Waterloo

A couple of months ago when we visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., I came upon this rather magnificent portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte. For some reason this struck a note in my aging brain and I finally remembered that 200 years ago, (June 18, 1815), an epic battle began near the small Belgium town of Waterloo. Most historians consider this battle to be one of the most important in recent history. French forces under the command of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte fought against a collation of European forces headed by the British army under the command of Duke Wellington and the Prussian army under the command of Gebhard von Blucher. Napoleon lost the battle, and was exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic and the monocracy was restored to rule over France. Most people consider it a good thing that Napoleon lost, but on closer examination, there was a down side to it. Napoleon, in his most recent, and short time back in France, had presented some quite advanced and democratic laws for the people of his country. Most of the monarchies of Europe were quite alarmed at these revolutionary ideas and desired that Napoleon should be put away for good. Napoleon had been defeated the previous year by another collation of European armies and forced to give up the throne of France. He was exiled to Elba, a small island in the Mediterranean. The fact that he came back to a huge welcome in France and could possibly reconquer Europe by military force again, alarmed the other European countries tremendously. However, it was not his fate to rule again for long. Napoleon, in his military career, had fought 60 battles, in that he had won 48 of them, had five draws and seven losses. Waterloo was his greatest loss and his most famous. After the battle was fought and Napoleon was defeated, there was a relative peaceful 50 years for Europe and it was quite safe for the ruling aristocracy all the way up until World War I, when the old order, quite catastrophically, came crashing down around them.