What if napoleon waterloo

Napoleon abdicated rather than plunge France into a civil war. He was exiled to the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba in May. As Napoleon adjusted to life ruling a much-reduced domain, he kept a close eye on what was happening in France. They had not learned from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire that the French people had changed profoundly and now took for granted meritocracy, low direct taxation, secular education and a certain degree of military glory.

Nor had the Bourbons forgotten the expropriations and executions suffered by the royal family, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church during the Reign of Terror in the s.

As a result, they returned to France ill-prepared to effect a grand settlement that could reconcile the contesting demands of the army, clergy, aristocracy, peasantry, merchants, Bonapartists, liberals, ex-revolutionaries and conservatives.

Napoleon was emboldened to take the last and greatest gamble of his life. On February 26, , he secretly boarded the largest ship in his tiny fleet and sailed to Golfe-Juan, on the south coast of France. Landing on March 1, Napoleon struck north with the Imperial Guardsmen he had brought with him, over mountain passes and through tiny villages, sometimes on foot when the paths were too steep and narrow to ride down.

The route he took from Cannes to Grenoble—today mapped out as the Route Napoleon for tourists, hikers and cyclists—is one of the loveliest if more vertiginous trails in the country. 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 former sovereign. On March 20, Napoleon reached the Tuileries Palace in Paris—on the site of the Louvre today—and was acclaimed by the populace.

The carriages enter, we all rush around them and we see Napoleon get out. 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 Austria, Russia, Britain and Prussia had no idea where he had gone. The Powers consequently declare that Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself beyond the pale of civil and social relations, and that as an enemy and disturber of the tranquility of the world, he has delivered himself up to public vengeance.

Kraehe later put it. The Austrian chancellor, Prince Klemens von Metternich, softened the wording because Napoleon was still the son-in-law of the emperor of Austria, and the Duke of Wellington denounced the language as encouraging the assassination of monarchs.

Nonetheless, the declaration clearly foreclosed any negotiation. Thus they made the Waterloo campaign as inevitable as it was ultimately unnecessary. Napoleon well knew that after 23 years of almost constant war, the French people wanted no more of it. And so he resumed building various public works in Paris, including the elephant fountain at the Bastille, a new marketplace at St.

At a concert at the Tuileries he kindled a romance with the celebrated year-old actress and beauty Anne Hippolyte Boutet Salvetat whose stage name was Mademoiselle Mars. Some time later, the UK plays neutral and adopts practices of the French empire. Right-hand drive and the metric system are implemented across the Channel. Fiction, yes, and we can imagine and invent other scenarios. A victory at Waterloo would only stall the inevitable defeat — even weakened coalition countries would have done everything possible to halt the march of the emperor.

In reality, on that day, June 18, , nothing was as it should be: the chain of command was faulty and the weather was erratic.

They both failed to attack and annihilate the enemy while their armies were separated. The day before the battle, a flood had engulfed the Walloon countryside.

The soggy, muddy field made maneuvers difficult that day. They had reason to be suspicious, but instead of waiting and seeing they launched an all out assault on France in an effort to get him out of the way.

Andrews argues, and I agree, that their aim was not defensive but actively reactionary. His liberalized and modernized France posed a threat to the preservation of the traditional powers of monarchy, nobility, and church. They sought to tamp out the fires of reform and revolution before it reared up in their own domains.

It was an unprovoked, preemptive strike. Andrews concludes his Smithsonian article with this assessment of what might have been if Waterloo had turned out differently:. 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 Austria would not have been able to crush liberal constitutionalist movements in Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere; pressure to join France in abolishing slavery in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean would have grown; the benefits of meritocracy over feudalism would have had time to become more widely appreciated; Jews would not have been forced back into their ghettos in the Papal States and made to wear the yellow star again; encouragement of the arts and sciences would have been better understood and copied; and the plans to rebuild Paris would have been implemented, making it the most gorgeous city in the world.

What followed his loss was a century of reaction across the continent of Europe. The Bourbons were restored and the liberal gains in Germany, Spain, Austria and Italy were rolled back. Royalist statesmen such as Metternich and Bismarck aggressively defended their regimes against reform efforts by liberals and Marxists alike. These regimes persisted until the First World War, which they precipitated and which eventually brought them all down — Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs, and Ottomans.

The reactions to the fall of these monarchies in turn set the stage for the Second World War. You can only play out historical counterfactuals so far, before the chain of contingencies becomes too long and the analysis turns wholly speculative.

But it seems quite reasonable to me to think that, if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, this history would have played out quite differently. Yet the war was far from over and he would have to decide where to head next.

Had he returned to France to secure his domestic position and take a more defensive approach, Napoleon may have delayed the next battle. Decades of revolution , the Terror, and the rise and fall of his empire had left the country bitterly divided, though, and he could not rely on the citizenry for support, many of whom remained loyal to the republic or the monarchy.

That left Napoleon with major shortcomings both before and after Waterloo. As emperor of France up until , he had been able to draw on the resources of Europe to build and sustain his army.

Since returning from exile on Elba, he only had France. While many soldiers remained fiercely loyal to him, not everyone rushed to rally to the returned emperor. Napoleon had limited resources and his army suffered, notably in the quality of its commanders.

The allied nations, meanwhile, were united against Napoleon. As he had launched a military campaign virtually right away, he only cemented beliefs among the likes of Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia that he posed a danger to the security and peace of Europe.