Napoleon's famous Hundred Days actually lasted 110
On 26 February 1815, with the guard ships away, Napoleon slipped off Elba with about 1,000 men. He retook France without firing a shot, entered Paris on 20 March, and held it until Louis XVIII's return on 8 July, a span of 110 days that a Paris prefect later rounded off into history.
His first abdication came on 6 April 1814, after coalition troops entered Paris, and he was sent to Elba off Tuscany while the victors redrew Europe at the Congress of Vienna. He lasted only 9 months and 21 days there. France resented its shrunken borders and the tactless Bourbons, and at Vienna the great powers quarrelled so fiercely over Poland and Saxony that Tsar Alexander I challenged Metternich to a duel.
Coming ashore on 1 March at Golfe-Juan, between Cannes and Antibes, he skirted royalist Provence by heading through the Alps along what is now the Route Napoléon. Regiments at Grenoble defected, and at Laffrey he reportedly opened his coat before royalist troops and invited any of them to shoot their Emperor; they joined him instead. Marshal Ney, who had vowed to bring him back in an iron cage, went over with 6,000 men on 14 March.
Back in power, Napoleon posed as a constitutional ruler. With the liberal Benjamin Constant he drafted the Acte additionel, nicknamed La Benjamine, which created a hereditary chamber of peers and an elected lower house. Chateaubriand dismissed it as a lightly improved copy of the Bourbon charter, though later historians such as Agatha Ramm note it widened the franchise and guaranteed press freedom. Only 1,532,527 votes were cast in the plebiscite, under half the turnout of the Consulate's votes.
The allies never wavered. The Congress had declared him an outlaw on 13 March, and on 25 March Austria, Prussia, Russia and Britain each pledged 150,000 men. Defeat at Waterloo followed, possibly worsened by haemorrhoids that kept him from staying long in the saddle to watch the fighting. Ney was executed on 7 December 1815, and Napoleon died in exile on Saint Helena in 1821. The label les Cent Jours was coined by the prefect of Paris, Gaspard, count of Chabrol, when he greeted the returning king.
Source: Hundred Days
