Hundred Days

The Hundred Days commonly referred to as The War Of The Seventh Coalition or simply, Napoleon’s Hundred days (French: les Cent-Jours IPA: [le sɑ̃ ʒuʁ]) marked the period between Napoleon's return from eleven months of exile on the island of Elba to Paris on 20 March 1815 and the second restoration of King Louis XVIII on 8 July 1815 (a period of 110 days). This period saw the War of the Seventh Coalition (French: Guerre de la Septième Coalition), which is commonly the name used for the hundred days, which includes the Waterloo campaign and the Neapolitan War (Naples and Austria) as well as several other minor campaigns. The phrase les Cent Jours (the Hundred Days) was first used by the prefect of Paris, Gaspard, count of Chabrol, in his speech welcoming the king back to Paris on 8 July.

Napoleon returned while the Congress of Vienna was sitting. On 13 March, seven days before Napoleon reached Paris, the powers at the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw, and on 25 March, Austria, Prussia, Russia and the United Kingdom, the four Great Powers and key members of the Seventh Coalition, bound themselves to put 150,000 men each into the field to end his rule. This set the stage for the last conflict in the Napoleonic Wars, the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, the second restoration of the French kingdom, and the permanent exile of Napoleon to the distant island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821.

Background

Napoleon's rise and fall

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars pitted France against various coalitions of other European nations nearly continuously from 1792 onward. The overthrow and subsequent public execution of Louis XVI in France had greatly disturbed other European leaders, who vowed to crush the French Republic. Rather than leading to France's defeat, the wars allowed the revolutionary regime to expand beyond its borders and create client republics. The success of the French forces made a hero out of their best commander, Napoleon Bonaparte.