The directors Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle continue their historical work and revisit the Great War in Apocalypse - La Paix impossible, broadcast on France 2.
With The Impossible Peace , the new part of the Apocalypse Historical Collection highlights the mistakes made by the victors of the First World War, which paved the way for new tragedies. An instructive geopolitical lesson, tonight at 9 pm on France 2.
Since 2009 and their WWII subjects, Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle have been making their historic documentaries in the Apocalypse collection with wide public success.
Four years after having treated the First World War for the centenary of the beginning of the conflict, the tandem repeats the story from the armistice. Their sixth film explains how and why the political decisions taken between 1919 and 1926 made "peace impossible".
One and a half hours of a grand and complete course in geopolitics, in which the authors highlight the dramatic consequences of the Treaty of Versailles as it was wanted by the victors: humiliation of Germany, rise of nationalisms born of the dismemberment Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, spirit of revenge for the vanquished, the rise of Nazism in Germany ...
Colored archives, rare sequences
By watching this accelerated history class, the viewer can see the tragedy of the Second World War, twenty years later. Contemporary events, the feminist and pacifist Marcelle Capy, quoted in the film, summarized at the time: "The signed peace treaties are actually sources of conflict, inspired by revenge, they made injustice a dogma and Europe a chaos. The Treaty of Versailles is an absurdity.
To describe this impossible peace, Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle present as usual remarkable images of colorized archives, much of which is unpublished, with rare sequences: the first filmed appearance of Hitler, in 1919, during a far-right demonstration, Marshal Foch on a trip to the United States alongside a great Indian chief and celebrated by the Sioux ...
"The production company Clarke Costelle & Co has a specialized archive search service," explains the documentary filmmaker, perhaps one of the most successful in the world.
Apocalypse - Peace impossible , this Sunday at 21 hours on France 2