"French OOB at Waterloo" Topic

I am looking for the French Order of Battle at Waterloo with actual unit strength per regiment on Jun 18th 1815. There are obviously lots of OOBs online but my understanding is that they cover the initial strength at the start of the 100 days campaign. I could find some from June 10th but that still omits the large losses at Ligny and Quatre-Bras for some of the regiments.

I don't need very precise numbers, but I am trying to get a sense if any of the regiments present at Waterloo suffered significant casualties at Ligny/Quatre-Bras beforehand and were at a materially different strength than that listed in the online OBBs for the campaign as a whole.

Any insights would be much appreciated!

Mark Adkin's Waterloo Companion would be a good starting point.

Best wishes,

Chris

Yes. Many French Regiments in "du Nord" suffered significant casualties at Ligny and/or Quatre Bras.

I second the approach to use Adkin's Waterloo Campaign, in my estimation he is as accurate as the best and better than most. Quick, well laid out and accessible.

Paul Dawson's books often cover casualty states, and the Truth of Waterloo (bad title) contains much on losses but IIRC focuses on before and after Waterloo. Might be worth a look if you can get it out of a library.

Another one for Adkins.

Thanks for the suggestions. I found Adkin's book on the Archive. It's beautiful and I am going to try to find a physical copy to buy!

Unfortunately though, I remain confused about the numbers. Adkin explicitly calculates the armies' overall strength at Waterloo on page 50 (strength at the start of the campaign minus losses at Ligny/Quatre-Bras). The subsequent pages then have beautiful organisational diagrams with the strength of each battalion. Very nice, except none of it adds up…

First, the sum of all the infantry units in the diagrams adds up to 56k men whereas his own calculation on the first page only has 53k for infantry. And that's before adding staff and support units which would augment the "infantry" count even further.

Second, the divisional strength in his diagrams is very close (or larger) than the historical strength returns from June 10th (i.e. before any casualties). Consider second Corps which he lists at 20k men but the strength record of June 10th has at 19.7k. We know they lost heavily at Quatre Bras with around 1.5k losses and possibly more during various skirmishes. So his 20k number is clearly materially higher than the possible strength at Waterloo.

My conclusion therefore is that he correctly calculates the effective overall strength at Waterloo, but then uses June 10th strength figures for the diagrams (but doesn't explain the shift). If that is the case then I am no further on this question…

Scotty Bowdin's book on Waterloo is extremely granular, but I have no idea of its accuracy.