Battle of Waterloo

On 18 June 1815, near the village of Waterloo south of Brussels, Napoleon fought his final battle. Defeat there ended the Hundred Days — his dramatic return from exile on Elba — and closed the door on more than two decades of near-continuous European war.

A race to keep two armies apart

Napoleon's plan depended on speed: strike the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-allied army and Field Marshal Blücher's Prussian army separately, before they could combine against him. Two days earlier, at Ligny, he had mauled Blücher's Prussians; the same day, at Quatre Bras, Marshal Ney fought Wellington's forces to an inconclusive draw. Both allied armies survived, and — critically — the Prussians retreated in a direction that let them regroup and march to Wellington's aid rather than out of the fight entirely.

The battle itself

Heavy overnight rain delayed Napoleon's attack on the 18th, giving the ground time to dry and, unknowingly, giving the Prussians more time to arrive. French assaults through the day focused on the fortified farmhouses of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, anchoring Wellington's ridge position at Mont-Saint-Jean. By late afternoon, Prussian forces began arriving on the French right flank, forcing Napoleon to divert troops to hold them off. A final, desperate assault by Napoleon's elite Imperial Guard against Wellington's line broke against determined resistance — the first time in the Guard's history it had been repulsed — and the French army collapsed into a rout as Prussian forces pressed the pursuit.

The end of the Hundred Days

Napoleon abdicated for the second and final time four days later, on 22 June 1815. He surrendered to the British and was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena, where he would remain until his death in 1821 — read more in Napoleon's Exile: Elba and St Helena. Waterloo's outcome held: the peace settlement negotiated at the Congress of Vienna endured, and Europe's major powers avoided another continent-wide war for decades.

The correspondence from the Hundred Days and the Waterloo campaign itself — orders, dispatches, and the collapsing final days of the campaign — is plotted on the interactive map.