Marie-Christine walks her dog at the Hougoumont farmstead, a key landmark on the Waterloo battlefield in Belgium. A planned monument to British soldiers at the farmstead has angered the area’s French speakers.

Preparations are underway to mark the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat, but sometimes it seems the battle has not really ended.

WATERLOO, Belgium — The region around this Belgian city is busily preparing to commemorate the 200th anniversary in 2015 of one of the major battles in European military history. But weaving a path through the preparations is proving almost as tricky as making one’s way across the battlefield was back then, when the Duke of Wellington, as commander of an international alliance of forces, crushed Napoleon.

A rambling though dilapidated farmstead called Hougoumont, which was crucial to the battle’s outcome, is being painstakingly restored as an educational center. Nearby, an underground visitor center is under construction, and roads and monuments throughout the rolling farmland where once the sides fought are being refurbished. More than 6,000 military buffs are expected to re-enact individual skirmishes.

While the battle ended two centuries ago, however, hard feelings have endured. Memories are long here, and not everyone here shares Britain’s enthusiasm for celebrating Napoleon’s defeat.

Every year, in districts of Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, there are fetes to honor Napoleon, according to Count Georges Jacobs de Hagen, a prominent Belgian industrialist and chairman of a committee responsible for restoring Hougoumont. “Napoleon, for these people, was very popular,” Jacobs, 73, said over coffee. “That is why, still today, there are some enemies of the project.”

Belgium, of course, did not exist in 1815. Its Dutch-speaking regions were part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, while the French-speaking portion had been incorporated into the French Empire. Among French speakers, Jacobs said, Napoleon had a “huge influence — the administration, the Code Napoléon,” or reform of the legal system. While Dutch-speaking Belgians fought under Wellington, French speakers fought with Napoleon.

That distaste on the part of modern-day French speakers crystallized in resistance to a British proposal that, as part of the restoration of Hougoumont, a memorial be raised to the British soldiers who died defending its narrow North Gate at a critical moment on June 18, 1815, when Wellington carried the day. “Every discussion in the committee was filled with high sensitivity,” Jacobs recalled. “I said, ‘This is a condition for the help of the British,’ so the North Gate won the battle, and we got the monument.”

If Belgium was reluctant to get involved, France was at first totally uninterested. “They told us, ‘We don’t want to take part in this British triumphalism,’” said Countess Nathalie du Parc Locmaria, a writer and publicist who is president of a committee representing four townships that own the land where the battle raged. As in the case of the North Gate memorial, however, persistence paid off.

Prince Charles Napoleon, 62, a French politician and direct descendant of Jerome Napoleon — Bonaparte’s brother, who also fought at Waterloo — agreed to join a ceremony on the first of four days of events, to shake hands with the eighth Duke of Wellington, the 98-year-old head of his family, and Prince Blücher von Wahlstatt, a direct descendant of the field marshal who commanded Prussian forces in the battle. The French ambassador to Belgium was won over as an honorary member of the organizing committee.

The word triumphal, or variations thereof, comes up frequently in discussions here, but the Britons involved vigorously deny having entertained a single triumphalist thought.

“In no way will this be Anglocentric or triumphalist in any way,” said Michael Mitchell, an aircraft consultant who volunteers as secretary of the organizing committee. “We never talk about a celebration, but a commemoration,” said Mitchell, the son of a British father and Belgian mother whose ancestor Col. Hugh Mitchell fought on Wellington’s right flank. “Many brave men died,” he said. “All the belligerents played an incredibly impressive role.”

Over the centuries, the Wellington family has taken a keen interest in the battlefield. The present duke, said Mitchell, “in fine family tradition, takes, I won’t say a proprietary, but a close eye on the battlefields.” Several times, most recently in 1973, the duke intervened successfully when the local authorities planned to extend a superhighway across the battlefields.

In 2000, a group of Belgian taxpayers brought suit, demanding that the government rescind an agreement dating back to just after the battle under which the Duke of Wellington was given the rights to 2,600 acres around the battlefield. The lands were bringing in about $160,000 annually for the Wellington family, and the taxpayers argued it was time to end the arrangement. The case stagnated until 2009, when the finance minister, Didier Reynders, told Parliament that the government had no intention of backing out of its commitment, which was anchored in the 1839 Treaty of London guaranteeing the independence of Belgium.

Of course, if the Wellingtons continue to benefit from the lands, so do the communities around Waterloo. In good years about 300,000 people visit the battlefield, though recently the number has fallen as word of the restoration work got out. Clearly, the organizers hope that the farm’s revival and the new visitor center will raise the numbers, perhaps as high as 500,000 a year. In discussions, organizers frequently mention Gettysburg, which attracts more than two million people a year.

But the economy is only part of the picture. “Our concern is the experience of the visitor,” Du Parc said. “What is the message? What is the legacy, what purpose does it serve?” She contrasted the Napoleonic wars with World War I, which was followed only two decades later by an even greater war.

Jacobs agreed. “Still today, you find Belgians on both sides,” he said, “but thanks to the British this foolish Napoleonic experience was brought to an end. It changed the history of Europe.”

“It brought a hundred years of peace,” he said.