Waterloo The Hundred Days

Presents an account of the battle, and discusses the organization behind the French and Allied Armies, their commanders, strategy, tactics, and weapons.

Napoleon has escaped from Elba – the Hundred Days have begun.

Now in paperback, Napoleon’s return to the throne in Paris, as imagined by the incomparable Joseph Roth Joseph Roth paints a vivid portrait of Emperor Napoleon’s last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica—an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates. Roth’s signature lyrical elegance and haunting atmospheric details sing in The Hundred Days. “There may be,” as James Wood has stated, “no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile.”

A riveting narrative of the events from Napoleon's return from Elba through the battle of Waterloo, but above all it is a sparkling portrait gallery of the personalities who shaped those events.

Describes events following Napoleon's return from Elba leading up to the Battle of Waterloo, and provides a detailed chronicle of the Waterloo campaign, with maps providing a visual presentation of troop movements.

Illustrated with 30 maps, portraits and diagrams of the Waterloo Campaign Philip Guedalla was a British barrister, nut he was better known as a popular historical and biographical writer. His subjects were many and varied, but he had a noted inclination toward European subjects and particularly the history of France. For this volume he chose as his subject the “Hundred Days” — the return of the Emperor Napoleon from exile on Elba to his defeat at Waterloo and his final banishment to St. Helena. Eschewing national bias, the author sums up the dramatic events with wit, panache in his inimitable style.

This book examines the politics of legitimacy as they played out across Europe in response to Napoleon’s dramatic return to power in France after his exile to Elba in 1814. Napoleon had to re-establish his claim to power with initially minimal military resources. Moreover, as the rest of Europe united against him, he had to marshal popular support for his new regime, while simultaneously demanding men and money to back what became an increasingly inevitable military campaign. The initial return – known as ‘the flight of the eagle’ – gradually turned into a dogged attempt to bolster support using a range of mechanisms, including constitutional amendments, elections, and public ceremonies. At the same time, his opponents had to marshal their resources to challenge his return, relying on populations already war-weary and resentful of the costs they had had to bear. The contributors to this volume explore how, for both sides, cultural politics became central in supporting or challenging the legitimacy of these political orders in the path to Waterloo.

A portrait of the general and self-made emperor who, in 1815, escaped captivity and fought his way across Europe for one hundred days, until meeting his match at Waterloo, a journey chronicled in a recreation of the rise and fall of an Empire.