Facing their Waterloo

Three weeks ago, a journalist from Le Figaro asked France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs who would be attending the 200th anniversary ceremony at Waterloo. ‘When is it?’ was the reply.

Two centuries on, the French are still in denial about Waterloo. To understand why, you have to bear in mind a quotation by the 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, who declared that: ‘The war of wars, the combats of combats, is England against France; all the rest are mere episodes.’ The defeat at Waterloo was the humiliation of humiliations, almost impossible to countenance.

French chauvinists still refuse to accept that Napoleon really lost. (Napoleon himself had declared: ‘History is a series of lies on which we all agree.’) For example Dominique de Villepin, French prime minister from 2005 to 2007 and author of several books about Napoleon, called Waterloo a ‘defeat [that] shines with the aura of victory’. His argument seems to be that by standing alone against Britain, Prussia, Russia and Austria (to name only his most important adversaries), Napoleon was the tragic hero of his era, who effectively scored a moral victory on 18 June 1815.