacépède equally chancellor. At a concert at the Tuileries he kindled a romance with the historic 36-year-old actress and beauty Anne Hippolyte Boutet Salvetat (whose stage name was Mademoiselle Mars).

All that Napoleon achieved in just 12 weeks after he returned to Paris—even every bit he prepared for the war the Allies had declared on him.

Like the Bourbons, they were in no mood to forgive or forget. In add-on to their alleged distrust, they had less-public motives for moving confronting him. The autocratic rulers of Russia, Prussia and Republic of austria wanted to crush the revolutionary ideas for which Napoleon stood, including meritocracy, equality before the police, anti-bullwork and religious toleration. Essentially, they wanted to turn the clock back to a time when Europe was safe for elite. At this they succeeded—until the outbreak of the Great War a century after.

The British had long enjoyed most of the key Enlightenment values, having beheaded King Charles I 140 years before the French guillotined Louis XVI, but they had other reasons for wanting to destroy Napoleon. Anything that distracted the British public's attending from Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans in Jan 1815 was very welcome, not to the lowest degree because the British commander at that place, Gen. Edward Pakenham, was the Duke of Wellington's brother-in-law. More gravely, Britain and French republic had fought each other for no fewer than 56 years in the preceding 125, and Napoleon himself had posed a threat of invasion earlier Lord Nelson destroyed the French and Castilian fleets at Trafalgar in 1805. With the French threat removed, the British were able to sign a peace treaty securing strategically important points effectually the world, such every bit Greatcoat Boondocks, Jamaica and Sri Lanka, from which they could projection their maritime ability into a new empire to supervene upon the 1 they'd lost in America. They, too, succeeded, building the largest empire in earth history, which by the dawn of the 20th century covered well-nigh a quarter of the world'due south land surface. The British could have achieved those goals even if they'd left Napoleon alone; they had total control of the oceans.

Once it became clear that the Allies were amassing huge armies to invade France and depose him once again, Napoleon acted swiftly, leaving Paris on June 12 and hit n to defeat the Anglo-Allied army nether Wellington and the Prussian Army under von Blücher before the Austrian and Russian armies, totaling half a million men, could arrive.

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Wellington later described the Boxing of Waterloo as "the nearest-run thing yous e'er saw in your life." Initially, the French outnumbered their opponents, peculiarly in artillery. They were a homogeneous national force, and their morale was loftier, since they believed their commander was the greatest soldier since Julius Caesar. The kickoff stages of the Waterloo campaign too saw Napoleon returning to the best of his strategic abilities. He wanted to fight in mod-day Kingdom of belgium (then officially known as the Austrian Netherlands, though they no longer belonged to Republic of austria) because the British and Prussian troops were far apart, and considering capturing Brussels would be a nifty boost to French morale and might forcefulness the British Ground forces off the Continent altogether. By achieving a brilliant feint toward the west, he managed to steal a solar day's march on Wellington. "Napoleon has humbugged me, by God," the Briton exclaimed.

Napoleon wanted to strike at the hinge betwixt the Prussian and British armies, as he had washed on other battlefields for nearly 20 years, and at starting time it seemed equally if he'd succeeded. At the Battle of Ligny on June 16, he pinned the Prussians in place with a frontal attack and ordered a corps of 20,000 men under Gen. Jean-Baptiste d'Erlon to fall on the enemy's exposed right flank. Had d'Erlon arrived as planned, it would have turned a respectable victory for Napoleon into a devastating rout of the Prussians. Instead, just as he was about to appoint, d'Erlon received urgent orders from Marshal Ney to back up Ney miles to the west, and so d'Erlon marched.

"Incomprehensible day," Napoleon subsequently said of that fateful June 18, admitting that he "did not thoroughly sympathize the battle," the loss of which he blamed on "a combination of extraordinary Fates." In fact, it was not incomprehensible at all: Napoleon divide his ground forces disastrously the day before the battle, put his senior marshals in the wrong roles, failed to attack early plenty in the morning time, didn't discern that the Prussians were going to arrive in the afternoon, launched his major infantry assault in the wrong germination and his major cavalry assault at the incorrect time (and unsupported by infantry and horse artillery), and unleashed his Regal Guard too belatedly. As he told one of his captors the post-obit year: "In war, the game is always with him who commits the fewest faults." At Waterloo, that was undoubtedly Wellington.

If Napoleon had remained emperor of France for the six years remaining in his natural life, European civilization would have benefited inestimably. The reactionary Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Republic of austria would not have been able to beat out liberal constitutionalist movements in Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere; pressure level to join France in abolishing slavery in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean would have grown; the benefits of meritocracy over feudalism would accept had time to become more widely appreciated; Jews would non take been forced back into their ghettos in the Papal States and made to wear the yellow star over again; encouragement of the arts and sciences would accept been improve understood and copied; and the plans to rebuild Paris would have been implemented, making information technology the most gorgeous city in the world.

Napoleon deserved to lose Waterloo, and Wellington to win information technology, but the essential point in this bicentenary year is that the ballsy battle did non need to be fought—and the world would have been better off if it hadn't been.

Napoleon: A Life

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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/we-better-off-napoleon-never-lost-waterloo-180955298/

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