Revolution and Empire
The Bastille falls. Sovereignty descends from the king to the nation. The Declaration of the Rights of Man makes the people the sovereign. Napoleon exports this principle across Europe at bayonet point; the Congress of Vienna tries to put it back in the bottle.
Part of Farewell To Westphalia
12 moments in this segment.
- — The Fall of the Bastille. Storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789. Anonymous, oil on canvas, c. 1789. Musee de la Revolution francaise. Place: Bastille fortress, Saint-Antoine, Paris Figures: Bernard-René Jordan de Launay, Bastille governor (killed) · the crowd, perhaps a thousand strong The Storming The crowd assembles outside the medieval fortress on the morning of 14 July, looking for the gunpowder rumored to be stored inside. The fortress has eighty-two retired soldiers and thirty-two Swiss guards defending it; it holds seven prisoners (four forgers, two lunatics, one aristocratic offender). De Launay attempts to negotiate; the crowd misreads a lowering drawbridge as an attack, storms in, takes the fortress in four hours. De Launay is dragged to the Hôtel de Ville, killed, his head paraded on a pike. The seven prisoners are freed. The act, in itself, is smaller than its symbolic charge: the fortress had four times more cannons than prisoners. From King's to People's Sovereignty Within six weeks the National Assembly publishes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Article 3: Le principe de toute souveraineté réside essentiellement dans la nation. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. The Westphalian sovereign of 1648 was the prince; after 1789, the sovereign is the people. The revolution's wars (1792 to 1815) export this principle across Europe by bayonet. Where Napoleon's armies pass, monarchies are replaced or reorganized along French-revolutionary lines. The principle that sovereignty descends from the people, not God, becomes — over the next century — the operating assumption of every European state, even when nominally monarchical. Video: John Green walks the road from the Estates-General to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789.
- — The Execution of Louis XVI. Execution of Louis XVI on the Place de la Revolution, 21 January 1793. German copperplate engraving, 1793. Place: Place de la Révolution (today Place de la Concorde), Paris Figures: Louis XVI, deposed king, tried as Louis Capet · Maximilien Robespierre, regicide · Charles-Henri Sanson, executioner · the National Convention, 749 deputies voting The Vote of the Convention The trial opens on 11 December 1792. The Convention sits as both court and jury. Robespierre's argument is theoretical and total: the king need not be tried for specific crimes, because his very existence is incompatible with the Republic. Louis doit mourir parce qu'il faut que la patrie vive. The proceedings nonetheless run for six weeks. The final roll-call on the sentence runs through the night of 16 to 17 January 1793. Each deputy mounts the tribune and says his vote aloud. The count: 387 for death, 334 for detention or conditional sentence. The margin is one vote in a hundred. Philippe d'Orléans, the king's own cousin, votes for death. The cousin will himself be guillotined within ten months. What the Blade Does to the Westphalian System At 10:22 on the morning of 21 January, the blade falls. The sovereign of 1648 (the prince, by divine right, as the Peace of Westphalia (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]]) had codified him) is killed in person by the sovereign of 1789 (the nation, by Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as the Bastille (see [[fall-of-the-bastille-1789]]) had launched her). The two principles cannot share a body politic. One has now killed the other on a public scaffold. European monarchies recoil. Within weeks Britain, the Dutch Republic, Spain, Naples, and the Holy Roman Empire form the First Coalition. The wars that follow run, with brief pauses, until 1815. France faces them by inventing, in August (see [[levee-en-masse-1793]]), the first national-conscription army in modern history. The Revolution has demonstrated that popular sovereignty, taken literally, can dispose of the person at the apex of the old order. The rest of Europe organizes to make sure it does not happen twice. Video: Sandbrook and Holland on the Convention's vote, the appeal, and the guillotine at the Place de la Revolution.
- — The Second Partition of Poland. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the Second Partition of 1793, reduced to a Russian protectorate. Place: St Petersburg, with parallel signatures at Grodno Figures: Catherine II of Russia · Frederick William II of Prussia · Stanisław August Poniatowski, the powerless king at Grodno · the Grodno Sejm, sitting under Russian guns Berlin and St Petersburg, Two Days After Paris Two days after the Convention guillotines Louis XVI in Paris, the Russian and Prussian ambassadors sign a convention at St Petersburg dividing roughly 300,000 km² of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between their crowns. Russia takes most of Belarus and right-bank Ukraine: 250,000 km², perhaps three million subjects. Prussia takes Greater Poland with Gdańsk and Toruń: 58,000 km², a million subjects. Austria, occupied with the war on France, gets nothing in this round. The pretext is the Polish reform movement: a Commonwealth that had spent four years drafting and ratifying its Constitution of 3 May 1791 (the second written national constitution in the world, after the United States) is, on the partitioners' reading, infected by French Jacobinism and must be amputated for the safety of the monarchical order. Two Westphalian Crises in Parallel While Paris is killing its king in person, Berlin and St Petersburg are killing a kingdom by treaty. Both operations claim Westphalian legitimacy. The Convention argues that the sovereign nation has the right to depose and execute its monarch; Catherine argues that great powers have the right to dismember a state whose internal politics threaten their security. Both arguments shred different parts of the 1648 settlement. The Polish king Stanisław August is forced to convene a Sejm at Grodno in June, surrounded by Russian troops, to ratify the partition. Deputies who object are arrested. On the night of the final vote, the chamber sits in silence; the presiding marshal interprets the silence as consent. Poland loses half its remaining territory and over four million subjects. A third partition (see [[third-partition-of-poland-1795]]) two years later will finish what this one began. Video: Animated account of the three partitions, with the 1793 carve-up that followed the May Constitution.
- — The Levée en Masse. The levee en masse of 1793. Watercolour by Jean-Baptiste Lesueur depicting the Republic mobilising its citizens for war. Place: Convention nationale, Paris Figures: Bertrand Barère, rapporteur of the Committee of Public Safety · Lazare Carnot, the Convention's organizer of armies · the conscripted, perhaps 750,000 men under arms by 1794 Every Frenchman in Permanent Requisition France in August 1793 faces the First Coalition on every frontier, royalist insurrection in the Vendée, and federalist revolts in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Caen. The Committee of Public Safety responds with a decree of seventeen articles drafted by Barère. Article 1: Dès ce moment jusqu'à celui où les ennemis auront été chassés du territoire de la République, tous les Français sont en réquisition permanente pour le service des armées. From this moment until the enemy has been driven from the territory of the Republic, all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for army service. The articles continue with a division of labor that no European state has ever decreed: Les jeunes hommes iront au combat; les hommes mariés forgeront les armes et transporteront les subsistances; les femmes feront des tentes, des habits, et serviront dans les hôpitaux; les enfants mettront le vieux linge en charpie; les vieillards se feront porter sur les places publiques, pour exciter le courage des guerriers. The young to combat, married men to forging and supply, women to tents and hospitals, children to bandages, the old to public squares to rouse the soldiers. What the State Can Now Demand Within twelve months France fields roughly three-quarters of a million soldiers, far larger than any of its dynastic opponents can match. Carnot reorganizes the army around the amalgame, mixing royal regulars with revolutionary volunteers and conscripts into a single force. Promotion is by merit and survival rather than birth. By 1794 the coalition is pushed off French soil; by 1795 French armies are operating in the Netherlands, the Rhineland, and northern Italy. Conscription is not a French invention in the abstract sense. Sweden and Prussia had used selective systems. The novelty is the universality and the framing. The Westphalian state of the seventeenth century could demand taxes and obedience; the Westphalian state after 1793 can demand the bodies of its entire male population, justified by the principle that the nation in arms is defending its own sovereignty. The technological ceiling on what wars can mobilize is removed. Every subsequent total war (1914, 1939) operates on Barère's basic permission.
- — The Third Partition of Poland. The three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1772, 1793 and 1795. After the third, sovereign Poland disappeared from the map for 123 years. Place: St Petersburg Figures: Catherine II of Russia · Frederick William II of Prussia · Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor · Tadeusz Kościuszko, leader of the failed 1794 uprising · Stanisław August, abdicating the following year After Kościuszko The 1794 uprising under Tadeusz Kościuszko (veteran of the American Revolution, engineer at West Point) is the Commonwealth's last attempt to reverse the dismemberment. The insurgents hold Warsaw and Wilno for several months. At Maciejowice on 10 October 1794, Kościuszko is wounded and captured by Russian forces. Warsaw falls a month later after the Praga massacre, in which Russian troops kill perhaps twenty thousand civilians in a single day's sack. The three eastern powers now agree that what remains of Poland must be divided. The convention is signed at St Petersburg on 24 October 1795. Russia takes Lithuania and Courland (120,000 km²); Prussia takes Warsaw and Mazovia (55,000 km²); Austria takes the remainder of Lesser Poland with Kraków (47,000 km²). Stanisław August abdicates the following year and dies in St Petersburg in 1798, a pensioner of the empire that destroyed his kingdom. What It Means to Delete a State Poland ceases to exist as a sovereign entity in international law for 123 years, until November 1918. The 1648 settlement had recognized the sovereign equality of states; the three partitions demonstrate, within 147 years, that the same system permits sovereignty to be deleted by the unanimous agreement of neighbors. There is no procedure for objection. The Sejm cannot meet. France is occupied with its own revolution and offers nothing beyond rhetorical solidarity. The Ottoman Empire, the only major European power that refuses to recognize the partitions, has neither the means nor the will to reverse them. The partition trains nineteenth-century nationalism in a specific lesson: that a stateless nation can persist as a cultural and linguistic project across generations, and that the recovery of sovereignty is the central political task. Mickiewicz, Chopin, Paderewski, and eventually Piłsudski operate within that schema. The lesson is also legible to other stateless peoples (Hungarians, Italians, Czechs, Irish, Jews, eventually Ukrainians) across the coming century.
- — The Coup of 18 Brumaire. General Bonaparte before the Council of Five Hundred at Saint-Cloud, 19 Brumaire Year VIII (10 November 1799). Francois Bouchot, oil on canvas, 1840. Place: Château de Saint-Cloud, near Paris Figures: Napoleon Bonaparte, general returned from Egypt · Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Director and theorist · Lucien Bonaparte, presiding over the Council of Five Hundred · Joseph Fouché, Minister of Police, neutral A Coup Dressed as a Procedure Sieyès, one of the five Directors, has concluded that the Constitution of Year III is unworkable and that France needs a stronger executive. He needs a general with a reputation. Bonaparte, just returned from abandoning his army in Egypt, is the candidate of convenience. The conspirators frame the move as a defense of the Directory against a fictional Jacobin plot. On 18 Brumaire (9 November) the legislative councils are moved out of Paris to Saint-Cloud, ostensibly for their own safety. On 19 Brumaire (10 November) Bonaparte enters the Council of Five Hundred to demand emergency powers. Deputies shout hors-la-loi, outlaw. Lucien Bonaparte, presiding, refuses to put the outlawing motion to a vote. Napoleon withdraws; grenadiers under Murat clear the chamber at bayonet point. The conspirators reassemble a rump that evening to vote a provisional Consulate of three: Sieyès, Roger Ducos, and Bonaparte. First Consul, Then Consul for Life, Then Emperor Within weeks Bonaparte sidelines Sieyès and writes the Constitution of Year VIII, which makes him First Consul with effectively monarchical powers; a plebiscite ratifies it. In 1802 he becomes Consul for Life by a second plebiscite. In 1804 he crowns himself Emperor, in Notre-Dame, in Pope Pius VII's presence (taking the crown from the Pope's hands and placing it on his own head). The Revolution's exit from chronic instability is, characteristically, into a single executive far stronger than the Bourbon king it replaced. Brumaire is a model that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will repeat without quite admitting they are repeating it. A republican constitution under stress, a war hero with administrative talents, an emergency framed to require him, a procedure dressed up to look constitutional, then a permanent revision of the system to reflect what the emergency had produced. Bonapartism enters the political vocabulary as a recognizable mode. Video: How the 18 Brumaire coup turned the Directory into the Consulate and Napoleon into First Consul.
- — The Napoleonic Code. Title page of the first edition of the Code civil des Francais, promulgated 21 March 1804. Place: Paris Figures: Napoleon, presiding over more than half the drafting sessions · Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, principal drafter · François Tronchet, Félix-Julien-Jean Bigot de Préameneu, Jacques de Maleville, the drafting commission Thirty-Six Sessions Chaired in Person The four-man commission appointed in August 1800 produces a draft within four months. Napoleon, as First Consul, then chairs 36 of the 102 Council of State sessions that revise it, intervening on questions ranging from paternal authority to the status of mining concessions. He has no legal training; his contribution is to insist on plain language and on resolving theological-sounding disputes by executive fiat. The completed code is promulgated on 30 Ventôse An XII (21 March 1804) as the Code civil des Français; it is renamed the Code Napoléon in 1807. Its 2,281 articles consolidate centuries of customary and Roman law into a single instrument. Property is secular and absolute. Contract is freely entered. Marriage is a civil ceremony. Births, marriages, and deaths are recorded by the municipality, not the parish. Primogeniture is abolished. Privileges of caste and corporation are erased. Adult sons and daughters inherit equally (a partial advance; the code remains deeply patriarchal, subordinating wives to husbands and restricting divorce within a generation). The Most Successful Revolutionary Export Where French armies go, the Code goes. Belgium, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, Westphalia, the Kingdom of Italy, Naples, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, parts of Spain. Some of these regimes collapse with Napoleon in 1815, but the Code does not. Belgium and Luxembourg retain it. The Netherlands models its 1838 code on it. Italy's 1865 code is a direct descendant. Romania, Egypt, Bolivia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Quebec, Louisiana all adopt or model on it. Napoleon's military empire lasts fifteen years; the legal empire is a two-century structure still operating. Ma vraie gloire n'est pas d'avoir gagné quarante batailles. Waterloo effacera le souvenir de tant de victoires. Ce que rien n'effacera, ce qui vivra éternellement, c'est mon code civil. (Saint Helena, dictated late.) The Westphalian state of the nineteenth century, even where it explicitly rejects French rule, inherits the French specification for what a civil legal system looks like.
- — The Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire on the eve of its dissolution, in its final 1789 configuration before Napoleon's reordering of the German lands. Place: Vienna Figures: Francis II, last Holy Roman Emperor (continuing as Francis I of Austria) · Napoleon, founding the Confederation of the Rhine · the sixteen princes who seceded from the Empire on 12 July Austerlitz, Then the Rhine Confederation Napoleon destroys an Austro-Russian army at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805. The Peace of Pressburg three weeks later strips Habsburg territories in Italy and Germany and recognizes Bavaria and Württemberg as kingdoms. Six months later, on 12 July 1806, sixteen German princes sign the act founding the Rheinbund, the Confederation of the Rhine, under Napoleon's protection. They formally secede from the Empire on 1 August. Francis II, having reigned in Vienna since 1792 and having already (in 1804) taken the precautionary title Emperor of Austria, now faces the prospect that Napoleon might claim the imperial title himself or designate one of his marshals. On 6 August Francis issues a brief proclamation: he releases all imperial estates from their obligations to him, dissolves the bond, and lays down the crown. After 1006 Years The Empire founded when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800 dissolves after 1006 years. The Peace of Westphalia (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]]) had already rendered the Empire effectively a loose federation of sovereign principalities; 6 August 1806 removes even the ceremonial cap. The German lands are now plainly a system of states (the kingdoms of Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony; the grand duchies; the free cities) loosely organized under Napoleonic suzerainty until 1813, then under the German Confederation (1815 to 1866), then under Prussian leadership. Voltaire's famous quip (the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire) is now retrospectively legible as an epitaph. The institution that had survived the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, the rise of France, and a century and a half of post-Westphalian decay finally cannot survive a Corsican general who is willing to declare the question moot. The Roman imperial title, transmitted from Augustus through Charlemagne to Francis, lapses. The German question, which 1648 had answered with a constitutional fiction, is now genuinely open. Video: How Austerlitz, the Confederation of the Rhine, and Francis II's abdication ended eight centuries of Reich.
- — The Continental System. Napoleon's Continental System at its 1812 maximum: French Empire, vassal kingdoms and allied states enforcing the blockade against British trade. Place: Berlin (the Berlin Decree) Figures: Napoleon, having just defeated Prussia at Jena · Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, Foreign Minister · Tsar Alexander I (acceding at Tilsit in 1807) · the smugglers and licensed traders who make a fortune evading it Sovereignty as Embargo Napoleon has crushed the Prussian army at Jena-Auerstedt on 14 October 1806 and entered Berlin in triumph. From the Prussian capital, on 21 November, he decrees that the British Isles are in a state of blockade, that all commerce and correspondence with Britain is forbidden, that all British goods or goods produced in British colonies found in any territory occupied by French or allied troops shall be confiscated, and that any vessel that has called at a British port is barred from continental harbors. Britain responds in 1807 with Orders in Council requiring neutral ships bound for any port closed to British trade to first call at a British port and pay duties. Napoleon counters with the Milan Decree, declaring that any ship complying with the British orders is itself British property and subject to seizure. Neutral shipping is now squeezed from both sides. American merchant marine losses are heavy; the American embargo of 1807 and ultimately the War of 1812 trace partly to this pincer. Continental Scale, Continental Failure The economic theory is mercantilist: deprive Britain of European markets and the British economy will collapse, forcing peace. The empirical result is mixed. British exports do contract sharply in 1808 and again in 1811. Smuggling on a heroic scale develops along the North Sea coast, in Heligoland, and through Portugal. The French manufacturing sector benefits in the short run but is starved of colonial raw materials in the medium run. Russian noble landowners, dependent on Baltic grain exports to Britain, suffer severely; by 1810 Tsar Alexander is permitting neutral shipping to evade the system, and by 1812 his noncompliance becomes Napoleon's pretext for invasion (see [[invasion-of-russia-1812]]). The Continental System is sovereignty deployed at continental scale as an economic weapon. It is a recognizable ancestor of every subsequent sanctions regime: the 1935 League sanctions on Italy, the Cold War's CoCom, the post-2022 freeze of Russian central bank reserves. The instrument and its limits are first tested at this scale in Berlin in November 1806. Video: Kings and Generals walks the Berlin Decree, the smuggling economy, and why economic war broke Napoleon.
- — The Invasion of Russia. Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow. Adolph Northen, oil on canvas, second half of the 19th century. Of the 600,000 who marched east, fewer than 100,000 returned. Place: the crossing of the Niemen at Kaunas Figures: Napoleon, commanding the largest field army Europe has yet assembled · Mikhail Kutuzov, Russian commander at Borodino · Tsar Alexander I, refusing to negotiate · the Grande Armée, 685,000 men, perhaps 100,000 returning The Niemen, Borodino, Moscow Burning Napoleon crosses the Niemen on 24 June 1812 with the largest army Europe has assembled to date: 685,000 men of twenty nationalities, half of them French. The pretext is Russian noncompliance with the Continental System (see [[continental-system-1806]]). The real objective is to force Alexander into a binding peace that secures Napoleonic Europe. The Russian armies retreat eastward, refusing the decisive battle Napoleon needs, burning supplies as they withdraw. At Borodino on 7 September, Kutuzov finally stands. The battle lasts a single day and produces roughly 70,000 casualties on the two sides combined, the bloodiest single day of the entire Napoleonic Wars. Both armies claim victory; Napoleon holds the field; Kutuzov withdraws in order. A week later the French enter Moscow. The city is empty; the governor Rostopchin has ordered it set ablaze. The fires burn for four days. Napoleon waits five weeks in the half-ruined Kremlin for a peace offer that does not come. The Retreat On 19 October the Grande Armée begins to withdraw westward. Snow falls in early November; the temperature drops below minus 30 Celsius in late November. Cossack raids harass the column at every river crossing. At the Berezina (26 to 29 November) perhaps half the surviving force is lost in the crossing. Of the 685,000 who crossed the Niemen in June, perhaps 100,000 recross it in December as a functioning force; many more straggle home individually or die over the winter. Napoleonic Europe is finished. Prussia switches sides in February 1813; Austria in August. Within sixteen months the allies are at the gates of Paris. The Russian campaign demonstrates the upper bound of what conscript mass armies (see [[levee-en-masse-1793]]) and Napoleonic logistics can do. Beyond that bound, even genius cannot project sovereignty. The lesson will be re-learned by every continental power that tries to invade Russia for the next century and a half. Video: Epic History's Russia campaign episode, from the Niemen crossing to Borodino, Moscow, and the snow.
- — The Battle of Leipzig. 16 to 19 October 1813. Vladimir Moshkov, oil on canvas, 1815. The Battle of the Nations broke Napoleon's hold on Germany. Place: Leipzig, Kingdom of Saxony Figures: Napoleon, fighting his last great continental battle · Karl Philipp Schwarzenberg, allied commander-in-chief · Tsar Alexander I, King Frederick William III of Prussia, Emperor Francis I of Austria, watching from a rise · Crown Prince Bernadotte of Sweden, formerly a French marshal Völkerschlacht After the Russian disaster (see [[invasion-of-russia-1812]]) Napoleon rebuilds a field army of conscripts and veterans in the spring of 1813. He wins at Lützen and Bautzen in May but cannot finish the Russo-Prussian forces. An armistice in summer collapses when Austria joins the Sixth Coalition in August. By October the coalition has converged on Saxony with roughly 350,000 troops against Napoleon's 200,000. The battle opens on 16 October south of Leipzig and ends on 19 October with the French retreat across the Elster. The numbers exceed any previous battle in European history: roughly 600,000 combatants, perhaps 100,000 killed or wounded across the four days. Contemporaries name it the Völkerschlacht, the Battle of Nations, because of the multiplicity of armies engaged (Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Swedes, Saxons who defect mid-battle, Bavarians, Württembergers, Poles fighting for Napoleon, Italians, French). March on Paris The retreat is botched. A French sapper destroys the bridge over the Elster prematurely, stranding 30,000 troops including Marshal Józef Poniatowski (made marshal of France three days earlier, drowned in the retreat). The Confederation of the Rhine dissolves within weeks; Saxony, Bavaria, and the other German states change sides. Napoleon retreats across the Rhine in November with perhaps 70,000 effectives. The coalition follows. The 1814 campaign in France is one of Napoleon's most brilliant defensive efforts, won at small scale and lost at large. The allies enter Paris on 31 March 1814. Napoleon abdicates at Fontainebleau on 6 April and is exiled to Elba. The first phase of the Westphalian restoration begins. Leipzig is the European battle that ends the French revolutionary-imperial expansion; in the size of forces engaged, it will not be exceeded on European soil until the First World War. Video: Animated reconstruction of the four-day Battle of the Nations that broke French Germany.
- — Waterloo. Wellington at Waterloo. Robert Alexander Hillingford, oil on canvas, late 19th century. The Duke of Wellington commanding the Anglo-allied centre on 18 June 1815. Place: Mont-Saint-Jean, Belgian Brabant, twelve miles south of Brussels Figures: Napoleon, returned from Elba for the Hundred Days · Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, allied commander · Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Prussian field marshal, age 72 · Marshal Michel Ney, leading the French cavalry charges · roughly 190,000 combatants engaged across the day The Hundred Days Napoleon escapes Elba with a thousand men on 26 February 1815 and lands in Provence on 1 March. He reaches Paris on 20 March without firing a shot; the troops sent to arrest him at Grenoble join him instead. Louis XVIII flees to Ghent. The European powers, meeting at Vienna, declare Napoleon an outlaw and pledge 150,000 men each to crush him. Napoleon strikes first, into Belgium, hoping to defeat Wellington's Anglo-Allied army and Blücher's Prussian army separately before the Russians and Austrians can arrive. He nearly succeeds. On 16 June he mauls Blücher at Ligny while Marshal Ney holds Wellington at Quatre Bras. The Prussians retreat but, critically, retreat north toward Wellington rather than east. Napoleon detaches Grouchy with 33,000 men to pursue them and turns west with the bulk of the army to face Wellington at Mont-Saint-Jean. The Prussian Arrival Battle opens at 11:30 a.m. on 18 June. Wellington's infantry squares hold against repeated French cavalry charges through the afternoon. La Haye Sainte, the central farmhouse, finally falls to the French around 6 p.m., but by then the Prussians have begun to debouch from the woods at Plancenoit on Napoleon's right flank. Napoleon commits the Imperial Guard at around 7:30 p.m. for a final assault on Wellington's center; the Guard breaks for the first time in its history. The French line dissolves into rout. Napoleon abdicates a second time on 22 June. He attempts to escape to America from Rochefort, is blocked by the Royal Navy, surrenders to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon, and is transported to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. He dies there on 5 May 1821, age 51, perhaps of stomach cancer. The Concert of Europe (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]), whose Final Act has been signed nine days before the battle, is now the operating system. The Westphalian restoration has held; the revolutionary-imperial parenthesis is, formally, closed. Video: Blow-by-blow of 18 June 1815, with Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, the Old Guard, and the Prussian arrival.
