Napoleon wins battle of Waterloo

[slon]

OK Waterloo station is now in Paris ..... but what else could have happened?

[Devil Wincarnate]

I suppose it depends on Blucher's timing.  I doubt Napoleon could have been in a state to wage more wars of expansion to any useful degree.  Here are two scenarios:

If Blucher shows up later in the day and really does save the day after an embarrassing defeat of Wellington and Willem, then it's the geopolitical status quo but there are vast future changes in Britain, as Wellington's political career never takes off.

If Blucher fails to show on the day and Napoleon defeats Wellington and Willem I, then Blucher still defeats him shortly afterwards.  Prussia effectively now pulls the Netherlands into its orbit, although how it reacts to the Belgian Revolution is anyone's guess.  Massive changes in Britain occur as above.

[mrhell]

Can't look into this as I'm out currently. However, Wellington was a conservative PM not keen on reform. Also given Napoleon's disaster in Russia was he in any state to go much further?

[East Anglian Lefty]

Assuming it wasn't too badly beaten up, I suspect Napoleon's army could have disposed of Blücher too - the Prussians had been pretty heavily hit at Quatre Bras. But there wouldn't have been time to pursue the British, so Wellington would have been able to retreat in good order with minimal losses.

Meanwhile it wasn't just the Prussians and the British - an Austrian army was also nearing France. I doubt Napoleon would have made it to 150 days.

Perhaps the most significant development might have been increased British reluctance to guarantee Belgian independence a couple of decades down the line.

[slon]

I was thinking more beyond the immediate military situation.
Let us assume for example Wellington is forced to retreat to the channel, Blücher put to flight, the Prussians would probably be cut to pieces when faced by the entire French army.... the Austrians would have zero chance against the now resurgent French so would sue for peace .... the Russians were months away from any movement West so would sit tight.

What would the political situation pan out to?
Could Napoleon cease the megalomaniac aim of Grand Empire so France would retain the new borders (including the low countries and North west Germany) with Britain isolated on the other side of the moat, Austria and Russia intact.

Where would that lead?

[East Anglian Lefty]

Still doesn't seem plausible. Wellington could retreat in good order and enough of his army was detached that he'd still have had a workable military unit. The Prussians might have been roughed up retreating, but that was only the Army of the Lower Rhine and after von Gneisenau's reforms they could easily have mustered a lot more forces from Prussia proper. If the Austrians hurried, they could very well have beaten Napoleon back to Paris and it's not like France was solidly behind him. And you've got Spain still bearing a grudge too...

The War of the Seventh Coalition might have taken rather longer, but letting Napoleon regain the throne was too risky for the rest of Europe and it would have kept going. The odds were still stacked against Napoleon, he wasn't the general he had had been a decade earlier and his men weren't the Grande Armée. Possibly if he dragged it out into the Year Without a Summer then the famine might have brought Europe to its knees enough for history to pan out differently, but otherwise I suspect the impact would have been minimal.

[slon]

Oct 23, 2014 14:39:59 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

Still doesn't seem plausible. Wellington could retreat in good order and enough of his army was detached that he'd still have had a workable military unit. The Prussians might have been roughed up retreating, but that was only the Army of the Lower Rhine and after von Gneisenau's reforms they could easily have mustered a lot more forces from Prussia proper. If the Austrians hurried, they could very well have beaten Napoleon back to Paris and it's not like France was solidly behind him. And you've got Spain still bearing a grudge too...

The War of the Seventh Coalition might have taken rather longer, but letting Napoleon regain the throne was too risky for the rest of Europe and it would have kept going. The odds were still stacked against Napoleon, he wasn't the general he had had been a decade earlier and his men weren't the Grande Armée. Possibly if he dragged it out into the Year Without a Summer then the famine might have brought Europe to its knees enough for history to pan out differently, but otherwise I suspect the impact would have been minimal.

I think you are missing what Napoleon and the French army were capable of .... remember Austerlitz and Jena, they almost made it at Leipzig despite being outnumbered 2 to 1 and after the disaster in Russia. The Prussians and even more so the Austrians were scared to death of the French and with good reason.

Anyway the speculation was more about the next 50 years assuming the French were not defeated at Waterloo or immediately afterwards.
My thought is that world history would have been quite different ....
the inept empires of Austro Hungary and Ottoman Turkey would have been swept away in pretty short order (not necessarily by French military action but by their own inability to suppress dissent by military means).
But what would have happened on our side of the channel, or between America and France?
 

[East Anglian Lefty]

Oct 23, 2014 16:56:20 GMT slon said:

Oct 23, 2014 14:39:59 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

Still doesn't seem plausible. Wellington could retreat in good order and enough of his army was detached that he'd still have had a workable military unit. The Prussians might have been roughed up retreating, but that was only the Army of the Lower Rhine and after von Gneisenau's reforms they could easily have mustered a lot more forces from Prussia proper. If the Austrians hurried, they could very well have beaten Napoleon back to Paris and it's not like France was solidly behind him. And you've got Spain still bearing a grudge too...

The War of the Seventh Coalition might have taken rather longer, but letting Napoleon regain the throne was too risky for the rest of Europe and it would have kept going. The odds were still stacked against Napoleon, he wasn't the general he had had been a decade earlier and his men weren't the Grande Armée. Possibly if he dragged it out into the Year Without a Summer then the famine might have brought Europe to its knees enough for history to pan out differently, but otherwise I suspect the impact would have been minimal.

I think you are missing what Napoleon and the French army were capable of .... remember Austerlitz and Jena, they almost made it at Leipzig despite being outnumbered 2 to 1 and after the disaster in Russia. The Prussians and even more so the Austrians were scared to death of the French and with good reason.

I think you're missing that those armies were mostly dead, and Napoleon was too distracted by his piles to concentrate on the battle.

Oct 23, 2014 16:56:20 GMT slon said:

Anyway the speculation was more about the next 50 years assuming the French were not defeated at Waterloo or immediately afterwards.
My thought is that world history would have been quite different ....
the inept empires of Austro Hungary and Ottoman Turkey would have been swept away in pretty short order (not necessarily by French military action but by their own inability to suppress dissent by military means).
But what would have happened on our side of the channel, or between America and France?
 

Austria (not year -Hungary) survived 1848, so I'd be wary of assuming it would collapse that easily. I suspect world history would have been much the same.

[slon]

Oct 24, 2014 11:12:35 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

Oct 23, 2014 16:56:20 GMT slon said:

Anyway the speculation was more about the next 50 years assuming the French were not defeated at Waterloo or immediately afterwards.
My thought is that world history would have been quite different ....
the inept empires of Austro Hungary and Ottoman Turkey would have been swept away in pretty short order (not necessarily by French military action but by their own inability to suppress dissent by military means).
But what would have happened on our side of the channel, or between America and France?
 

Austria (not yet -Hungary) survived 1848, so I'd be wary of assuming it would collapse that easily. I suspect world history would have been much the same.

Consider European (mainland) history post 1815 ...
The conservative/feudal empires were allowed to continue as there was nothing to oppose them. The liberal ideas of the American  and French revolutions were back in the box as far as continental Europe was concerned.
The ideas resurfaced as sporadic rebellions (regarded as akin to terrorism today) and eventually as nationalist movements with the liberalism replaced by more extreme national focused ideas.

With France in the role of major player and upholder of the ideas of rights of man, liberalism, internationalism, etc as per the general political foundation of the 1st Republic/Empire political history in Europe would almost certainly have been different.
Exactly how is difficult to guess, hence this thread

[East Anglian Lefty]

I'm considering it, but your statements are contrafactual, which isn't a proper basis to build a counter-factual on.

[No Offence Alan]

Didn't "Blackadder" do this? Blackadder turns up at Waterloo to "help" and Napoleon wins - one result is that "The Italian Job" stars Citroen 2CVs.

[Rose Tinted Lane]

I always thought Waterloo in 1815 was far too late to change anything. For me, the more interesting question is the battle of Corunna in 1809. I might push this one just a little too far.

Let's say the rescue fleet dispatched from Lisbon got caught up in a storm and had to head back to port, delaying them by 24 hours. And let's say that the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John Moore had a less orderly retreat and lost several thousand more men in the retreat before reaching Corunna. The French under Soult then launch the attack and succeed in wiping out the remaining troops, capturing several high profile figures, including Moore himself. In exchange for him (and several thousand other POWs), the British agree to pull their forces out of Portugal and not to interfere in Iberia. The French then launch a series of attacks on Portugal, without the British reinforcements - most of Portugal falls quickly, with Lisbon holding out a little longer due to its defences. By 1810, Portugal and Spain are under French control and the guerrillas have been largely put down ruthlessly.

With Western Europe fairly safe, this leaves Napoleon free to send an even larger army east, reaching Moscow by July 1812, before the Russians had had a chance to pillage and flee the city, finding huge reserves of food and goods. Demoralised, and with the French safely ensconced for the Winter, the Tsar comes to an arrangement with Napoleon to permanently cede St Petersburg, but give Moscow back. This just leaves a smattering of principalities, republics, duchies and assorted microstates in Europe, all queuing up for protection. And Britain.

With more troops available, the War of 1812 was a greater success and the Eastern Seaboard was brought back under partial British rule with the help of considerable bribes paid for by the introduction of the hated "income tax".

However, as any schoolchild will tell you, when the inevitable ground invasion of Britain took place in 1815, the British may have had a navy and considerable coastal defences, but the underbelly of the "nation of shopkeepers" was soft. Once a beachhead was established at Harwich, the crushing victory took place at the Battle of Colchester, where a hasty counter-attack led by Arthur Wellesley, always more comfortable on the defence, was first repulsed, then broken utterly. As a parlour game, some scholars like to discuss what could have happened had Wellesley been able to drive the French back into the sea at Harwich, but that sort of counterfactual teaches us nothing.

As is often the case, the defeated power ends up influencing the victor culturally, which is why the French are these days so keen on a full cooked "English" breakfast and drinking tea. Indeed, rather than an Assembly, Diet, or House of Deputies, the legislature became known as the "European Parliament", after the British institution, and English loanwords make up a considerable portion of the French we speak today. The death of the old-fashioned idea of hereditary monarchy is usually traced to this point in history, via the short-lived "elector-prince" phase of the French Empire, until the liberal revolutions which swept across Europe in 1848, restoring many of the original values of the French Revolution and creating an imperfect, but burgeoning, multi-state confederal democracy.

The global empire of the Confederation was considerable but the Lieutenant-Governor of the American Colonies had been quick off the mark to establish his "Monroe Doctrine" that American matters should be devolved to the American "Congress". Despite having considerable devolved powers, this was not enough for the American people and after being refused a plebiscite on independence, the 2nd American Revolutionary War lasted from 1861-1865 and wouldn't have been won by the newly reformed United States had it not been for the considerable reinforcements from South American states and the Indian "Sepoy Mutiny", stretching the European forces thin.

An ill-timed declaration of war over an obscure matter of Danish aristocratic lineage resulted in the battle of Sadowa in 1866, whereby the "Confederatíon Européenne" added the former Austrian Empire as a member (under some duress) and by 1871 the Risorgimento ended with the "voluntary" joining of Italy to the Confederacy. That the Ottomans managed to hold on to Greece as late as 1912 is something historians have often pondered. The period from around 1880 to 1930 came to be known as a golden era of peace and prosperity (at least for Europeans, if not their African and Asian subjects), marred only by the spread of "Turkish Flu" across Europe in 1919, killing millions. Despite this, living standards were going up and things were looking good until all of that was brought to an end: the ultra-liberal European free-trade zone resulted in an overproduction of consumer goods, the consequent overextension of credit and the resulting financial and economic crisis which came to be known as the Bastille Day Crash of 1931.

The fallout from this was some of the worst poverty and destitution seen for over a century. There was a resurgence of nationalism and the emergence of charismatic regional leaders who railed against "ever closer confederacy" and instead advocated a dissociation of states and a return to the old pre-Vienna Conference borders. While in some countries, this proved to be a flash in the pan (Pierre Poujade managed to secure as many as 12 of the 99 French Members in the European Parliament, before fading into obscurity), in Britain, the British Independence Party, led by a man called Mosley, managed to secure 43% of the British vote in the 1937 regional elections, and was only kept out of office, and greater prominence, by a coalition of the Confederate Conservative and European Liberal Progressive parties.

This disunity came at a bad time for Europe, with the rise of a militaristic Japanese-American alliance, which launched a combined surprise assault on both Confederal Canada and the Republic of Siberia in December 1941. Even given the size of the expanded United States following the annexation of Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1898, many contemporary observers felt that both nations had erred in taking on the hardy Siberians, mainland China and the Canadian Autonomous Region of the European Confederacy, in Winter. The US in particular had allowed a belief in "manifest destiny" to translate into something dark, under the leadership of Defence Secretary William Pelley. The "World War" as it came to be known, lasted many years with significant losses on both sides, with the intervention of the pan-Arab states on the side of the Japano-Americans several years into the conflict being a decisive blow to the Confederacy. It wasn't until the Rutherford Project in Oxford had gathered the greatest Physicists of the age together and resulted in the creation of a working atomic weapon that the end of the war began to look in sight. When one was exploded over Port Said in late 1947, and another 12 hours later in Alexandria, the pan-Arabs sued for peace. With the threat of the same over Boston, the Americans agreed to peace and withdrew from Canada, but offered them the chance to amalgamate with the United States, as equals. Canada declined, but did not re-establish itself as a member of the European Confederacy, remaining independent to this day, while joining a new free-trade zone called "NAFTA". The World War ended with the declaration of peace between a now isolated Japan, a United States in a strategically improved position and a European Confederation which had racked up a serious debt during the war.

The revolutions of 1848 had produced another thinker, however. Despite the deep embrace of political liberalism across Europe, a young Confederate named Engels had seen the exploitation of the new urban poor and created a new theory of society which he called "communitarianism" but became more widely known as Engelsism. Although his theories were not seriously put into practice, his ideas were considered dangerous and by the 1860s he was touring the world spreading his philosophy in the Americas, Australasia, India and finally in China, where he lived until his death in 1895. His teaching in China was considered instrumental in informing the ideas of the Chinese Communitarian Party under the leadership of renowned Engelsian, Dr Sun Yat-sen. The combination of Chinese Nationalism and Communitarianism was a potent one and although the Boxer Rebellion was only partially successful in shaking off the shackles of Confederal Imperialism, by his death in 1925, he was able to leave control of most of mainland China to his Deputy, Zhou Enlai. With some assistance from Confederal Indian forces, the Chinese were able to drive the Japanese out of China by 1942, but only at the cost of extending the "lease" on Hong Kong to the Confederacy into perpetuity. The Chinese turned their attention northwards, capturing Siberia from the Japanese and declaring it a province of China. While the pan-Arabs had been busy in the West, China had also grabbed the central Asian states, right up to the Caspian. Into the 1950s and 60s, the the Union of Communitarian Chinese Republics adopted their "domino strategy" of subverting first Indochina and Korea, then supporting the African Dominions in their fight for independence from the Confederacy, before finally trying to support the spread of their philosophy to South America.

With the Confederacy's power waxing and no other obvious hegemon, UCCR power grew and became more adventurous in its foreign policy. In an attempt to modernise and hold on to its global pretensions, the Confederacy established a "Liberal International" in the postwar period and invited all liberal democracies to join. This wasn't a great success however, with no American states choosing to join, Japan remaining a pariah, and a rival "Communitarian International" set up by the UCCR. The Hong Kong missile crisis of 1962 resulted in the Confederacy backing down and moving the missiles back to India. The antagonism continued and was compounded by a proxy war in Persia all through the 1980s, with American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger infamously commenting "it's a pity they can't both lose". The UCCR eventually brought most of Persia into its sphere of influence, but Afghanistan remained a constant thorn in the side, with hundreds of thousands of CLA troops tied down to peacekeeping duties. The Confederacy also worked to gain allies in the middle east, supporting the Turks and minority groups like the Druze in creation of their own Levantine states. The United States has maintained the Monroe principle of fighting inter-continental interference in the Americas, but other than some aggression in the Pacific, seizing the Pacific Polynesian and Micronesian Islands in the 1960s and directly sponsoring some African states, it has largely kept to itself since the War.

And so today we wonder, while it appears inevitable that the Arab states were too volatile and incoherent to form a long-lasting alliance, if history had happened differently, could we have avoided the partition of the Palestinian territories and the Wall which separates East Jerusalem's Asian sector, from West Jerusalem's European Sector? In another time, could the middle-east have instead been a bastion of peace and hope?

[East Anglian Lefty]

If we had agreed a policy of non-intervention, I'm not sure the War of 1812 would have happened in the same way. Napoleon's incentive to demand a blockade of British shipping would have disappeared. Russian territory was too distant for its incorporation into the French Empire ever to be really feasible, so I have a hard time seeing why he'd have attacked - even if we view it as simply military adventurism, there were easier and more attractive targets.

[slon]

Many thanks RTL ..... I was not really expecting a blow by blow account.

The situation I imagine is not that Napoleon succeeds in re-establishing dominance over continental Europe, just that he is not defeated.
We know the history of the 19th century, British hegemony in world trade, authoritarian dinosaur empires of Austo-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey, the growth of nationalism.
How would that have been different with France as a major player still ruled by the concepts of the 1st republic (with or without Bonaparte at the helm)?

[East Anglian Lefty]

France wasn't ruled by the concepts of the First Republic. He'd spent the last decade trying to make his friends and relatives monarchs over most of western Europe. Republican ideals were dead.

[slon]

Nov 14, 2014 13:04:24 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

France wasn't ruled by the concepts of the First Republic. He'd spent the last decade trying to make his friends and relatives monarchs over most of western Europe. Republican ideals were dead.

That is the Napoleon conundrum ... his absurd ego and apparent desire to be Caesar or Alexander but set  against the modern liberal mechanisms for legislature and governance which he introduced into much of Europe.

[East Anglian Lefty]

He didn't introduce any liberal measures for legislation - it was a military empire, not a democracy. As for governance, he was interested in modernisation, not in liberalism. It was enlightened despotism, nothing more.

[East Anglian Lefty]

Nov 14, 2014 22:07:36 GMT @stuart said:

Nov 14, 2014 16:29:29 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

He didn't introduce any liberal measures for legislation - it was a military empire, not a democracy. As for governance, he was interested in modernisation, not in liberalism. It was enlightened despotism, nothing more.

Britain with its organic change provided more of a liberalisation of governance then revolutionary France ever did. I find it ironic that the victor of the battle did more for for liberalising government, despite fearing a french style revolution, then Napoleon ever did dispute the opportunity and rhetoric.

Not whilst revolutionary France was around, it didn't. I know you love this myth, but it's just not true. The Treason Trials of 1794 and the Combination Acts were both profoundly illiberal.

And Napoleon didn't really go in for the rhetoric of democracy, because he was very clearly a military strongman trading on ideas of a resurgent Roman Empire. Whereas Wellington's only contribution to reform was to be so profoundly unpopular that even his own party wanted rid of him and replaced him with Grey. Wellington's Catholic Relief Act actually thinned the electoral rolls by disenfranchising vastly more poor Protestants than the small number of wealthy Catholics it enfranchised.

[slon]

Nov 14, 2014 16:29:29 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

He didn't introduce any liberal measures for legislation - it was a military empire, not a democracy. As for governance, he was interested in modernisation, not in liberalism. It was enlightened despotism, nothing more.

Modern and liberal for the day in the places where they were introduced ..... remember continental Europe was not the UK, serfdom and feudal law were the norm.
You could call it enlightened despotism but it is a bit harsh

[Sibboleth]

And how, exactly, does that explain the Combination Acts?