Six Months That Changed the World: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919

I have been after a copy in hardback for some time. I have tried reading the paper back version, but print is too small.

No one book is ever going to do justice to, or shine light on, all of the aspects that went into formulating the Treaty of Versailles, but this particular one throws a lot of light on the major actors who helped produce the treaty. It's a fascinating insight into the characters of those concerned, and well worth reading to inform the readers further. A work of real scholarship.

Wonderful book, I bought it for my wife's birthday....we are not talking at present as her head is never out of the book!!Regards, David Evans

Brilliant history of the creation of the Versailles Peace with Germany. Highly recommended

Besides being the ultimate treatise on the way our current map was formed, there is a thriller aspect about how the protagonists battled it out. A joy.

Magisterial stuff with a wonderful eye for the illuminating anecdote; even in the most obscure corners of the diplomatic world in 1919.

good

Macmillan's superbly written book of the drafting of the peace accords at the end of World War 1 offers a fascinating insight into the machinations, double dealing and lust for revenge at the end of the First World War. So many of the 20th centuries conflicts trace back to the months in Paris. Paris 1919 reads like a novel tracing the carve up of the world by America, Britain and France with side spoils for the other Allies. History writing at its best.

Ouvrage remarquable qui détaille toutes les négociations de paix qui eurent lieu à Paris en 1919 au lendemain de la Première guerre mondiale. La lecture est importante car elle permet de comprendre la situation mondiale après la guerre et les contraintes imposées aux négociateurs. Les négociations couvraient l'Europe, l'Afrique, le Moyen Orient et l'Asie de l'Est (Chine et Japon)

El libro me llegó algo maltratado porque el embalaje no lo protegió lo suficiente: venía sucio y con una esquina golpeada y un pedazo de la cubierta alzado.

Very good

As France prepares to host its largest international conference ever—the Paris conference on climate change, or COP21--, I thought it might be wise to look at a previous event comparable in scale if not on substance: the high-level negotiations that took place in Paris during the first six months of 1919, as delegates from Allied countries gathered to give shape to the post-WWI world. This search for a precedent is quite natural: it is a standard move among students of international affairs and diplomats, who always look for relevant examples, models, and templates in order to understand and to shape the present. After all, many delegates in 1919 came to Paris with books devoted to the Congress of Vienna. The balance of power that Vienna created held for most of the nineteenth century. By contrast, the Paris conference, and the treaty of Versailles to which it led, only brought temporary peace, and was even accused of having planted the seeds of WWII.Richard Holbrooke, who masterminded the Dayton agreement and went on to tell the tale in To End a War, prefaced Margaret MacMillan's book for a reason: as a negotiation practitioner, he studied the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, as he did other international gatherings such as the Geneva talks that led to the end of the Vietnam war and in which he participated as a junior diplomat. This gave him practical insights to stage the Dayton negotiations that are the topic of his aforementioned book. Every detail mattered to him: the shape of the negotiating table (during the 1968 peace talks the Americans had wasted two months arguing over it with the North Vietnamese), the setting of the compound, the choice of audio channels for translation, the eating arrangements, etc. He may have borrowed from Paris in 1919 the recourse to "proximity talks", whereby the mediator moves between the different parties who rarely meet one another face-to-face. This negotiating technique was used for some sessions of the Paris peace conference, as chronicled by MacMillan.It is said that success is 10 percent talent, and 90 percent hard work. In international negotiations, much of the hard work occurs behind the scenes. Logistics plays a key part, although protocol agents and technicians are not often granted full credit for their contribution. Minor decisions—seating arrangements, the quality of the interpretation, the place where the delegations reside and the way they occupy their leisure time—all have important consequences over the outcome of a negotiation. The names of the treaties that stood up as products of the Paris Peace Conference—Versailles, Trianon, St. Germain, Neuilly and Sevres—all refer to posh places in the outskirts of Paris where meetings were gathered and documents were signed. These locations have kept their charm and distinctiveness to this day. They are certainly not the places that the French have in mind when they use the word “la banlieue,” although they are technically part of it.The reason Versailles was chosen as a location to sign the treaty with Germany was to wipe out the humiliation that had been imposed upon France by the Prussian victors in 1871. The signing ceremony itself proved a logistical conundrum. Each of the Great Powers was awarded sixty places in the Hall of Mirrors at the Versailles Palace. This gave rise to a hunt for tickets, some of them going at exorbitant prices on the black market. The press corps was also in attendance, and it was the first time a signing ceremony was filmed by cameras. Everything was conceived to humiliate the Germans. The train that brought them to France slowed down when it crossed the devastated battlefields where the war of trenches had been fought. In Versailles, they were quarantined in the barracks where French leaders had stayed in 1871 while they negotiated with Bismarck. After one week, they were summoned to the Trianon Palace Hotel to be handed out the text of the treaty, with only a fortnight to take it or leave it. The terms were so harsh that even members of the British and the American delegations, including John Maynard Keynes, resigned in protest. At the gallerie des glaces, on June 28th, the two German delegates stood erect, heartsick, as if the hour of death had rang. An American compared the scene to a Roman triumph, with the defeated being dragged behind their conqueror's chariots.Even so, Margaret MacMillan makes the case that the Treaty of Versailles was not excessively harsh on Germany. It certainly didn't cause World War II. In Germany, the Diktat (“dictated treaty”) took the blame for all that was wrong with the economy: high prices, low wages, unemployment, taxes, inflation. But the reparations, which were set afterwards in 1921 and then continuously revised downward, were not a devastating blow: in the final reckoning, Germany paid less to the Allies than what France, with a much smaller economy, paid Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The disarmament clauses didn't prevent the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich to rearm on the sly. The “war guilt clause,” Article 231, which was denounced by German nationalists as the most shameful act of the “peace of shame,” was a standard clause that was also put in the treaties with Austria and Hungary, without becoming an issue.Other treaties negotiated during the Paris conference had more earth-shaking consequences. Empires disappeared, new nations were created, borders were redrawn, cities acquired special status. The treaty of St. Germain officially registered the breakup of the Habsburg Empire, recognizing the independence of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) and ceding eastern Galicia, Trento, southern Tirol, Trieste, and Istria. It reduced Austria to a small state of 8 million people and allocated former non-German speaking territories to the new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Under the treaty of Trianon, Hungary lost over two thirds of its territory to Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechslovakia. With the treaty of Neuilly, Bulgaria lost about 10 percent of its land, including the southern Dobrudja and what it still had of western Thrace, along with its access to the Aegean. The treaty of Sevres abolished the Ottoman Empire and obliged Turkey to renounce all rights over Arab Asia and North Africa. Its Middle Eastern Territories were handed to British and the French as League of Nations mandate. Britain gained mandate of Iraq and Palestine. France gained mandate of Lebanon and Syria.In judging the performance of the peacemakers, a general law seems at work: the closer the territory, the more attention was paid to find workable solutions and equitable outcomes. The farther away from Paris (and from Western Europe), the more catastrophic the outcomes proved to be. The Great Leaders particularly botched their job when they dealt with non-European places, of which they knew little. Japan was allowed to pursue its land-grabbing policy in the Far East. In the Middle East, the seeds of future conflicts were sown, to which there seems to be no end in sight, even today. Even on the European continent, negotiators fell prey to national stereotypes and ethnic profiling. MacMillan reflects on their nineteenth-century preconceptions with a delight that shows these categories are still active in the twenty-first century: “The Poles were dashing and brave, but quite unreasonable; the Rumanians charming and clever, but sadly devious; the Yugoslavs, well, rather Balkan. The Czechs were refreshingly Western.”But even if Versailles and, to a letter extend, St. Germain, Trianon, Neuilly and Sevres are remembered as the outcomes of the peace negotiations, most of the action took place in Paris. This is where logistics comes in again, and what gives the French their main asset for hosting international conferences: Paris will always be Paris. Margaret MacMillan makes a great job of recreating the atmosphere that surrounded the delegates who took part in the negotiation: diplomats of course, but also outside experts such as intelligence officers (all the hotel rooms were rumored to be tapped), university professors whose expertise on regions and ethnicities was often kept idle, Wall Street bankers such as Thomas Lamont and Paul Baruch, journalists emboldened by Woodrow Wilson's point that “open covenants of peace” should be “openly arrived at”, and interlopers of various stripes who claimed to represent the interests of faraway nations and peoples. Almost exclusively men, they found in Paris a promiscuous atmosphere where many distractions were offered: the races at St. Cloud, excellent restaurants if you could afford the price, shows at the Opera, revues and cabarets, and ballroom dancing. As MacMillan notes coyly, “attractive women had a wonderful time in Paris that year.”Wherever the Paris Climat 2015 conference turns out to be a one-in-a-century event or a flop, there are some lessons to be learned from the “six months that changed the world” in Paris 1919. As Holbrooke notes in his foreword, flawed decisions can have terrible consequences, many of which haunt us to this day. Therefore, instead of playing God and taking part in the Creation, designers of a new international order should apply simple rules to limit the negative consequences of their acts: minimize regret, encourage reversibility, build in flexibility and adaptability, defer some decisions in time while front-loading others, go for low-hanging fruits and early harvests, etc. Most importantly, beware general principles, slogans and catchwords. Nowadays climate change negotiators have to grapple with the “common but differentiated responsibility” principle, which sheds more darkness than light. In 1919, the buzzword was “self-determination” which was invoked like a mantra by all parties but offered little help in choosing between competing nationalisms. “Of all the ideas Wilson brought to Europe,” writes MacMillan, “this concept of self-determination was, and has remained, one of the most controversial and opaque (…) Did he really intend that any people who called themselves a nation should have their own state?” This interrogation is still valid today: with 16,000 existing ethnic groups (by some accounts), can one imagine a world with a similar number of independent polities?As for logistics, it is interesting to note that most of COP21 negotiations will take place in “la banlieue”: not the bourgeois cities of the south-west of Paris, where most of the post-WWI treaties were signed, but in the convention center of Le Bourget Airport, north-northeast of Paris, in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis. This will certainly contribute to the reshaping of the image of France abroad. In 1919, foreign delegates were impressed by Parisian insouciance, joie de vivre, and flirtatious promiscuity. For Puritan Americans whose country was entering Prohibition, the description of Parisian life brought back by delegates and journalists created dual reactions of attractions and repulsion. While a generation of rich American expatriates and bohemians settled in Paris to lead a life of sinful pleasure, others were confirmed in their isolationist tendencies by this image of decadent Old Europe. Similarly, Seine-Saint-Denis now stands in the mind of many Americans as synonymous with Muslim immigrants, derelict housing projects, urban riots, and the failure of the French republican model of integration. My sincere hope is that the success of the Paris Climat 2015 conference may eventually contribute to dispel such stereotypes and to give a more positive image of twenty-first-century France.

Macmillan has a direct enjoyable style. She is exhaustive in historical research while additionally providing inspiring anecdotes which fully capture the psicology of the main actors and the environment around the peace negotiations.Her assumptions on the reasons that lead to World War II were new to me. A good point to think about. The situation in the Middle East could be more easily explained after the Paris Negotiations.