Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 was the work of a coalition army commanded jointly by?
Wellington commanded the Anglo-Dutch-German coalition force (about 68,000) on a defensive ridge south of Brussels through the morning and early afternoon. Blücher's Prussian army (about 50,000) — defeated at Ligny two days earlier but in better order than Napoleon assumed — arrived from the east in the late afternoon, struck the French right flank, and turned a marginal French defeat into a rout. Without Blücher's intervention, Wellington estimated, the battle would have gone the other way. Napoleon abdicated four days later and was exiled to Saint Helena. Kutuzov died in 1813. Alexander I was at the Congress of Vienna.
Read the full facts →The Napoleonic Wars were a sequence of seven European coalition wars fought from 1803 to 1815 between France under Napoleon Bonaparte and successive alliances of European powers. They were the largest sustained European military conflict between the Thirty Years' War and the First World War, killing approximately 3.5 million soldiers and civilians and producing the political-territorial reorganization of Europe at the Congress of Vienna.
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