Napoleon's Hundred Days: From Elba to Waterloo

Napoleon spent only 9 months and 21 days in his forced retirement on Elba. The Palazzina dei Mulini in Portoferraio was his residence for public life and receptions; his private life went on at the nearby Villa di San Martino. On 26 February 1815, while the British and French guard ships were absent, his tiny fleet of one brig, four small transports and two feluccas slipped away from Portoferraio with some 1,000 men. The furnishings were scattered after the sudden departure. Since 1964 the villa has been a Napoleonic museum.

Visitor guidance: The museum is reached by a stairway called Salita Napoleone.

On 1 March 1815 Napoleon landed at Golfe-Juan, between Cannes and Antibes, with 607 grenadiers of the Old Guard, 118 Polish lancers, some 300 Corsicans, 50 elite gendarmes, 80 civilians and two light guns. Outside royalist Provence he was warmly received, and he avoided much of Provence by taking a road through the Alps. That road is marked today as the Route Napoléon, inaugurated in 1932, and it begins here.

Location precision: Sources give the landing at Golfe-Juan as a whole; the pin marks the village, not a particular beach.

Visitor guidance: The Route Napoléon, inaugurated in 1932, begins at Golfe-Juan.

On 7 March 1815 Napoleon and his handful of troops were met at Laffrey by a battalion of the royal 5th Regiment of the Line, sent to arrest him. Leaving his men behind, he presented himself to the soldiers and declared, "If any of you will shoot his Emperor, here I am". They defected to his cause, crying Vive l'Empereur. The meadow by the Grand lac de Laffrey is now a protected natural site, with Emmanuel Frémiet's equestrian statue of Napoleon, installed in 1930.

Visitor guidance: Bronze reliefs of the scene hang on two walls at the entrance of the meadow.

After Laffrey, Napoleon was acclaimed at Grenoble, and General Jean Gabriel Marchand could not prevent him from entering the city through the Bonne gate. The journey from Golfe-Juan had taken less than seven days. Napoleon summed it up later: "From Cannes to Grenoble, I still was an adventurer; in that last city, I came back a sovereign." From here he went on to Paris.

Location precision: The pin marks the city centre; the Bonne gate through which Napoleon entered is not pinned.

Marshal Ney had said Napoleon ought to be brought to Paris in an iron cage; on 14 March, at Lons-le-Saunier, he joined him instead with a small army of 6,000 men. On 20 March Napoleon entered the capital, which Louis XVIII had recently fled, returned to the Tuileries and named the government of the Hundred Days that day. The palace was burned by the Paris Commune in 1871 and demolished in 1883.

Visitor guidance: The site is a raised terrace between the Place du Carrousel and the Tuileries Garden.

Napoleon's plan for 18 June began here: Jérôme's division would attack Hougoumont first, which he expected to draw in Wellington's reserves. Sous-Lieutenant Legros broke through the north gate with an axe, and all the French who got inside were killed except a drummer boy. Napoleon kept feeding in troops all afternoon, 33 battalions and 14,000 men in all, and personally ordered the house shelled until it burned. Wellington later said the battle "turned upon the closing of the gates at Hougoumont".

Visitor guidance: Restored and opened to the public on 18 June 2015; a memorial by the north gate shows two soldiers struggling to close the gates.

About 400 men of the King's German Legion defended La Haye Sainte. Napoleon failed to commit enough force against it early on, ordered Marshal Ney to take it at 15:00 and had to repeat the order at 17:30. The defenders held out until their ammunition ran out, and its capture in the early evening gave the French a position to attack the allied centre. Napoleon then committed his last reserve, the Imperial Guard, but Blücher's Prussians had arrived, and he was too late.

After Waterloo Napoleon abdicated on 22 June 1815 in favour of his four-year-old son. On 25 June he was told to leave Paris and retired to Malmaison, the former home of Joséphine, who had bought the estate in 1799 and died there shortly after his first abdication. On 29 June the approaching Prussians, who had orders to seize him, drove him west toward Rochefort and a hoped-for passage to the United States.

Visitor guidance: Malmaison is open to the public as a Napoleonic national museum.

Royal Navy ships blocked the escape to America, so Napoleon spent his last days in France in the commander's house on Île d'Aix, which he had ordered built in 1808. In a simple room with yellow hangings, on 13 July 1815, he wrote his surrender letter to the Prince Regent, "I come, like Themistocles, to sit at the hearth of the British people". On 15 July he put on his uniform and boarded HMS Bellerophon. Saint Helena followed, where he died in 1821.

Location precision: The pin marks the island, not the commander's house.

Visitor guidance: A year-round ferry runs from Fouras; cars are prohibited on the island.