From the bestselling and award-winning author of Paris 1919
comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating
portrait of Europe from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I.
The century since the end of the Napoleonic wars had been
the most peaceful era Europe had known since the fall of the
Roman Empire. In the first years of the twentieth century,
Europe believed it was marching to a golden, happy, and
prosperous future. But instead, complex personalities and
rivalries, colonialism and ethnic nationalisms, and shifting
alliances helped to bring about the failure of the long
peace and the outbreak of a war that transformed Europe and
the world.
The War That Ended Peace brings vividly to life the military
leaders, politicians, diplomats, bankers, and the extended,
interrelated family of crowned heads across Europe who
failed to stop the descent into war: in Germany, the
mercurial Kaiser Wilhelm II and the chief of the German
general staff, Von Moltke the Younger; in Austria-Hungary,
Emperor Franz Joseph, a man who tried, through sheer hard
work, to stave off the coming chaos in his empire; in
Russia, Tsar Nicholas II and his wife; in Britain, King
Edward VII, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and British
admiral Jacky Fisher, the fierce advocate of naval reform
who entered into the arms race with Germany that pushed the
continent toward confrontation on land and sea.
There are the would-be peacemakers as well, among them
prophets of the horrors of future wars whose warnings went
unheeded: Alfred Nobel, who donated his fortune to the cause
of international understanding, and Bertha von Suttner, a
writer and activist who was the first woman awarded Nobel’s
new Peace Prize. Here too we meet the urbane and
cosmopolitan Count Harry Kessler, who noticed many of the
early signs that something was stirring in Europe; the young
Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and a
rising figure in British politics; Madame Caillaux, who shot
a man who might have been a force for peace; and more. With
indelible portraits, MacMillan shows how the fateful
decisions of a few powerful people changed the course of
history.
Taut, suspenseful, and impossible to put down, The War That
Ended Peace is also a wise cautionary reminder of how wars
happen in spite of the near-universal desire to keep the
peace. Destined to become a classic in the tradition of
Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, The War That Ended
Peace enriches our understanding of one of the defining
periods and events of the twentieth century.
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