Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna: Map of Europe in 1815

By 1812 Napoleon dominated Europe: France stretched from Hamburg to Rome, and his allies and relatives ruled most of Germany, Italy, Spain and the Duchy of Warsaw. Use the 1812 button to see that map. After the disaster in Russia, the coalition armies drove him back across Germany and into France, and on 6 April 1814 he abdicated. He was given the small Mediterranean island of Elba to rule, and Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, became king of France.

From September 1814 the rulers and diplomats of Europe gathered in Vienna to decide what should replace Napoleon's empire. The Austrian foreign minister, Prince Metternich, hosted the Congress amid balls and banquets, but the real work was done by the four great allies, Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia, joined by Talleyrand for France. Their aims were to contain France, reward the victors and restore a balance of power so that no single state could dominate the continent again. The talks nearly broke down over Poland and Saxony, which Russia and Prussia wanted for themselves.

On 26 February 1815 Napoleon slipped away from Elba with about a thousand men and landed at Golfe-Juan, near Cannes, on 1 March. Avoiding royalist Provence, he marched north over the Alps by the road now called the Route Napoléon. At Laffrey, near Grenoble, the troops sent to stop him went over to his side, and on 20 March he entered Paris as Louis XVIII fled to Ghent. The blue line on the map traces his journey.

The Congress, still sitting, declared him an outlaw, and Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia each promised 150,000 men to a Seventh Coalition. Napoleon decided to strike first, in Belgium, before the Austrian and Russian armies could arrive.

On 15 June the French crossed the border at Charleroi, between Wellington's Anglo-allied army of British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops and Blücher's Prussians. On 16 June Napoleon beat the Prussians at Ligny while Marshal Ney fought Wellington to a draw at Quatre Bras. Wellington fell back to a ridge at Mont-Saint-Jean, just south of the village of Waterloo, and Blücher promised to come to his aid.

The battle began late on the morning of 18 June, delayed by rain-soaked ground. All afternoon the French attacked: around the fortified farm of Hougoumont on Wellington's right, with a massed infantry assault in the centre that the British heavy cavalry, among them the Scots Greys, threw back, and with huge cavalry charges against the allied infantry squares. La Haye Sainte, the farm in the centre, fell in the early evening. But from the afternoon the Prussians were arriving on the French right flank and fighting for the village of Plancenoit. At about 7.30 pm Napoleon sent in his Imperial Guard; it was repulsed, and the French army broke and fled.

About 73,000 French had faced some 68,000 Anglo-allied troops and, by evening, around 50,000 Prussians. Roughly 50,000 men were killed or wounded on a few square kilometres of farmland. "It has been a damned nice thing, the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life," Wellington said the next day.

Napoleon hurried back to Paris and abdicated for the second time on 22 June 1815. He hoped to escape to America, but British ships blockaded the coast, and on 15 July he surrendered to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon off Rochefort. The allies sent him to the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena, where he died on 5 May 1821. Louis XVIII returned to Paris on 8 July, ending the Hundred Days. The Second Treaty of Paris of 20 November 1815 cut France back to its borders of 1790, imposed an indemnity of 700 million francs and an army of occupation for up to five years.

The Final Act of the Congress was signed on 9 June 1815, nine days before Waterloo. In place of the Holy Roman Empire, which Napoleon had ended in 1806, it created a loose German Confederation of 39 states under Austrian presidency. Prussia gained the Rhineland and Westphalia, the northern two-fifths of Saxony and Swedish Pomerania, which moved it west to the French border. Austria gave up the Austrian Netherlands but took Lombardy and Venetia in Italy, along with Illyria, Tyrol and Salzburg. Russia received most of the Duchy of Warsaw as the Kingdom of Poland, ruled by the tsar.

To guard France's northern border, Belgium was united with the Netherlands in a new United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Kingdom of Sardinia gained Genoa, the pope recovered the Papal States, and Bourbon kings returned in Spain and Naples. Norway, taken from Denmark in 1814, was joined to Sweden, and Switzerland's permanent neutrality was guaranteed. Britain, which wanted no land in Europe, kept colonies and bases it had captured, among them the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Malta and Heligoland. Move the timeline from 1812 to 1820 to see the change.

The Vienna settlement gave Europe a century without a war involving all the great powers, until 1914. The powers met regularly in the "Concert of Europe" to settle crises, and the Congress also condemned the slave trade and set rules for diplomatic rank and for shipping on international rivers. But it ignored the nationalism that the French Revolution had awakened: Germans, Italians, Poles and Belgians were divided or placed under foreign rulers. Revolts followed in 1830 and 1848, Belgium won its independence in 1830–1839, and Italy and Germany were united in the 1860s and 1871, undoing much of what Vienna had drawn.