In French minds, the Battle of Waterloo has gone down as a Franco-British horror story. [….] And in the popular French imagination, it is still the defeat to end all defeats, and has entered the language, as I found out for myself soon after arriving in France. I knew that a colleague had been having trouble with his boss, and asked what the mood was like in the office.

‘Oh, c’est Waterloo!’ he exclaimed.

‘Très bien.’ I smiled, assuming that things were obviously on the up. He had to explain to me that, no, he meant that it was all-out war, and he was coming off worst.

Yes, almost 200 years later, Waterloo still has the ability to make the French suffer.