In France, it's a fact, rightly or wrongly, that few folk celebrate the
Battle of Waterloo, which took place exactly two centuries ago, on 18 June 1815.
My wife and I used to drive to Waterloo often when we were living in Brussels, but it’s an uninteresting place. Funnily enough, I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that the illustrious
Napoléon Bonaparte was defeated by a dull Englishman,
Wellington, neither in France nor in England… but on the outskirts of the Belgian capital. That has always appeared to me as what the French call
une histoire belge (a Belgian tale, which might be translated as a shaggy dog story).
Maybe we should have made an effort for the second centenary of this terrible defeat… but it’s not easy to rouse enthusiasm for this affair. Besides, France has always had an excellent reason for celebrating a quite different event: the BBC radio speech of
Charles de Gaulle on June 18, 1940.
Be that as it may, the French newspaper
Le Monde has just reacted to this anniversary by the publication of a moving English-language editorial addressed to our British neighbors:
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