From February to June 1815, after his escape from Elba, he assembled an army of about 200,000 and nearly beat the British and the Prussian armies at the Battle of Waterloo. I understand he was still popular after his abdication, but where did all of those soldiers and their weapons, uniforms, accoutrements, horses, artillery, etc. come from? Were they all former soldiers of his? Was all the other stuff just taken from armories or government storage?
They didn’t just disband the entire French army, the new regime needed an army too. It was whittled down, and pro-napoleonic officers fired, but the troops were still there when Napoleon got back. It was more a matter of winning their loyalty and recalling willing officers (and it was voluntary, Napoleon did not have enough of a mass following to risk being a heavy handed dictator again.)
Accoutrements were more haphazard than before the abdication (and more importantly there was a bad shortage of horses.)
Veterans, Napoleon had the veterans of 20 years of Revolutionary and Imperial armies, a fair number of whom were still young enough to serve and a fair number of whom had recovered from wounds and exhaustion while the Emperor was in exile on Elba. The was a huge officer corps and corps of NCOs who had been pretty cavalierly dismissed by the returned Bourbons and were not being paid their pensions as quickly and generously as they expected. There were men, who wore the cross of the Legion of Honor, who had led men in combat in Russia, Germany and Italy, had survived a hundred fights, who had been soldiers since their youth who were living on a crust of bread and a few pennies because the new regime and the new economy had no place for them. These people were eager to return to the ranks to support a man who could restore their respect and prosperity.
Napoleon’s real problem was not trained men, it was horses. Horses and money. Horses were needed not just for cavalry but for all of the army’s transportation. The army could not move five miles without a huge supply of horses and forage. Those Napoleon did not have. Twenty years of war had pretty well exhausted the domestic supply of horses not essential to keep commerce and agriculture going. That is why Napoleon need ed a quick victory close to the French frontier in Belgium, before the full weight of Austria, Prussia and Russia could be brought to bear. He could not mount or finance an army that would match the juggernaut that would be coming from the East in the late summer of 1815.
Even with all his veterans, Napoleon only brought some seventy to seventy-five thousand men to Waterloo. He had gone into Russia three years before with a quarter million (at least half of whom were foreigners).
I’ll also note that Napoleon wasn’t idle on Elba. He kept in contact, via letter, with his people back home and so was still essentially running a fairly organized effort.
That high a percentage? Huh. Where were they from?
At its height in 1812, consisted of 554,500 men:
• 300,000 Frenchmen and Dutchmen
• 95,000 Poles
• 30,000 Italians[1]
• 24,000 Bavarians
• 20,000 Saxons
• 17,000 Westphalians
• 20,000 Prussians
• 35,000 Austrians
• 15,000 Swiss
• 3,500 Croats
Courtesy of wikipedia. I might note that some of those “Croats” were probably Serbs. Err…well, at least one was - a distant progenitor of mine, according to family history ( my father’s side of the family were Serbs settled in one of the Austrian miltary zones in what is today Croatia, like Nikola Tesla, reputedly also a relative ).
The amazing thing is, Croatia (called Illyria) was part of France from 1809 until 1813. The Illyrians fought more willingly than some of the others in Russia, since in the event of Napoleon’s defeat their land would revert to the Hapsburgs, whom they disliked. The Poles also fought probably more eagerly than the French in Russia, for obvious reasons.
Indeed, Napoleon called his invasion of Russia “the Second Polish War” to co-opt Polish hatred of Russia.