So many people lost their teeth that dead people s teeth were recycled. The teeth of the 50,000 soldiers killed at Waterloo in 1815 were extracted and used until the 1860s as replacements for the toothless.

For example, the British Government continued to pay Russia loan payments despite the outbreak of war between the two parties because the treaty establishing the loan, the Convention of 19 May 1815, expressly provided that such payments should continue during times of war.

Consider the French Revolution, which began in 1789. Who would have predicted that within a decade, an obscure Corsican soldier would lead French armies to the banks of the Nile, or that the Napoleonic Wars would disrupt Europe until 1815?

To answer that question, we should consider not just the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, but also the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, each of which in its own way brought to an end a bloody chapter in European history.

It can be opposed with equal fervor, like that which enabled Europe's conservative powers to defeat Napoleon in 1815 and the Allies to defeat Germany in World War II. Or it can reach the limits of its military and economic strength, as in the case of the Soviet Union at the time of its disintegration.

WASHINGTON, DC When the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1815, the French diplomat Talleyrand is reported to have said of the Bourbons They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Ten years after the start of the Iraq War, the question is whether anyone Americans, Iraqis, Iranians, other Arab states has learned anything from this terrible experience.

Europe s western and eastern fringes obsess about dates that recall their struggles with the core 1914, 1815, 1709, 1707, 1704, and 1612, among others. By contrast, the European core is obsessed with transcending history, with working out institutional mechanisms for overcoming the conflicts that scarred Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius, who is recognized for codifying international law, argued that pirates could be tried for their crimes, regardless of where they were committed, aboard the ships that captured them. Following the 1814 1815 Congress of Vienna, with its condemnation of slavery, some states applied the concept to slave traders, who also committed many of their crimes outside national jurisdictions.

Or perhaps something like the bipolar hegemony of Great Britain and Russia after 1815 (though other players like Austria, Prussia, and France mattered) could be reconstituted, with the US and China substituting for Great Britain and Russia. This seems to be Henry Kissinger s ultimate dream a dream that one can glimpse in his latest book, Germanically entitled World Order Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History.

PARIS In his masterpiece Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger describes, probably too idyllically, the international balance of power system that, following the Congress of Vienna in 1814 1815, produced what came to be called the Concert of Europe. As Kissinger describes it, after the Napoleonic Wars, There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one.

Could Putin one day receive, like Obama before him, a Nobel Peace Prize? Has not Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who proposed the deal, already entered the pantheon of great Russian diplomats, as the successor of Karl Nesselrode, the Russian envoy to the 1814 1815 Congress of Vienna and to the Congress of Paris in 1856?

With the US Russian agreement, signed in Geneva on September 14, to place Syria s chemical weapons under international control, Russia has returned to the global scene and not only because of its nuisance value. Could Putin one day receive, like Obama before him, a Nobel Peace Prize?