French Army 1815

T'was back in the ancient mists of time (well, July 2011) when I bought the Airfix Waterloo boxed set, and expanded my rediscovery of 1/72 plastics into a brand-new monster-sized project to recreate the campaign of 1815.  Since then I have managed to achieve a fair amount of progress over the last year and a bit.

I have managed to collect all the figures necessary to put and entire Anglo-Allied army on the field, and also a fair proportion of the Prussian army.  I have also managed to launch painting of the entire Anglo-Allied force, with about a dozen bases already completed in prototype form.  
With this progressing so nicely, and the bi-centennial on the way, it's high time to get the opponents sorted out!  

Well, after much planning and searching I've done it.  Napoleon might've needed to escape from Elba, stage a one-man coup to take over France, then run an Imperial bureaucracy to pull together an army for his ambitions, but I find that raising the plastic equivalent requires a far more agreeable afternoon surfing EBay and Amazon for much the same result.  If only he'd known!   

So, to the haul:  my "recruiting efforts" have focused on my favoured Italeri figures, plus some of the excellent-looking sets from Zvezda, which also seem to get high praise online.  The end result, from various sources:

6 boxes of Italeri French Line Infantry
4 boxes of Zvezda French Line Artillery
2 boxes of Italeri French Dragoons
2 boxes of Zvezda French Cuirassiers
1 box of Italeri French Lancers
1 box of Italeri Napoleon's General Staff

This isn't the final, definitive purchase - corps commander miniatures are still needed, plus a few odds and ends of 'specialist' troops of note such as the Imperial Guard, some voltigeur light infantry, and so on.  Nonetheless, the list above breaks the back of the French army collection.  It provides me with a mass of line infantry, plus a weighty spearhead of heavy Cavalry, and also a powerful artillery park which should certainly make Old Boney a ferocious prospect on the tabletop.  

With painting efforts continuing on the Anglo-Allied force, and shortly to commence on the French arrivals, I should be able to start putting on a few small-scale Napoleonic games before very long - before building towards the ultimate objectives of re-enacting the Waterloo campaign as a whole, and also the classic historical battle itself.  

En Avant!