Germany's Angela Merkel pleads for world peace at Paris forum

Trump watched on as the French president added: 'I know there are old demons which are coming back to the surface.

"Today at lunch, the President sat with President Macron, Chancellor Merkel, and President Putin, and many other world leaders", Sanders told reporters traveling with the President.

Macron paid tribute to the allies and opponents who battled for four years on French soil.

He called nationalism a "betrayal of patriotism".

He also delivered a stinging indictment of nationalism, calling it "the exact opposite" of the patriotism shown by soldiers.

Macron, during a visit to the World War One Western Front at Verdun, told Europe 1 radio that in face of a revived threat from Moscow that Europe needed to "defend itself better alone" and Europeans can not protect themselves without a "true European army".

"By saying our interests come first and others don't matter we are erasing what makes a nation precious, what makes it live, what makes it great and most importantly of all, its moral values". 'History sometimes threatens to take its sinister course once again'.

But on Sunday both the United States and Russian presidents arrived separately for the solemn ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe, skipping the bus ride and symbolic walk with other leaders.

When journalists asked Putin whether he managed to speak to Trump, he said: "Yes", Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported. "We're not the ones exiting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty".

Ahead of the ceremony, dozens of world leaders dressed in black strode shoulder-to-shoulder along the Champs Elysees toward the Arc. Military jets streaked overhead, emitting red, white and blue smoke, the colors of France.

Yet Trump and Putin did not participate in the processions. The group, which had first gathered at the Elysee Palace, had come to the Arc on tour buses along the 70m-wide boulevard.

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They had arrived a few minutes late, missing the exact moment - 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918 - that four years of fighting ended. He said: 'The Trumps could easily have got to Beaulleau by road too - with a limousine escort it would take less than an hour'.

Trump and Putin arrived separately from other leaders at the commemorations, which took place in the rain.

Trump has said he will not hold a bilateral summit with Putin in Paris, with the White House saying he did not want to overshadow the WWI ceremonies. At the start of the ceremony, they shook hands and Putin flashed a thumbs-up.

President Trump took umbrage at a recent interview in which President Macron talked about the need for a European army and cited the United States, along with Russian Federation and China, as potential security risks.

Macron did, however, bow to the tradition of standing at attention as a choir sang the national anthem rather than taking a knee. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed a solo piece.

Afterwards, he planned to visit and deliver Veterans Day remarks at the Suresnes US cemetery and memorial outside Paris, where more than 1,500 Americans who died during the conflict are buried.

"Attacks on the media are not just about getting your preferred political candidate elected, for example, they are about increasing the level of cynicism that citizens have towards all authorities, towards all of the institutions that are there to protect us as citizens", Trudeau said to a crowd of about 150 people.

For European observers, the commemoration was a somber event - and not exclusively because of the dead it honoured.

Sunday's address also contained a number of historic rebukes, such as a subtle reference to a well-known 1927 French book that decried the elites at the time, who embraced reactionary, nationalistic ideologies at the expense of a rational consensus. Merkel, his most loyal partner in this endeavor, has announced that she will soon leave public life behind.

"Franco-German reconciliation was at the very heart of what we've been seeing together", said Dominique Moisi, a French foreign policy expert at the Paris-based Institute Montaigne and an informal adviser to the Macron campaign. "We have to continue working for it", she said. "The spirit in which we are commemorating the events is no longer fully present".

He warned that to dash hopes for peace through "isolation, violence or domination" would "be a mistake for which future generations would rightly find us responsible". "Or, on the contrary, a photograph of a final moment of unity before the world descends into a new disorder?"