After less than a year of exile on Elba, Napoleon boarded the Inconstant with roughly 1,000 Guardsmen and slipped past British and French patrol ships. He landed near Cannes days later, marching on Paris and reclaiming his throne without firing a shot, setting the stage for Waterloo.
Napoleon's exile on Elba was meant to end his career quietly, a tidy diplomatic solution to Europe's most disruptive man. But the emperor grew restless watching the Bourbon restoration unravel from afar, and he calculated—correctly—that France's new king had squandered whatever goodwill he'd earned.
Under cover of a masked ball's distraction and his guards' watchfulness elsewhere, Napoleon and roughly 1,000 soldiers boarded ships including the brig Inconstant, repainted to resemble a British vessel. He slipped past the Royal Navy frigate assigned to watch him and the French warships patrolling nearby waters, reaching the French mainland near Cannes on March 1.
What followed astonished Europe: regiments sent to arrest him instead joined his march to Paris, and Louis XVIII fled without a fight. Napoleon's return lasted only a hundred days, ending at Waterloo that June, but the sheer audacity of the escape—an emperor walking out of exile past an entire continent's watchful eyes—remains one of history's boldest gambits.
Key people: Napoleon Bonaparte