There are many who made contributions to this project.
Jean-Marc Largeaud has been a great source of inspiration. He has demonstrated a tireless patience over the last several years answering my thousands of questions on 19th century France and reign of Napoleon. He has been an invaluable guide for my journey through the events of the cent-jours, and there are a multitude of references I only became aware of because of him.
Pierre de Wit’s study of the Campaign of 1815, found online at https://www.waterloo-campaign.nl/, and soon to be published, is by far the most detailed study ever performed on this period. His pursuit of facts and attention to detail is applied with equal vigor to each nation involved and across all languages.
Pierre and I have been discussing and debating the events for several years, and regardless of our positions on any topic, we inevitably come to agreement that we are in desperate need of finding the primary source materials that remain unseen. Working together, we identified many important items, and have been fortunate to acquire several sources that have previously not been available for study.
Chris Rollet and Olivier Chauvelin provided thousands of images of source material that not only enabled this reference but inspired the pursuit for more.
Claire Khelfaoui was my extension in Paris spending countless hours in libraries and archives following every lead I could find, as well as some of her own. Her efforts produced many important pieces to this work, as well as an archive of thousands of additional documents I hope we can add to future editions.
Melissa Wittmeier contributed in innumerable ways – transcriber, archival visits, introductions to collectors, reviewing and proofing the thousands of entries, and many more assorted tasks. Without her assistance, this project would never have finished.
Karen Hickey helped turn thousands of pages of variously formatted documents into coherent InDesign projects. This was critical to create the visualization that captured the function of the original documents.
I am deeply indebted to Christian Kubitza and Alain Draps who hosted me during trips to Europe and introduced me to Léon Bernard, a collector with a personal museum that has an unbelievable collection of artifacts from the 1815 campaign. Léon is one of the collectors committed to providing access to materials and adding to the historical record, and the pieces he shared will be in a future edition.
I’d like to thank Munro Price for his advice and recommendations that directly led to finding the assistance required to undertake this project.
I wish the thank the following individuals for their valuable feedback while creating these references: Michael Leggiere, George Nafziger, Oliver Schmidt, John Lee, Don Valeri, Carsten Boldt.
I want to thank the following for their contributions to the project: Sophie Abdela, Thierry Leger, Francince McEntyre, Francois Girard, Nicole Charley, Carol Petrovich, Christopher Moss
Finally, I wish to thank my family who sacrificed so much to allow this work to be pursued.