The “One Hundred Days” of Napoleon's Last Adventure: From Exile on Elbe to the Waterloo Disaster

On March 20, 1815 Napoleon arrived in Paris after defying fate, fleeing the island of Elba to regain the throne he had lost in the Russian steppes.

Alone, he toured France facing the battalions that went out to meet him with the intention of capturing him, but they were defeated by his words.

Louis XVIII sent Marshal Ney to arrest Napoleon and he promised to bring him in an iron cage, but when he faced his former boss, Ney, “the brave among the braves”, he was disarmed in the face of Bonaparte's temper and joined the cause. Napoleon even exposed himself to the soldiers urging them to shoot him if they dared to kill their emperor. No one dared and in less than a month he arrived in Paris.

Napoleon's Hundred Days are, in part, responsible for the fate of a former Spanish colony, because in those days Belgrano, Rivadavia and Sarratea had virtually convinced the former King Charles IV to hand over one of his sons to be consecrated as monarch of the Rio de la Plata.

Carlos and María Luisa (his wife) were already thinking about the life pension granted by their subjects of the former viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata that would ease their economic hardships, when they learned that this “monster” had returned. Shaken by the panic of having to deal with Bonaparte once again, they did not want to sign the agreement and Belgrano returned to Buenos Aires empty-handed, but with a detailed account of the European political situation that he presented to the members of the congress meeting in Tucumán.

Some newspapers in Paris also called it a monster, recalling the problems it had caused in the past (and ignoring its glories).

Interestingly, newspapers were decreasing the tone of their criticism and the tenor of their pejorative qualifications as Napoleon approached Paris.

From “monster and beast, soulless” it became “the glorious excellence that comes to save France from its decay”. That was the key to their success, the French longed for the glory days of the Empire.

On the same night he entered Paris, without firing a shot, hailed by the army and the population as the new savior of the homeland, he summoned his former ministers to launch the nation.

Among those summoned was his former chancellor, Prince and Bishop Charles Maurice Talleyrand of Périgord, whom Napoleon called “crap in a silk stocking” but who appreciated his handling of foreign relations. However, the skillful Talleyrand did not accept the position waiting for the outcome of the battle that ended these hundred days.

The other summoned was the sinister Joseph Fouché, the chief of police and the secret service who had the virtue of knowing everything that was going on or going on around him thanks to his network of spies who were in turn spied on by other agents to avoid resignations and folds.

With them he had to launch the powerful war machine he had created to once again hack a Europe horrified by the return of the Gran Corso. England, the German principalities, Austria, Russia and some French troops recruited by the Duke of Angouleme, prepared to arrest the emperor who decided to modify the political structure of the monarchy with a new constitution known as “La Benjamina” to assume the role of constitutional monarch. It was just a facade. During his exile he admitted that if he had been the winner, the first thing he would have done was to dissolve the two legislative chambers he had created.

Since the end of March, the other European nations had concluded an alliance and committed themselves to raising 150,000 men in order to defeat Napoleon.

The only chance Bonaparte had of causing this alliance to fail was to prevent these forces from uniting. Aware that the English were concentrating in Belgium, without yet coming into contact with the Prussian troops, Bonaparte left Paris in early June for a peaceful village 20 km from Brussels, called Waterloo...

The rest is known history.

The One Hundred Days was a phrase coined by the Count of Chabrol to receive Louis XVIII after the fall of Bonaparte. The expression acquired political significance when it was reproduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he assumed the presidency of the United States during one of the highest periods in American history, the Great Depression. This crisis could be overcome by his proposal for the New Deal, materialized in that period of one hundred critical days when political will was still dominated by hope.

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