Hundred Days

The Hundred Days was the period between Napoleon's return from Elba and his second abdication, roughly March to July 1815, ending twenty-three years of revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare. Landing near Cannes with about a thousand men on 1st March, Napoleon won over the troops sent to stop him and entered Paris on 20th March without firing a shot, as Louis XVIII fled. He hurriedly raised a new army and struck into Belgium, winning at Ligny and Quatre Bras before meeting Wellington at Waterloo on 18th June. The defeat there was total, and on 22nd June he abdicated in favour of his son. The allies restored Louis XVIII and exiled Napoleon to Saint Helena. The episode showed both his undimmed charisma and the impossibility of his position: Europe would no longer tolerate him, and France, exhausted by war, gave him only raw recruits. The restored Bourbons treated the returning soldiers with suspicion, and the White Terror in the south settled scores that festered for a generation.