The Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) was the last major engagement of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), fought by a French army under Emperor Napoleon I (r. 1804-1814; 1815) against two armies of the Seventh Coalition. Waterloo resulted in the end of both Napoleon’s career and the First French Empire and is often considered one of history’s most important battles.

On 1 March 1815, Napoleon returned from exile to regain control of his empire, beginning the period of the Hundred Days. The great powers of Europe responded immediately by branding him an outlaw and declaring war. The decisive Battle of Waterloo was fought between the towns of Mont-Saint-Jean and Waterloo in modern Belgium, then part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Napoleon’s objective was to crush the Anglo-allied army of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, before it could be reinforced by a nearby Prussian army under Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. Napoleon nearly succeeded in his goal when his men captured the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte and stood poised to break through the allied center. However, the timely arrival of several Prussian corps and a failed charge by the French Imperial Guard dashed Napoleon’s hopes of victory. Four days after his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon abdicated for a second time and was exiled to the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, where he would die six years later.

The Battle of Waterloo has often been regarded as one of the most decisive battles in history; it brought an end to the Napoleonic period and ushered in a new political era known as the Concert of Europe. Additionally, Waterloo marked an end to nearly 23 years of constant warfare that had devastated continental Europe since the Battle of Valmy in September 1792. After Waterloo, Europe enjoyed decades of relative peace, as the great powers did not fight another major war until the Crimean War (1853-1856). Still, the importance of the Battle of Waterloo is sometimes overstated; historians have argued that the odds against Napoleon were impossibly high, and had he not been defeated at Waterloo, he likely would have met his end on some other battlefield shortly thereafter

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  • Mog_Pharou [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 days ago

    Only in Florida can you hit the dating apps and match with real life 2024 2nd-gen ‘progressive’ revolution hating gusanos who have 🏳️‍🌈 tattoos and yet moved to the most bloodthirsty reactionary queer hating ghoul state and unironically use the term ‘cubansplaining’ when you call them on their terminal brainworms. Deeply unserious people.

    God I fucking love Fidel fidel-freethrow

  • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    What the FUCK have Microsoft done with Minecraft. I cant fucking launch it because I dont have the xbox app? The launcher just doesnt launch anything anymore? It just kicks me to the Microsoft store. I am going to kill someone what the fuck is wrong with the people at Microsoft

  • ashinadash [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    You fuckin asshole fuckers lied to me, I touched grass! I logged off and it did nothing but MORE PSYCHIC DAMAGE!!! maddened

    As it happens, I fucking MISS the bear webzone! I appreciate everybody on it and I miss them! I like posting and all not being on the webzone did was hurt, so fuck that. We must retvrn, to posting hard.

  • CliffordBigRedDog [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 days ago

    im deeply deeply lonely and unhappy but im gonna cope by convincing myself that im a “stoic” and that it is you all who are lacking virtue, go fuck yourselves

  • operacion_ogro [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    Visited my dad yesterday for Father’s Day and he hit me with “what a surprise, it’s getting hot again in the summer smuglord” when he was talking about the East Coast heatwave this week

    Last time I saw him he hit me with “well actually everyone in the world practiced slavery so the US isn’t uniquely bad”

    Chud cope is fascinating, it’s like watching them self-soothe with a bottle

  • SoylentSnake [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago
    CW queerphobic harassment

    clearly unstable dude was making weird eye contact with me on morning commute, then turned to the disinterested stranger next to him and said (I think?) “imagine being a man and looking like that” then called me a “gay-ass n-word” and the f slur as I did the rational thing and got up to move away

    This is the kinda shabby treatment i get for debuting a new fit with a bit more flair, huh? oh well, let’s try and have a good Monday ya’ll big-cool

  • usa_suxxx [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    My sibling that lives with me is a sister. I pay all the rent and need to move out. She hasn’t had a job in 8 months and did not make a lot of money and I made enough to comfortably cover the rent. So I wasn’t charging her rent. She makes a mess, doesn’t clean up after herself. She doesn’t wash her dishes or bother removing the dirty food and seeds off them or pieces of vegetables before running water off them…to make them easier to clean. So I need to clean the sink out daily. She opens her sugar packets and drops 2-3 opened wrappers on the floor daily and leaves them there. She gets takeout coffee and drinks it on the patio and leaves the straw wrapper jammed into the patio chair regularly. She doesn’t bother to sweep or help clean the apartment or take out the trash when she fills it up or refill my car’s gas tank when it is empty. The car I let her borrow for free and put her on the insurance and also cover. She’s frankly very mean and yells at me for stupid shit like using the heater in my car during winter when I’m alone in the car. When she would use the car at 4-5 PM and found out she needed to adjust the car, she would yell at me about it. When I had an older car about a year ago, she would do the same to me about “using the heater” in summer, like no, its a 10+ year old car with air conditioning problems. Then she would try to convince I am having memory issues or something. I need to kick her out at the end of this lease.

  • There’s a fullblown nazi guy living next door to me and he rants to somewhere, online, so so loudly all night long several nights a week.

    And I don’t know how to deal with this, it gives me all kinds of anxiety and makes me so angry. I have headphones at home at night now.

    There isn’t anything I can do about this, the guy is too scary to confront as an AFAB and I can hear him talking about hurting people.

    I keep thinking about how this lumpen proletariat is just so uninformed, but it just makes it worse. This is the world the capitalis class has gotten us into, on purpose.

  • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 days ago
    Brief NSFW rant

    WHY do porn sites insist that I need to make my sexuality fit into one of three boxes, straight, gay, or trans? This is nonsense. Bi stuff with men only shows up in the “gay” section, but bi stuff with women shows up in the “straight” section. Trans people apparently get their own category because I guess to these websites trans people can’t be “straight” content, of course the whole section is filled with slurs. As a bisexual, I find myself going all throughout to find stuff I’m interested in, but the site wants me to cordon off my sexuality. Lord knows there’s enough porn shoved in your face with nasty racist content, sexist content, stuff you’re not into, but if a straight guy sees a cock in a man’s mouth that’s the “sin” that must be avoided??

  • BasementParty [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    We all have bad days but I get by with a little help from my friends ya know. And by “get by” I mean drink myself to oblivion and “my friends” I mean copious amounts of grain alcohol.

  • Bnova [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    After two interviews and the hellish experience that is air travel with several hours of layovers I have been offered an assistant faculty position. I’ve made it.

  • Babs [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    Weird social worker thing: “Which agency do you work for?” It’s never which company, it’s agency. We’re all agencies here and sometimes it confuses people when I say “the agency” or “my agency” to refer to the place I work for.