It has been argued that every major crisis of international law has seen a return of the discipline to its history. There indeed appears to be an urge to go back to the foundations and to the fundamentals in periods of transition and uncertainty; a need to take stock of the past in order to know how to situate one’s self in the present and plan for the future. Returns to the past, are, in sum and in most instances, guided by present social, political or even psychological needs. In the course of this research, we have seen how the narrative of the indifference of international law to the use of force before the twentieth century emerged in the interwar scholarship as a means to rationalize the events of the World War I and enable the discipline to move past the failure which they represented.