On Tuesday, May 5th, 2026, at the headquarters of MSF (14-34 avenue Jean Jaurès, 75019), the CRASH team was delighted to welcome Sylvain Venayre, professor of contemporary history and writer, for a conference on the distant wars of the 19th century and the debates they continue to spark today. This exchange was prepared and moderated by Rony Brauman.

The first humanitarian conventions and conferences took place in a Europe that had, to some extent, moved away from wars. Contrary to their predecessors, Europeans of the 19th century, or at least most of them, did not directly experience war. The telegraph and the printing press, however, provided them with the means to be informed, with the emergence of the daily press and war correspondents.

A founder of the Red Cross, Gustave Moynier, wrote in 1899, as if to describe a new sensibility towards war: “The descriptions provided by the daily news place, as it were, the dying on the battlefields before the readers’ very eyes and make resound in their ears, alongside the songs of victory, the agonising cries of the poor, mutilated men who fill the ambulances.” 

The ‘century of peace’, as it appeared to Europeans at the time, was in reality a century of never-ending wars led by the Europeans in the rest of the world – wars of which they themselves became mere spectators. 

Some of these “peacetime” wars were also, in certain instances, “humanitarian wars,” carried out by coalitions whose justifications resonate familiarly in our own ears: restoring order, bringing peace, eradicating slavery, etc. Free trade, often praised as a factor of peace, was in practice enforced at gunpoint. 

In Les Guerres lointaines de la paix. Civilisation et barbarie depuis le XIXe siècle (Gallimard), Sylvain Venayre, a historian specialised in the 19th century, recounts these expeditions and reports on the fierce controversies they gave rise to. The author of numerous scholarly works, as well as graphic novels and historic comic books, he will give a conference on these distant wars of the 19th century and the debates they continue to elicit today.