Almost from the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine , politicians, historians and commentators have questioned how the war will end. With that in mind, Jérôme Gautheret and Thomas Wieder, journalists at Le Monde newspaper and students of history, wrote a series of articles that they published as a book, Making Peace from Waterloo to Bosnia: Six Ways to End a War. At a discussion of war and peace with Le Monde readers this week, Gautheret said books more often focus on how wars start than on how they finish.
For example, Christopher Clark’s 2012 opus, Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Sylvie Kauffmann, an editorialist at Le Monde, chronicled Europe’s failure to prevent Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine in her 2023 book, Blindsided: How Berlin and Paris Cleared the Way for Russia. “All wars create a new reality that was previously unimaginable,” Gautheret said.
He attended the second centenary re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo on June 18th, 2015, and noted that after centuries of war, England and France have not fought one another since Napoleon. Likewise, the greatest achievement of France and Germany is to have observed nearly 80 years of peace. Napoleon’s wars claimed the lives of 2.
5 million people, including more than one million Frenchmen. The French diplomat Talleyrand exploited divisions among great powers to assert the will of his defeated country at the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna. Charles de Gaulle accomplished a s.
