ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the period from 20 March to 22 June 1815, known as the Hundred Days after the celebrated 'Flight of the Eagle' from exile on the island of Elba must surely rank among the most extraordinary episodes in the history of empires. As a military commander or imperial conqueror that Napoleon bequeathed his real legacy to France. What survived his fall was still of lasting importance, but it lay almost entirely in the sphere of his civil rule. Napoleon's military initiative during the Hundred Days and its diplomatic consequences ended of course in composite disaster. At an earlier stage, by the first Treaty of Paris, the Allies had been willing to allow France her frontiers of 1792, which included the former papal enclaves of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, parts of Belgium and of the Rhenish left bank, and Savoy. The second Peace of Paris, which followed the complex Vienna Settlement, was altogether a much more punitive document.
