1815
Waterloo
South of Brussels, on muddy fields of rye, Wellington's stubborn squares held against hour after hour of French cavalry and infantry until Blucher's Prussians fell on Napoleon's right flank at dusk. The emperor's hundred-day return ended in a scramble of routed grenadiers. It was his last battle. He surrendered to the British and was shipped to St. Helena, a speck in the South Atlantic from which there was no return.
Tambora Erupts
On Sumbawa, Mount Tambora blew itself inside out in the most violent eruption in recorded history. Tens of thousands died locally; ash circled the globe. The following year, 1816, became the "year without a summer" from Vermont to Switzerland, starving crops and inspiring, at Lake Geneva, a novel called Frankenstein.
Napoleon Exiled to St. Helena
The British put him on a volcanic speck in the South Atlantic, six weeks' sail from anywhere, with a small court and a jailer who hated him. He would dictate his memoirs, quarrel over firewood, and die in 1821, at fifty-one, of a stomach cancer or a slow poison, depending on whom you believed.
Battle of New Orleans
Behind cotton-bale breastworks on the Chalmette plain, Andrew Jackson's mixed force of regulars, Kentucky riflemen, free Black militia, and Jean Lafitte's pirates shot down the cream of Wellington's veteran army. Two thousand British fell in half an hour; Jackson lost fewer than a hundred. The treaty ending the war had been signed two weeks before.
Mount Tambora Erupts
Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies, exploded with a force that dwarfed any eruption in recorded history. Seventy thousand people died immediately from pyroclastic flows and tsunamis. The ash veil circled the globe, producing the 'Year Without a Summer' in 1816 - crop failures from New England to Yunnan, famine, and cholera.
Final Act of Vienna
Nine days before Waterloo, the Congress signed its final act. Poland was partitioned again; the Netherlands swallowed Belgium; Prussia took the Rhineland; a German Confederation replaced the dead Holy Roman Empire. A conservative peace, cynical and durable, had been carved from Napoleon's wreckage. Metternich's settlement kept Europe largely free of continental war for nearly a century, until the system collapsed in the summer of 1914.
Napoleon's Hundred Days
Having escaped Elba on a fast brig, Napoleon landed in France, gathered troops who refused to arrest him, and marched into Paris as Louis XVIII fled. For a hundred days the old empire was back. The coalition declared him an outlaw and mobilized. Waterloo was three months away, and the Napoleonic age had its last, theatrical coda.
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Frequently asked
What happened in the year 1815?
Saeculum lists 7 curated events from 1815. The most significant is Waterloo: South of Brussels, on muddy fields of rye, Wellington's stubborn squares held against hour after hour of French cavalry and infantry until Blucher's Prussians…
What era was 1815 part of?
1815 falls within the Industrial Age (1801-1900). Steam, empire, and the unmaking of the old order.
Which regions saw notable events in 1815?
The curated events from 1815 span Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and North America.