Christine Haynes
Making Friends Out of Enemies: The Allied Occupation of France, 1815–1818
Following the defeat of Napoleon for the second time at Waterloo, France was occupied by the Allied Powers. Between June and November of 1815, over 1.2 million troops from England, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and other German lands controlled 61 departments of France, as well as the capital of Paris. Following the Treaty of November 1815, the Allied Powers instituted a more limited “occupation of guarantee,” with 150,000 troops stationed in seven departments in the northeast of France. This occupation, which was supposed to last for five years, ended in November 1818, after the French fulfilled the Allied demands for war indemnities. Despite its significance for the re-building of France and Europe after 25 years of revolution and war, the story of this first modern occupation of France has been largely neglected by historians. As a result, we still know very little about how the occupation was experienced by ordinary soldiers and civilians on the ground. This paper will address this question. Providing an overview of the experience of occupation among both occupiers and occupied, the paper will argue that this event was critical for the establishment of a new post-war order in France and the rest of Europe.
Christine Haynes is Associate Professor of European History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A specialist in nineteenth-century French cultural history, she is the author of the book Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France (2010); as well as several articles related to the history of publishing and authorship. She is now venturing into military history, for a new book project on the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, tentatively entitled “Our Friends, the Enemies”: The First Allied Occupation of France, 1815–1818.
