March 20, 1815

Hundred Days

Napoleon re-enters Paris and retakes the Tuileries

The Paris paper that was the Journal des Débats on 20 March reappeared next morning as the Journal de l'Empire — still carrying its royal fiscal stamp.

The evening of 20 March 1815

Napoleon reached Paris on the evening of 20 March 1815 and entered the Tuileries Palace, which Louis XVIII had abandoned the night before.

John Quincy Adams, then in Paris, reported the next day that Napoleon arrived at the Tuileries at about 8 p.m. with no more than four or five regiments — and that the troops sent out to oppose him had come into the city with him.

Eleven hundred men, nineteen days earlier

Napoleon had landed at Golfe-Juan on 1 March with about 1,100 soldiers, and gained successive military defections as he marched north. Ney publicly rallied to him at Lons-le-Saunier on 14 March, removing an important military obstacle.

With the royal forces proving unreliable and Napoleon nearing the capital, Louis XVIII left Paris. A hostile palace witness later remembered officers lifting Napoleon above the crowd and carrying him into the Tuileries.

A government reassembled overnight

Napoleon began rebuilding an imperial government immediately; the Fondation Napoléon chronology places his installation at the Tuileries and the appointment of ministers across 20 and 21 March.

The march had been bloodless, which is not the same as welcomed everywhere — royalist resistance persisted, particularly in parts of the south and west. The liberalising Additional Act associated with Benjamin Constant came later: adopted on 22 April and submitted to a plebiscite on 1 June.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes

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