The Battle of Waterloo, as it happened on June 18, 1815 | Hacker News Reader

The Battle of Waterloo, as it happened on June 18, 1815

telegraph.co.uk

61 pointsvinnyglennon34 comments

I've recommended this before, but if you want a thrilling, literary take on the battle, read Victor Hugo's account from Les Miserables:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm#link2H_4_...

That's the anonymous translation, which I liked just fine (there are modern ones), and can be bought for a buck or two just about anywhere. I'm guessing that Waterloo gets cut in a lot of abridgments, though.

My favorite extract - "the finest word, perhaps, that a Frenchman ever uttered":

http://coldewey.cc/post/19163335604/the-victor-of-waterloo-a...

"An Infamous Army" by Georgette Heyer has a very good account also.

There is a very good french serie about him (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253839/). I like the board game ambience a la Risk.

Victor Hugo had the 19th-Century habit of putting too much into a book. He had plenty to say about the Battle of Waterloo, some I dare say correct, but he had small excuse for putting it all into Les Miserables. (And then there's the long excursion on convents, which the Penguin edition displaces to an appendix, but that's an argument for another day.)

John Keegan gives it a very readable treatment in The Day of Battle.

If you ask me, modern authors have a habit of putting too little into a book! But of course your criticism has merit. Les Miserables is indeed very long, though I don't think any of it is waste.

19th century long form fiction is TV show for the time. Weekly episodes in mainstream newspapers. Hugo, Flaubert, Dumas, Zola used the format for decades. People will find Game of Thrones "too little into a show" soon enough, too.

10 episodes per season is indeed too little for a show. Especially when you have like 20 main characters.

Dickens too across the channel.

Story time, I just learned this last Weekend:

Victor Hugo was a member of the imperial senate (la chambre des Pairs) and tried to have a law passed to curb child labor from 16 to 10 hours per day.

That law was defeated, and Louis Jacques Thénard one of its most ferocious opponents became Thénardier in the book.

Ha! That's great to know. Thenardier was a real jerk, I kind of wondered whether he had a real-life analog (well, most of the characters, really).

why is it... in reverse chronological order?

they were doing a sort of 'live blog' with constant updates. we're only coming in at the end, with the prussians arriving as a sort of 'one more thing'

yeah, it's pretty annoying.

Hey, guys. You should all stand in a line and start lobbing lead projectiles at each other.

I have to ask french folks, do you feel antagonized by all the attention the Waterloo battle gets these past few weeks? Belgium cast coins even.

When people talk about Napoleon plublicly (on TV for example), it is still very political. There was another emperor nammed Napoleon III until 1871. France lost a region called "l'Alsace et la Loraine" and it leads to WWI.

British tends to compare him to Hitler but he is more in the bag with Alexander the Great or Caesar. Warlords.

Hitler is with Pol Pot and Staline.

"When people talk about Napoleon plublicly (on TV for example), it is still very political"

There is a short piece on the BBC News website about how France views Napoleon. Do you feel it's an accurate description?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-eu-33169050

I'd say it's not wrong, though the "providential man" idea is more closely linked to De Gaule than Napoleon. I think there is still some pride at the brilliant military successes he gave France, and his important reforms (like the Civil Code) but at the same time imperialism has really gotten out of fashion. So a mix of embarrassment and pride.

Paris still has a lot of Napoleonic traces (eg, the Arch of Triumph, the Vendome column, the Invalides, the ring of boulevards named after his marshals...).

Personally, I don't give a damn about nationalism. People taking pride from the actions of long-dead folks happening to be born roughly at the right location, or holding grudges because their country lost territory decades ago leave me cold.

Gare d'Austerlitz.

I've read recently that Rome was the 131th french district at that time.

I've also seen on Arte a documentary with a positive point of view about the french administration in Germany during that time (maybe in Munich).

I don't think Spain has kept such a positive image of the French occupation, though.

But Spain occupation set in motion all the revolutionary movements in (latin) America. From 1808-1810 most spanish colonies claimed their independence.

The current president is from the socialist party. This party takes its roots in the III Republic. The first republic is the French Revolution. Their thinkings always refer to the Age of Enlightenment, the III Republic and a little bit to marxism. They are not comfortable with kings and emperors.

A lot of french people carry a kind of collective inconscious shame around the history of the country. It can be about the Kings, Napoleon, the colonization of Africa, or the collaboration of the french governement with the nazis.

It can also come from the failure against the Great-Britain during the carribean wars in the 16th century. France lost the battle, lost Haiti and Napoleon sold La Louisiane...

English is the new latin not french. France is an outsider.

The only comparisons I have seen of Napoleon to Hitler have reference to his desire to dominate the continent, and his attempt to defeat Britain by defeating Russia. They do not compare him on any sort of moral scale.

> France lost a region called "l'Alsace et la Loraine" and it leads to WWI.

I know quite a bit about the events that led up to WWI and I'd never really heard of this before. The events that led to WWI are very complex.

"Memories of the Napoleonic Wars were still quite fresh in the 1870s. Right up until the Franco-Prussian War, the French had maintained a long-standing desire to establish their entire eastern frontier on the Rhine, and thus they were viewed by most 19th century Germans as an aggressive people."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsace-Lorraine#From_annexatio...

When you read popular French literature from around this time, you find extremely strong anti-German sentiment. This may have played on the reaction of the government, but what I think it influenced the most was the treaty of Versailles after the war. The treaty was a "revenge" of sorts for the harsh conditions imposed by Germany after the war of 1870 (and, of course, for the massive loss of life and material destruction of WWI).

Not really. There's not a Napoleon cult in France and people don't talk much about it. Interestingly, for the Belgium coin I heard on the news this morning that Belgium wanted to release an Euro coin for the bicentenary of Waterloo's battle and French government pressured Belgium so that it only remained a "collection" coin of 2.5 or 10 Euros (only valid in Belgium).

18th of June is also another important anniversary for France : it is also the De Gaulle 18th of June appeal (WWII London radio appeal for resistance)

I don't think the date is well known around the country, people know more about the De Gaulle appeal (18th of June) than the Waterloo battle. People obviously are hearing about it on TV but I still think that the 18th of June appeal gets more attention.

A little bit. But in the end, I feel confident that most of those who might resent the attention given to Waterloo can still feel overall morally superior to the oppressors who won this battle. A lot of people don't care at all, but among those who care a bit, it's not comparable to, say, the 8th of May where most people more or less agree that the "good" won. Very few people in France will have the opinion that the good won at Waterloo.

I mean even when admitting Napoleon's numerous bad aspects, the Coalition was hardly more legitimate that the Empire, so from this point of view commemorating Waterloo feels more like pure military brag and less like celebrating something actually good, thus reinforcing the feeling of righteousness on the losing side.

It sure feels much less important than de Gaulle's Appeal of 18 June.

Only as much as the Brits feels the need to over emphasizing "theirs" victories: ad nauseum. The only other nation on Earth that like this kind of ultra nationalist celebration is the USofA as far as I can tell, in this part of the hemisphere. There are certainly bad and good parts in Napoleon's legacy, and reducing it to a single battle is kind of insulting.

Just remember one thing: the context of the late 18th century and early 19th century was the struggle of the old monarchies fighting against the seed of democracy. Napoleon was a tyrant, but he was still regarded as the "enfant terrible" of the French Revolution. He had to be suppressed by the monarchic powers in Europe.

As far as I am concerned (I'm French), Napoleon's positive contributions are his administrative reforms and his destruction of old European power structure, which paved the way for modern station-states. However, these are overshadowed, IMHO, by his going back to a monarchic system, his unfettered imperialism, the numerous war crimes of the regime, the organized looting, and of course the restoration of slavery.

That said, I agree with you that morally, the Coalition was little different.

I'm English and I feel the same.

Waterloo was a disater for the people of Europe but a day of wonder for the Elite.

FWIW I'm British and over-30 years old and had until this week no idea what happened at Waterloo. Waterloo is a song by ABBA. I've heard the phrase "that was his Waterloo" but never known really what it meant.

My knowledge of Napoleon changed when this week I watched a TV program on the BBC praising him as a great leader, and another kids program which seemed even handed merely telling his history. I didn't even know that it was Wellington['s army] who faced off against Napoleon, despite Wellington being a name I've known since my earliest years [rubber boots which nearly all UK kids have are called 'Wellington boots'].

I've never seen Waterloo lauded or celebrated in Britain. YMMV I'd be interested to hear other perspectives, perhaps I've missed out?

By chance I happened to watch a recent show, again on the BBC this week, that included an aspect of the Battle of Waterloo - there I learnt 2 things: it was in Belgium and the British were surprised to win, the battle being extremely close. It was a fictional work but presented the battle as a very narrow victory and without celebration.

For my part I see now in Britain an undercurrent of feeling that the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is too great that seems to me like a continuation of the feeling that fomented the French revolution. As an ordinary Brit coming to this topic afresh I kinda see Napoleon as "our man" to some extent. The French Revolution has definitely been painted in our popular culture as nothing more than a violent and uncivilised scourge motivated more by blood lust and power hunger than anything else.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/napoleo...

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