French President Emmanuel Macron led the ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Among the 70 other world leaders present:

• Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel
• Russian President Vladimir Putin
• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
• U.S. President Donald Trump
• U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Also part of the commemoration were the reading by children of letters by soldiers–British, French, and German–during the war and a performance by renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Macron then convened the Paris Peace Forum, which has as a goal the avoidance of the nationalist and/or isolationist polices that contributed to the start of World War I.

It was the end of a full week of commemorations across Europe. Macron toured former battlefields and spoke to veterans groups several times in the days leading up to Armistice Day. Macron and Merkel had also met in the reconstructed rail car that housed the signing ceremony for the armistice that ended World War I.

English leaders were busy as well. One particularly poignant ceremony took place every night for a week: Torches in the dry moat around the Tower of London commemorated the loss of life and the coming of peace.

In the U.K., Queen Elizabeth II, Prime Minister Theresa May, and other national leaders taking part in solemn ceremonies across the country. Silence reigned for two minutes at 11 o'clock, the exact time 100 years earlier that the war had stopped. A lit beacon at Westminster Abbey and more than 1,000 others around the country symbolized the end of the darkness of war. Nearly 900,000 British soldiers died during the war. Joining the London remembrance ceremony was German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier; it was the first time that a German leader had been in London for a WWI remembrance ceremony. At the Cenotaph, Prince Charles a laid a wreath and 10,000 people (including relatives of those lost in the war) marched past.

New Zealand's capital, Wellington, rang out with a 100-gun salute, as part of national remembrance ceremonies in that country, which sent tens of thousands of men and women to the front. About 17,000 were killed, and more than 41,000 were wounded. Ceremonies took place around the country as well.

In Australia, which numbered more than 60,000 dead during the war, commemorations took place around the country:

• In Adelaide, planes dropped more than 30,000 paper poppies over the city center; local schoolchildren made the poppies.
• Thousands of people gathered at the National War Memorial in Canberra.
• Red poppies were projected onto the sails of the Sydney Opera House

In the United States, where the day is marked as Veterans Day, parades and ceremonies across the country marked the loss of life by American forces during the war. More than 100,000 Americans died on the battlefields of Europe during World War I.