Treaty of Paris

March 30, 1856

The Crimean War ended with a treaty in Paris that neutralized the Black Sea, confirmed Ottoman territorial integrity, and prohibited privateering. Russia was humiliated but intact, and turned its imperial ambitions east toward Central Asia. France had her prestige. The Concert of Europe, battered, kept playing. The war's true legacy was the nursing reforms of Florence Nightingale and the journalistic revolution of William Howard Russell's dispatches from the front.