The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire is the first to use the term Surrealism

Wounded at the front on the Somme, the poet Wilfred Owen is invalided home to Britain

Amedeo Modigliani's first Paris exhibition is immediately closed by the police because it contains paintings of nudes

Parade brings together Massine (choreography), Satie (music), Cocteau (libretto) and Picasso (sets and costumes)

Manuel de Falla's ballet The Three-Cornered Hat is produced by Diaghilev with choreography by Massine and designs by Picasso

Paul Valéry wins praise for his long symbolic poem La Jeune Parque

Canadian troops take Vimy Ridge, subsequently the site of Canada's most important war memorial

The dancer Mata Hari is executed in France as a German spy

Suitable ground is selected by the British at the battle of Cambrai for the first serious deployment of their new tanks

Wilfred Owen, having returned to the front, is killed by machine-gun fire a week before the end of the war

US troops are by now fighting in large numbers on the western front

The Allies hold the Germans on the Marne and begin a successful counterattack with tanks

The Allied commander-in chief, Marshal Foch, meets a German delegation in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne to discuss an armistice

The Allies and the Germans finally agree the terms of an armistice at 5 a.m.

Léonide Massine, Ottorino Respighi and André Derain collaborate on the ballet La Boutique Fantasque

French poets Louis Aragon and André Breton launch Littérature, a surrealist review

Marcel Duchamp adds a moustache and beard to a postcard of the Mona Lisa, and gives it the subtly offensive French title LHOOQ

Darius Milhaud provides the score for Jean Cocteau's pantomime ballet Le Boeuf sur le toit

The delegates to the peace conference in Paris, mainly concerned with the terms to be imposed on Germany, hold their first session

Delegates to the Paris peace conference unanimously establish the League of Nations

The peace treaty with Germany, ending the world war, is signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles

After several less successful novels, the French writer Colette makes her reputation with Chéri

Destour is formed as a nationalist party in Tunisia, demanding full independence from France

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret launches and edits a radical architectural journal, L'Esprit Nouveau

The Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret adopts the simpler Le Corbusier as a pseudonym in L'Esprit Nouveau