The Hundred Days
Napoleon landed in France with about a thousand men on 1 March 1815 and was emperor again in three weeks. He had been on Elba for ten months, had not been paid the annuity the treaty promised, and had heard that the powers at Vienna were discussing moving him somewhere less convenient. The Bourbon restoration had also done him the favour of being itself: returning émigrés demanding their property, the tricolour replaced, and half the officer corps on half pay. He came ashore near Antibes and took the mountain roads to avoid the royalist south. The moment everyone remembers is at Laffrey, outside Grenoble, where a battalion sent to stop him was drawn up across the road; he walked forward alone, opened his coat and invited anyone who wished to kill his emperor to fire. They joined him. Ney, who had promised Louis XVIII to bring him back in an iron cage, went over near Auxerre. Louis left for Ghent, and Napoleon entered the Tuileries on 20 March carried up the stairs by a crowd. The regime he then improvised was liberal by necessity — a constitution drafted by Benjamin Constant with a free press and a two-chamber legislature — and satisfied nobody. The powers had declared him an outlaw within a week of the landing and would not negotiate. He had about 280,000 men against a coalition raising four times that, and everything depended on beating Wellington and Blücher before the Austrians and Russians arrived. The whole thing lasted 111 days.
- Year: 1815 CE
- Category: Political
