What intrigued me the most about the series of articles my newspaper was running on Franz Ferdinand and his murder, was that Gavrilo Princip was just one of a good number of would-be assassins wanting to murder him that day - and how the successful attack only took place after several failed ones, and after the driver had taken a wrong turn, at that. Suffice to say security was not up to modern standards, or one might even say up to standards of common sense...

That is a really incredible list. Add the failed attempts, and it becomes even crazier. Nevertheless, the common view of the "Belle Epoque" does have some truth to it, in the sense that there had been very few wars between European powers in the century preceding WW1, by the standards of earlier centuries. The Crimean War, the Italian unification wars, and three very short (though not necessarily bloodless) wars in which Prussia trounced Denmark, Austria and France. That's essentially it. And some events that might've led to war at earlier times didn't - the standoff at Fashoda, for instance. But yeah, "gauzy, romantic nostalgia" is hardly appropriate - if nothing else, the fate of the large majority of the population was pretty awful, though already getting better by the time the war began.

That does seem to make it hard to take them very seriously as historians... but yeah, as I also read in my newspaper, all the reflections on WW1 do prove the point that our views on history are always influenced by the spirit of the age we ourselves live in. In the romanticizing of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, the fascination with the anarchists and their terrorism, even in the refusal to accept any simple explanations for how WW1 broke out, and the way we judge the politicians of that time by modern standards.