An objective review of a useless massacre.

Two centuries after the Battle of Waterloo, the time he would come to an impartial examination of the Napoleonic adventure? Whereas in France the story of the 1st Empire was almost exclusively based on the self-supporting writings of Napoleon and his family, works like this book are now based on the multitude of texts of other actors in this tragedy to give a more realistic view.
The battle itself occupies only a small part of this work (60 pages out of 300). The rest relates to the conduct of the Hundred Days and the launch of the campaign. It is clear that the case was doomed from the start by the awkward choice of the date of return of Elba: European sovereigns assembled for the Congress of Vienna were able to agree to react immediately. Even if Napoleon had won at Waterloo his exhausted army would then deal with the huge Russian and Austrian forces.
For the rest, it is a succession of errors of judgment, hasty decisions, orders and confused-against orders that led to the "hundred most expensive day of the history of France." All troops involved in the battle were heroic, but they were controlled by a tired and sick emperor surrounded by worn marshals.