Over the last two centuries the world has experienced three monumental upheavals that utterly transformed the trajectory of Western Civilization.
Taken together, the French Revolutionary /Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II (1939-1945) can be viewed as an extended European civil war which in sequence dramatically changed, grievously wounded, and finally gutted a civilization that went from a confident world-wide imperium in 1914 to a shrunken, hesitant and often confused defensive posture today.
Thousands of books have endeavored to give a coherent narrative to this extraordinary chain of events. Is there any vantage point yet to be scaled, anything left to be said about the titanic conflicts and their aftermath?
Yes and yes, asserts contemporary historian Gregor Dallas (b. 1948), who has provided remarkable illumination with a trilogy focusing just on the end-year for each of these three upheavals.
In 1815- The Roads to Waterloo (1996), 1918- War and Peace (2000), and 1945- The War that Never Ended (2005), Dallas brings new light and perspective through a mixture of granular detail, sweeping vision, and well chosen anecdotes that results in "revisionist history" at its very best.
The books show off exceptional research and scholarship, combined with writing skills that are a pure delight. Raised in England, educated in America (A.B. Berkeley, Ph.D. Rutgers), and longtime resident of France, the author achieves in this trilogy a refreshing detachment that transcends national bias.
Upon concluding nearly two thousand pages (including highly illuminating maps, chronologies, notes, and bibliographies) of sparkling prose the diligent reader is rewarded by a stunning panorama, seen from Olympian heights, of how the modern world came to be.
Each of these volumes can with profit be read separately, yet taken together they comprise a towering achievement that can be fairly compared to the "magnum opus" of Edward Gibbon.
What is particularly compelling is the manner in which Dallas compares and contrasts the efforts of the victorious powers in each of these cataclysms to reorganize and stabilize the worlds that emerged from their military triumphs. Score it as one fair success, one fumbled failure, and one improvised incompletion—conflictus interruptus, shall we say.
The Congress of Vienna--often unfairly denigrated as the "Dancing Congress"--sought to reconstitute a Europe turned upside down by Napoleon. Of the three peacemaking efforts chronicled by Dallas, it is the only one that succeeded in its stated purposes, thus giving the world a century of peace and progress.
Clearly aristocratic in character--led by a dazzling cast which included the mystic Tsar Alexander I, the Machiavellian Metternich, the duplicitous Talleyrand, and the vastly under-rated Castelreagh--the Vienna Settlement of 1815 produced results that utterly eluded the democratic statesmen of the twentieth century. Interestingly Vienna was the only Conference in which women--albeit behind the scenes--were significant participants.
A singular virtue of Peacemaking 1815 was that the Vienna Congress included and dealt relatively fairly with the defeated French because the victors realized that to do otherwise would guarantee renewed conflict as soon as France regained its equilibrium.
By contrast, the greatest defect of the Paris Peace Conference that followed the victory of 1918 was that it totally excluded the two largest Continental powers- Russia because it was ruled by Lenin's Revolutionary Communism and Germany because it was formally judged to be "guilty" as the sole cause of WWI and accordingly needed to be severely "punished".
That these two outcasts would be joined together via the Treaty of Rapallo (1922) just three years after the Treaty of Versailles was "shocking" but hardly surprising. Only in retrospect however is it clear that Rapallo would be the foundation of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact that triggered WWII.
"Peacemaking" hit an absolute nadir in 1945 simply because there was no peace conference, no peace treaty, and the "outcome" was simply a reflection of the final positions of the Red Army in the East, and the Anglo-American Armies in the West. "The War that Never Ended" would endure--renamed as the "Cold War"--for half a century with a cost in human freedom, lives, and misery staggeringly immense though never fully tabulated, and today conveniently forgotten.
This final volume will likely be of greatest interest because it is closest in time to the present, and is rich with themes, politics, and personalities that resonate with current dilemmas--e.g. the genesis of the conflict between nationalism and supra-nationalism, the origin of the language of today's ideological controversies, and the convoluted path of the idealistic but often naive United States to its role today as reluctant global arbiter.
Particularly moving are lesser-known but heartbreaking aspects of the Holocaust, and its shamefully under-reported twin-the Soviet Gulag, vividly recounted by Dallas. So much more could be said, but let this suffice:
Don't miss this multidimensional masterpiece of historical writing, the Gregor Dallas 1815-1918-1945 trilogy.
Bill Moloney covers politics, books, and world affairs for the America blog. His columns have appeared in the Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, The Hill, and Human Events
