Why It’s Time to Remember Waterloo for a Different Reason

“Waterloo.” The very name has become a synonym of total defeat. Two hundred years have passed since the battle between the revived imperial army of Napoleon, on the one hand, and British as well as Prussian troops under the command of the Duke of Wellington, on the other. In the two centuries since the 18th of June 1815, Europe has seen many more, and far bloodier, conflicts. Yet the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo remains an iconic, if divisive, event, as seen most recently in the kerfuffle over a commemorative Euro coin, produced by the Belgian mint but rejected by the French government.

But this memory of Waterloo as first and foremost the defeat of Napoleon overlooks the battle’s most important legacy. Contrary to the way it is described in most history books, the Battle of Waterloo did not mark the end of the first “total war,” as the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars have been termed. Rather, it was just the beginning of a long and complex transition to peace. This peace was forged less in Vienna, where the Congress of that name was already concluding its work, than in Paris, in the context of a military occupation. Ending over two decades of continent- (really, world-) wide war, this peace established a foundation for “Europe” as a political entity. Aside from a handful of relatively short conflicts between individual nations, it would endure almost a century, until the outbreak of an even more total war in August of 1914.

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