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The Hundred Days: Return, Waterloo, and the End of Empire
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Napoleon's catastrophic defeat at Leipzig and the brilliant but futile 1814 campaign set the stage for his abdication — and his most audacious gamble yet. This episode covers the fall of the empire, exile on Elba, and the explosive return of the Hundred Days.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
October eighteenth, eighteen thirteen. The city of Leipzig is burning.
The retreat from Leipzig cost roughly seventy thousand casualties. Disease, combat, and desertion thinned the columns as they moved west.
Napoleon abdicated on April sixth, eighteen fourteen. He signed away the French throne for himself and his heirs, and was granted sovereignty over the small Mediterranean island of Elba, just off the Tuscan coast.
On February twenty-sixth, eighteen fifteen, Napoleon slipped away from Elba with around a thousand soldiers. He landed on the French coast near Cannes on March first.
June eighteenth, eighteen fifteen. The fields south of Brussels, near the village of Waterloo.
He returned to Paris and faced a Senate and a Chamber of Representatives who no longer had any interest in prolonging a fight they couldn't win. He abdicated a second time on June twenty-second, eighteen fifteen.
The legacy of Napoleon Bonaparte doesn't fit neatly into a verdict. He remade the legal architecture of Europe through the Napoleonic Code, which influenced the civil law of dozens of countries and still shapes legal systems today.
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