| Date | 18 June 1815 |
| Location | Waterloo, Kingdom of the Netherlands (present-day Belgium) |
| Caused by | Napoleon Bonaparte's return from exile (the Hundred Days) and his pre-emptive campaign against the Seventh Coalition forces massed on France's northern border |
| Resulted in | Decisive Coalition victory; final abdication of Napoleon Bonaparte; exile to Saint Helena; restoration of the Bourbon monarchy; conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars |
| Parties | French Army of the North · Anglo-allied Army (Britain, Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, Nassau) · Prussian Army of the Lower Rhine |
| Lead figures | Napoleon Bonaparte, Duke of Wellington, Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Marshal Michel Ney, Prince William of Orange |
The Battle of Waterloo was a decisive military engagement fought on 18 June 1815 near the town of Waterloo in present-day Belgium. The battle marked the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and brought a permanent end to his rule as Emperor of the French, following his escape from exile on the island of Elba and subsequent seizure of power during the Hundred Days.
By the spring of 1815, Napoleon's rapid return to power had alarmed the major European states, prompting Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia to form the Seventh Coalition and pledge a combined force of over 700,000 men to oppose him. Napoleon's only viable strategy was to strike first and separately defeat the Coalition armies before they could unite. He moved north into the Kingdom of the Netherlands in June 1815, aiming to neutralise the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-allied army and Field Marshal Blücher's Prussian army in rapid succession.
On 16 June, Napoleon achieved partial success at the Battle of Ligny, forcing the Prussians to retreat, while Marshal Ney fought the inconclusive Battle of Quatre Bras against Wellington. Wellington withdrew his forces northward to a prepared defensive ridge line south of the village of Waterloo. The night of 17–18 June was marked by heavy rainfall that churned the fields of the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau into thick mud, a circumstance that Napoleon would later cite as a critical factor in his delayed morning advance.
### Morning
Napoleon delayed the opening of the battle until approximately 11:30 a.m. on 18 June, citing the need for the ground to dry sufficiently to allow his artillery to manoeuvre. The assault began with a diversionary attack on the fortified farmhouse of Hougoumont on Wellington's right flank. What was intended as a feint rapidly consumed a disproportionate number of French troops as Wellington reinforced the garrison throughout the morning, tying down an estimated 14,000 French soldiers across the course of the day.
### Afternoon
At approximately 1:30 p.m., Napoleon ordered a massed infantry assault by d'Erlon's I Corps against Wellington's left and centre. The assault was met with determined musket fire from the ridge and a devastating counter-charge by the British heavy cavalry brigades of Ponsonby and Somerset. The charge broke d'Erlon's corps but overextended badly; both Ponsonby and a significant portion of the Union Brigade were destroyed by French lancers in the subsequent pursuit, removing Wellington's principal offensive cavalry reserve.
Between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m., Marshal Ney launched a series of unsupported cavalry charges against Wellington's infantry squares — a sequence later characterised by French historians as among the most costly tactical errors of the Napoleonic Wars. The squares held. No artillery accompanied the charges, and no infantry was deployed in coordination, a failure attributed at the time to a miscommunication between Ney and Napoleon's headquarters staff regarding the sequence of the assault order.
### Evening
At approximately 6:00 p.m., French forces under General Lobau captured the fortified farmhouse of La Haye Sainte after its King's German Legion garrison exhausted their ammunition. The loss opened a gap in Wellington's centre, and Napoleon directed his elite Imperial Guard to exploit the breach. However, Prussian forces under Blücher, whose retreat after Ligny had been north toward Wavre rather than east toward Namur — contrary to Napoleon's assumption — began arriving on the French right flank from approximately 4:30 p.m. onward, progressively engaging and drawing off French reserves.
The advance of the Imperial Guard's Middle Guard battalions at approximately 7:30 p.m. was repulsed by a concealed volley from Maitland's 1st Foot Guards and an enfilading assault by Adam's 3rd Brigade. The sight of the previously undefeated Guard in retreat triggered a general collapse of French morale. Wellington, observing from the ridge, signalled a general advance across the entire line. The French army disintegrated into rout. Napoleon fled the field in his carriage, abandoning it near Genappe and continuing on horseback.
The human cost of the battle was extraordinary. Casualty estimates across all three armies range from 47,000 to over 65,000 killed, wounded, or missing in the single day of fighting. Wellington, surveying the field on the evening of 18 June, reportedly wrote to a friend that "the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life" — a remark recorded in Thomas Creevey's papers and subsequently one of the most cited personal observations in British military history.
Napoleon abdicated for the second time on 22 June 1815 and surrendered to the British aboard HMS Bellerophon on 15 July. He was exiled to the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died on 5 May 1821. The Congress of Vienna, already in session, rapidly concluded its territorial settlements. The Bourbon monarchy was restored in France under Louis XVIII.
The Battle of Waterloo permanently retired the concept of Napoleonic hegemony over continental Europe and inaugurated a period of relative great-power stability known as the Concert of Europe, which persisted in various forms until the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853. The battlefield was designated a protected historical site by the Belgian government in 1914, and the Lion's Mound — a large conical earthwork commissioned by the King of the Netherlands and constructed between 1820 and 1826 — remains the central monument on the site.
The engagement gave rise to the phrase "meeting one's Waterloo," meaning to suffer a decisive and final defeat, which entered English common usage by the 1830s and was recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary's first systematic fascicle of 1884. The strategic conduct of the campaign has been the subject of continuous scholarly reassessment; the 1962 publication of John Naylor's *Waterloo* and the later *Waterloo: A Near-Run Thing* by David Hamilton-Williams each reassigned primary blame for the French defeat from Napoleon's health to Ney's cavalry mismanagement — a reattribution that remains contested among military historians.
The battle has been the subject of sustained cultural reproduction across two centuries. Victor Hugo devoted a lengthy digression to it in *Les Misérables* (1862), attributing Napoleon's defeat to divine intervention on behalf of the nineteenth century's progressive forces — an interpretation widely noted and widely disputed by contemporaries. The 1970 Soviet-Italian co-production *Waterloo*, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk and starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as Wellington, reconstructed the battle using approximately 15,000 Soviet Army soldiers as extras and remains the most logistically ambitious cinematic recreation of the engagement.
In 1974, the Swedish pop group ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with their song "Waterloo," performed in Brighton, England. The song reached number one in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Norway, and several other European markets, and is credited with establishing ABBA's international commercial profile. The use of a catastrophic military defeat as a romantic metaphor was noted at the time by several British music critics, though ABBA's management declined to comment on the intended irony.