An Authentic Narrative of the Campaign of 1815, comprising a Circumstantial Detail of the Battle of Waterloo.; By a Staff Officer in the French Army. Forming a Sequel to the History of the Campaign of 1814, by M. De Beauchamp.

London: Henry Colburn, 1815. Second Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing thus. Wraps, string-tied. RARE. Format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8.75 inches (some pages slightly smaller). [4], 52, [4 of advertisements] pages. Item has some wear and soiling, with some edge wear and some discoloration. Alphonse de Beauchamp entered the Sardinian military service in 1784. Beauchamp commenced his Histoire de la Vendée et des Chouans (three volumes, Paris, 1806), which depicted the cruelties of the Fouché regime. Under the Restoration, he received a pension and wrote for the Moniteur and the Gazette de France. The Waterloo campaign (15 June – 8 July 1815) was fought between the French Army of the North and two Seventh Coalition armies, an Anglo-allied army and a Prussian army. Initially the French army was commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte. The Anglo-allied army was commanded by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian army by Prince Blücher. The war between France and the Seventh Coalition came when other European Great Powers refused to recognize Napoleon as Emperor of the French upon his return from exile on Elba, and declared war on him, rather than France, as they still recognized Louis XVIII as the king of France and considered Napoleon a usurper. Rather than wait for the Coalition to invade France, Napoleon decided to attack his enemies and hope to defeat them in detail before they could launch their combined and coordinated invasion. He chose to launch his first attack against the two Coalition armies cantoned in modern-day Belgium, then part of the newly formed United Kingdom of the Netherlands, but until the year before part of the First French Empire. The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in Belgium, part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. A French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition, a British-led coalition consisting of units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, referred to by many authors as the Anglo-allied army or Wellington's army, and a Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal von Blücher, referred to also as Blücher's army. The battle marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle was contemporaneously known as the Battle of Mont Saint-Jean or La Belle Alliance (the beautiful alliance). Upon Napoleon's return to power in March 1815, many states that had opposed him formed the Seventh Coalition and began to mobilize armies. Wellington and Blücher's armies were cantoned close to the northeastern border of France. Napoleon planned to attack them separately in the hope of destroying them before they could join in a coordinated invasion of France with other members of the coalition. On 16 June, Napoleon successfully attacked the bulk of the Prussian army at the Battle of Ligny with his main force, causing the Prussians to withdraw northwards on 17 June, but parallel to Wellington and in good order. Napoleon sent a third of his forces to pursue the Prussians, which resulted in the separate Battle of Wavre with the Prussian rear-guard on 18–19 June, and prevented that French force from participating at Waterloo. Also on 16 June, a small portion of the French army contested the Battle of Quatre Bras with the Anglo-allied army. The Anglo-allied army held their ground on 16 June, but the withdrawal of the Prussians caused Wellington to withdraw north to Waterloo on 17 June. Upon learning that the Prussian army was able to support him, Wellington decided to offer battle on the Mont-Saint-Jean escarpment across the Brussels road, near the village of Waterloo. Here he withstood repeated attacks by the French throughout the afternoon of 18 June, aided by the progressively arriving Prussians who attacked the French flank and inflicted heavy casualties. In the evening, Napoleon assaulted the Anglo-allied line with his last reserves, the senior infantry battalions of the French Imperial Guard. With the Prussians breaking through on the French right flank, the Anglo-allied army repulsed the Imperial Guard, and the French army was routed. Waterloo was the decisive engagement of the Waterloo Campaign and Napoleon's last. According to Wellington, the battle was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life". Napoleon abdicated four days later, and coalition forces entered Paris on 7 July. The defeat at Waterloo ended Napoleon's rule as Emperor of the French and marked the end of his Hundred Days return from exile. This ended the First French Empire and set a chronological milestone between serial European wars and decades of relative peace, often referred to as the Pax Britannica. The battlefield is located in the Belgian municipalities of Braine-l'Alleud and Lasne, about 9.3 miles south of Brussels, and about 1.2 miles from the town of Waterloo. Condition: Good.

Keywords: Napoleon, French Army, Battle of Waterloo, Campaign of 1815, Duke of Wellington, Seventh Coalition, Blucher, Staff Officer, Alphonse de Beauchamp, Battle Studies

[Book #83358]

Price: $500.00

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