Napolean could retire toward Paris. The British would likely advance If he waited for the Allies to combine I think he still stood an excellent chance as the advantage would fall to the defender even against a huge allied force. I think Napolean's best bet was to destroy the Prussians then try to crush the British utterly. That would give him substantial time to deal with the others. Paul Connecticut : Yes. If he had detained the Prussian forces long enough to wear down the British blocks, his forces would have won the day.
However, I do agree that Europe would never have come under his control again. Unfortunately, he chose poor battlefield commanders. Grouchy had little experience with independent command; Soult would have known better and marched to the sound of the guns. Ney was always impetuous and unthinking; if Davout had been with Napoleon, instead of back in Paris as Minister of War, he would have known better than to send waves of cavalry against the British squares unsupported by infantry.
Davout may have even made the battle unnecessary, for he would have had the knowledge to crush Wellington at Quatre Bras as he did Brunswick at Auerstadt. And if Marmont had not been a traitor, he could have led the artillery to better, more concentrated fire. Napoleon's army was a veteran unit, but its morale was brittle.
The treason of sowed the seeds of defeat in , because so many officers and marshals proved themselves more concerned about their own estates than the survival of the empire. Travis North Carolina : Yes, Napoleon could have won at the battle of Waterloo had several things not taken place. First, Napoleon needed his confidence to win, and in this battle, he lacked it. After his Russian defeat and exile, he became inconfident.
Thus, he lead his armies with less power and confidence. Second, he shouldn't have sent troops to stop the Prussians from coming. He could've just crushed the British first, then taken care of the Prussians later with more troops. Third, if Berthier was present at the battle, Napoleon's chief of staff, he would have won. Napoleon was also very ill, and if he'd been in full health, he wouldn't have delayed on attacking.
Although, if Napoleon had won the battle, he would've lost eventually in the end. Reuben: No, and you have to go back to the disastrous campaign against the Russians.
Any force that has attacked Russia and this attack prolongs itself into the Russian winter, has never succeeded in history.
IE: Stalingrad. The Grand Armee had been reduced to a Petit Armee, demoralized, tired, and really out of shape. The hundred days were really a major turning point in European history -- things would go back to the way they were on the continent, with each side having and protecting their own interest without interference until WW1. Wellington, as Sun Tzu remarks, had the field.
He was in a better position to see the battle, the British squares were extremely formidable against either infantry or calvary attacks. If Napolean pushed his artillery forward to smash the squares, British snipers and infantry would have had an open shot at the Frech artillery. Napolean lost the battle before it began. Napolean even comments about this and he himself knows that he and his men are in a poor location and the terrain does not suit calvary nor artillery.
He fought at the wrong place, a place of not his choosing. Remember, if you fight a battle of the opponent's choosing, you are at a disadvantage and Napolean knew that he was at a disadvantage, but he had no choice, the Allies trapped him, he had to fight or go back to Paris and wait for a much larger Allied force.
Duc: Quite possibly, as Wellington put it, the battle was "a near run thing". There are hundreds of what-ifs related to the specific course of the battle, as well as the campaign that preceeded it. Disregarding all of these, one can quite simply, and with great confidence, say that Napoleon was let down by his subordinates, Ney and Grouchy, neither of whom wher competant to command an entire wing of the French army, as they had to do at critical times of the campaign. In addition, Ney had shown at Liepzig and Jena his inability to coordinate large numbers of troops in battle, a patern he repeated with disasterous consequences at Waterloo.
Bottom line, if Davout had been availble to command either wing of the French army, either pursuing the Prussians on the 17th and 18th, or attacking the British on the 16th and 18th, Napoleon would have won on the 18th, with either Wellington or Blucher destroyed. RJ California : Napolean could easily have won the battle of Waterloo and retained control of France. Marshal Ney led a cavalry assault in which the vast majority of British guns were in French hands for several hours.
There was ample opportunity to destroy the guns, but Ney lacked the forsight when he led the assault. Also, von Blucher may have died or been captured in an earlier battle, in fact he was knocked off his horse and was hidden only by a coat pulled over his face from a French search.
If he had been killed or captured, his successors would have allowed Grouchy to push them back into Prussia. Finally, there were several direct orders from Napolean to Grouchy to screen the Prussians and hit Wellington on the flank, but Grouchy ignored them and continued to follow a diversion of 10, Prussian troops.
If Ney had had the forsight to spike the British guns and ordered infantry to follow his cavalry assault, if von Blucher had been killed or captured or if Grouchy had followed Napolean's orders, the Russians would likely have gone home and signed a treaty and the Austrians would have probably been defeated.
James Oklahoma : Military Command is a matter of both skill and chance. Had "old Bluker" not arrived at the last moment with his fresh troops the "Grand Army" may very well have carried the battle. In that event our view of Napoleon would no doubt be quite different. Rob Michigan : Yes Napolean could have won. If only he had used the brilliance that he used in all his prior Prussian campaigns. Napolean was so successful agianst Prussia and Italy because he changed the rules of war, and that is what he should have done again at Waterloo.
By this time all of Europe was familiar to Napolean's new flanking strategy, and his strategy of fighting the enemy one-by-one. Napolean should have changed the rules again, instead of sending the cavalry. What would have been the political consequences had the Duke of Wellington been defeated? In power in London, conservatives are discredited; war was expensive after all. The Whig Party, traditionally opposed to absolute rule of the monarchy, claim power and maintain negotiations with Napoleon.
Some time later, the UK plays neutral and adopts practices of the French empire. Right-hand drive and the metric system are implemented across the Channel. Fiction, yes, and we can imagine and invent other scenarios. A victory at Waterloo would only stall the inevitable defeat — even weakened coalition countries would have done everything possible to halt the march of the emperor.
In reality, on that day, June 18, , nothing was as it should be: the chain of command was faulty and the weather was erratic. When the allies defeated Napoleon the first time, they exiled him to Elba and installed Louis XVIII as king, seeking to sweep away all of the gains from the revolution and the empire. Louis failed spectacularly in gaining local support for the reversion to the Ancien Regime.
Sensing this, Napoleon escaped to the mainland after only nine months and headed for Paris. Quite a statement about how the French, as opposed to the allies, viewed his return. They had reason to be suspicious, but instead of waiting and seeing they launched an all out assault on France in an effort to get him out of the way. Andrews argues, and I agree, that their aim was not defensive but actively reactionary.
His liberalized and modernized France posed a threat to the preservation of the traditional powers of monarchy, nobility, and church. They sought to tamp out the fires of reform and revolution before it reared up in their own domains. It was an unprovoked, preemptive strike. Andrews concludes his Smithsonian article with this assessment of what might have been if Waterloo had turned out differently:. If Napoleon had remained emperor of France for the six years remaining in his natural life, European civilization would have benefited inestimably.
The reactionary Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria would not have been able to crush liberal constitutionalist movements in Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere; pressure to join France in abolishing slavery in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean would have grown; the benefits of meritocracy over feudalism would have had time to become more widely appreciated; Jews would not have been forced back into their ghettos in the Papal States and made to wear the yellow star again; encouragement of the arts and sciences would have been better understood and copied; and the plans to rebuild Paris would have been implemented, making it the most gorgeous city in the world.
What followed his loss was a century of reaction across the continent of Europe. The Bourbons were restored and the liberal gains in Germany, Spain, Austria and Italy were rolled back. Royalist statesmen such as Metternich and Bismarck aggressively defended their regimes against reform efforts by liberals and Marxists alike. The next cry spelled disaster for any hopes Napoleon might have had for an orderly retreat: " Sauve qui peut!
Across the three-mile battlefront men threw down their muskets and fled, terrified of the Prussian lancers who were being ordered to pursue them with their eight-foot spears. In mid-June, darkness would not descend on that part of Europe for hours. Soon general panic set in.
Jean-Martin Petit. Taking a few trusted aides with him, as well as a squadron of light cavalry for personal protection, Napoleon left the square on horseback for the farmhouse at Le Caillou where he had breakfasted that morning, full of hopes for victory.
There he transferred into his carriage. In the crush of fugitives on the road outside the town of Genappe he had to abandon it for a horse once again, although there were so many people that he could hardly go at much more than a walking pace.
Letizia di Bunoaparte barely makes it home from church in time to give birth to Napoleon, her fourth child, on August 15 right, his birth certificate. The French government guillotines Louis; Napoleon laments, "Had the French been more moderate and not put Louis to death, all Europe would have been revolutionized.
Even with his horse shot out from under him, Napoleon liberates the French port of Toulon from monarchist forces; is promoted to brigadier general at age As some of his patrons are executed during France's Reign of Terror, Napoleon is imprisoned on suspicion of treason but released 11 days later for lack of evidence. He remains faithful to the ideals of the Revolution. He uses artillery to quell an insurrection in Paris, saying, "The rabble must be moved by terror.
After a coup, Napoleon becomes first consul; in he is declared emperor, to be succeeded by an heir. Enemy forces take Paris and restore the monarchy as Napoleon retreats from Moscow; he is exiled to Elba, which he calls an "operetta kingdom.
He dies of cancer at age 51 on St. Helena; while in exile there, he had said, "If I had gone to America, we might have founded a State there. There was no denying that the Battle of Waterloo had been catastrophic. Except for the Battle of Borodino, which Napoleon had fought in Russia in his disastrous campaign, this was the costliest single day of the 23 years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Between 25, and 31, Frenchmen were killed or wounded, and vast numbers more were captured. Within a month, the disaster cost Napoleon his throne.
A vast amount of literature has explored why Napoleon fought such an unimaginative, error-prone battle at Waterloo.
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