How Wars End-A J P Taylor

How Wars End

A. J. P. Taylor

© A J P Taylor 2014

A J P Taylor has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in Great Britain 1985 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd.

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Table of Contents

I – Napoleon’s Last Great War

II – The Congress of Vienna, 1815

III – The First World War: Armistice

IV – The First World War: The Peace Conference

V – The Second World War

VI – Present Chaos

Extract from The War Lords by AJP Taylor

I – Napoleon’s Last Great War

Napoleon the First invaded Russia in June 1812. At this time, Napoleon really dominated the whole of mainland Europe. Everywhere was either part of his empire or a satellite. Prussia had become a satellite, even Austria had become a satellite; all that was left of independence was Spain which was fighting against the French, and Great Britain, which was of course independent and hostile to France. Russia had been something like a satellite, although a high-minded one. The object of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was not to conquer Russia, but to win Russia’s friendship back and make it once more a satellite. The remarkable thing about this war is that if you define a general war as a war in which more than two great powers take part, this was the last general war until 1914. There was not a general war in the whole of the nineteenth century, except possibly the Crimean War, which hardly counts.

But certainly, Napoleon’s object was not conquest. One of his objects was to detach part of Russia. In the late eighteenth century, Poland had been partitioned, and most of Poland was now in Russia.

One of Napoleon’s many objects in life was to make Poland once more an independent country, and if he had had his way in this last war, Poland would have become independent, Russia would have become dependent on Napoleon, and he really would have dominated Europe.

As it was, the more he advanced into Russia, the more silent the Russians became on the other hand. They did not make an elaborate resistance, although they kept up a resistance, but what they did was to refuse to acknowledge Napoleon’s existence. Napoleon never meant to go to Moscow. He thought that once he said, ‘I’m going to Moscow,