"100 days campaign question- A matter of strength" Topic

I have read a fair share of the Waterloo campaign books with none of them touching on and or have not presented an answer to my question. I realize there are many more books/documents that could be "reviewed extensively" that may have the answer, so exhaustion of resources is not the limiter, just my time. All the great resources such as Atkins, Bowden et al. have been read with no real answer.
So what is the question that requires a possible credible or concrete answer….
With exhaustive review of the campaign's OOB, why the French units were so under strength at the start of this campaign when typical strength at the start of almost all campaigns had French battalion > 660 and squadrons> 150. The starting unit sizes were ~540 for infantry and ~120 for cavalry squadrons with many regiments only fielding 2 to 3 of either ( sqdrn/Btn)? The guard units make sense but the other line do not.
My suspicions are:
1) Bourbons had them near full strength during peace time and the disfranchised melted away when the reality of war under Bonaparte had set in?
2) The Bourbons were not effective in getting the units back to regulation strength?
3) The units were required to release a company or so to be amalgamated to reactivate units not active under the peace time regime of the Bourbons, for the campaign and multi fronts Napoleon now faced with war against ( not only GB and Prussia but Russia and Austria)?
4) Was it due to something other and what would that be?

Answer or theory with the supporting evidence is greatly welcomed.

BTW-I am just a wargamer and just have a passion for the period.

MG

At a guess, because Napoleon decided the previous army had not been properly discharged and were thus AWOL, so this was the pretext for them to be ordered to return to their unit. Some did, most didn't.

Outside the Guard, there was no process whereby X thousand men were found and then divided by 660 to obtain Y battalions. The battalions were rebuilt organically with varying success. In some cases units received drafts of men but these again would have been from (eg) one local National Guard battalion to the local infantry regiment.

Why they were so low to begin with is a good question and I suspect you have the right of it, although no doubt the true credit belongs to the Germans as with all matters 1815.

I feel that the Bourbons were not confident of the Army's loyalty (a prescient attitude) and didn't work to increase strength.

Be fair to the Bourbons, whom I don't like. The Napoleonic Wars were over. Conscripts were being discharged and armies reduced to peacetime strength over Europe. There was no reason for Louis XVIII to maintain a wartime army France couldn't afford just in case Bonaparte decided to kill tens of thousands more before his final retirement.

Yes, Nappy ordered the Class of 1815 "recalled to the colors" which they had mostly never seen. Given what happened to those of the Classes of 1805-1814 who had gone to those colors, there was a notable lack of enthusiasm.

The army was behind Napoleon. But the army was not France.

Note that everyone else was also caught in the middle of demobilization too. There was recent discussion here of the emptied-out KGL battalions at Waterloo, and the Prussians were smack in the middle of assimilating the Freikorps, RGL and Swedish Pommeranians they'd just picked up.