A History of the First World War
Volume 1 : 1914: The Fate of the World

Paris, East Station, Sunday 2 August 1914. Everyone is rallied up. All of these men getting ready to leave are so innocent and unaware… They cannot imagine that hundreds of thousands among them will die or be wounded before the end of the year or that this war, meant to be brief and local, would become World War I.

In 1914: The Fate of the World, Max Gallo recounts, month after month, this year that changed the world. It was not until 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall built by the Russians and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 that World War I gave birth to its ultimate litter: the war in the Balkans.

Eighty years later, in the same country where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28 June 1914, the cycle opened by the First World War finally came to a close.

1914 marked the world’s fate.