Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 ended twenty-three years of more or less continuous European warfare. The two allied commanders who beat him there were?
Wellington held the battlefield with his Anglo-Dutch army through the day; Blücher arrived in the late afternoon with the Prussian reinforcements that finished the French army. Nelson had been dead for ten years by then — killed at Trafalgar in 1805. Marlborough and Eugene won the Battle of Blenheim against Louis XIV in 1704, a century earlier. Kutuzov and Schwarzenberg were both real Napoleonic-era commanders — Kutuzov ran the Russian campaign of 1812, Schwarzenberg led the Allied army at Leipzig in 1813 — but neither was at Waterloo.
Read the full facts →Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) was a French military commander and emperor who dominated European politics from his coup in 1799 to his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. His campaigns conquered most of continental Europe, his civil code became the foundation of European civil law, and his consolidation of post-revolutionary institutional reform shaped modern European government.
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