I was told by a European History teacher that the Battle of Waterloo was significant for being the first battle with over a million combatants. However, I have read before that the French had about 70,000 men in their army, while the coalition had about double that amount. When I brought it up, he said that those figures were incorrect. I didn't want to argue about it right there, so I just dropped it. Now, I want to set the record straight here. Were there a over a million combatants at Waterloo?
Edit: I a word
Were there a over a million combatants at Waterloo?
No, not even if you count every bastard, camp follower, whore and civilian in a 10 miles radius of Waterloo will you get anywhere close to 1 million men. However, if you include the entire war of the 7th Coalition you will find that the total armies involved numbers over 1 million men (about 250 000 French soldiers and about 850 000-950 000 coalition soldiers), however most of these were nowhere near Waterloo.
Sources: 1815: The Waterloo Campaign and Waterloo 1815: Quatre Bras and Ligny, both by Peter Hofschröer
EDIT: Holy spelling fuckups. Sorry.
Your history teacher is mistaken, perhaps confusing the amount of troops involved in the War of the Seventh Coalition with the amount involved at Waterloo itself.
A battle that involved more than a million men in total would be on the order of the Battle of the Somme and other similarly large battles.
Was the teacher maybe talking about the Battle of Leipzig rather than Waterloo? That was the largest battle involving Napoleon, involving several times as many men as Waterloo, in fact iirc correctly it was the largest battle of the 19th century as a whole.
Even then however the estimates I'm aware of put it short of a million in the 600000 sort of ballpark, but some of the more numerous estimates might reach that high I suppose.