AD 1800-2000 Modern

In AD 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of France. After his defeat at Waterloo (1815) conservative and liberal regimes alternated with revolutions. The Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852-70) ended when the Franco-Prussian War (1870) resulted in defeat for France. A Revolutionary Commune briefly took power, but it was crushed and the Third Republic was declared, issuing in a long period of conservative rule.

In World War I (1914) Belgium and parts of France were overrun by Germany, and the Western Front experienced the horror of trench warfare with enormous losses until the armistice (November 1918). A series of short-lived governments preceded World War II (1939-45). France was occupied by Germany, with a pro-German Vichy government in the south, and the Free French under General de Gaulle in London. The Fourth Republic (1946-58) emerged from the Liberation. Wars in French Indo-China (1946-54) and Algeria (1954-62), led to the recall of de Gaulle in 1958 as President of the Fifth Republic. His cooperation with Germany established a strong partnership at the centre of Western Europe.

In the later 20th century Brussels in Belgium became the headquarters of the European Union and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation). The Netherlands resisted German occupation in World War II, and granted independence to Dutch Far Eastern after 1945.