About book Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World (2003)
I think it was Churchill who said that the most fascinating aspects of World War I – from a historical perspective – was its beginning and end. The start: the shocking assassination of an unloved heir of a creaky empire, shot in a Balkan backwater and somehow touching off a world war. The end: the peace to end all war, monarchies toppled, empires disintegrated, lines redrawn. Certainly, the majority of war-literature resides in these bookend events. I actually found my way to Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919, about the Treaty of Versailles that concluded World War I, while reading The War that Ended Peace, her more-recent volume about the years leading up to the Sarajevo assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Both of MacMillan’s World War I entries are excellent books, with the broad strokes of history complemented by precise, human-sized details and wonderful portraitures of the participants. Paris 1919 covers the six months of the Paris Peace Talks that followed the Armistice. The talks were dominated by the victorious Allies, especially the Big Three of Great Britain (represented by Prime Minister David Lloyd George), France (represented by Premier Georges Clemenceau), and the United States (represented by President Woodrow Wilson). Perhaps the best word to describe this half-year process is complicated. As in reach-for-the-bottle-opener-because-this-is-a-wine-night kind of complicated. Any attempt of mine to summarize the results of the Treaty of Versailles would ultimately fail, an undoubtedly have you reaching for wine yourself. The geographical changes alone are mind boggling. Germany was stripped of its gains from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, lost Alsace-Lorraine, and had to cede parts of Upper Silesia. They also had to recognize the newly-independent nations of Czechoslovakia and Poland. This is a lot of reshuffling, and that’s only a small part of the worldwide redistricting. Trying to keep it all straight requires familiarity with the many different maps, from many different time-periods. (In other parts of the world, the death of the Ottoman Empire saw the remaking of the Middle East, including the creation of Iraq).Most people are at least a bit familiar with the German-centric portions of Versailles. They know about the stab-in-the-back myth, the restrictions on military buildup, and on the reparations payments. (Much has been made of the payments, but MacMillan comes down on the side that says the reparations weren’t nearly as onerous as contemporary German propaganda, or John Maynard Keynes, would have you believe). Paris 1919 spends a great deal of time on Germany, for obvious reasons, but its purview goes far beyond that one nation. Methodically, region by region, MacMillan covers the reach and ramifications of the eventual Treaty of Versailles. She has chapters devoted to Russia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland, the Czechs and Slovaks, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Japan, China, Greece, Palestine, and Turkey. Each one of those nations had its own negotiator, with his own set of priorities, priorities that inevitably came into sharp conflict with those of his neighbor. All the wrangling, horse-trading, and chicanery is head spinning. It also is very reductive. The men involved in these processes were not always (or even often) great men of talent and foresight. More often, they were fueled by greed or grudges, by a desire for power. Sometimes they pouted. Literally pouted. History was used as a cudgel, though that history itself was often in dispute. Countries sought to use Versailles to heal the slights of centuries past. Inevitably it was the commoner who suffered while the kings moved their pieces. Every decision in Paris, large or small, affected thousands of people. MacMillan’s thoroughness and completeness are laudable. It comes, however, at the cost of some clarity. She writes with an on-the-ground perspective that, for long stretches, eschews a broad overview of what’s going on. Often, I found myself in the conundrum of being unable to see the forest for the trees. That is, I’d be in the midst of a dense and detailed chapter, and by the end of it, I would be a bit unsure of what’d been accomplished. As in The War that Ended Peace, MacMillan is at her best when tethering her story to strong personalities. The driving forces in Paris were the leaders of the victorious triumvirate of America, Great Britain, and France: Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau. Of these three, Wilson looms largest. A complex, contradictory man: Wilson remains puzzling in a way that Lloyd George and Clemenceau…do not. What is one to make of a leader who drew on the most noble language of the Bible yet was so ruthless with those who crossed him? Who loved democracy but despised most of his fellow politicians? Who wanted to serve humanity but had so few personal relationships? Was he, as Teddy Roosevelt thought, “as insincere and cold-blooded an opportunist as we have ever had in the Presidency?” Or was he, as Baker believed, one of those rare idealists like Calvin and Cromwell, “who from time to time have appeared upon the earth & for a moment, in burst of strange power, have temporarily lifted erring mankind to a higher pitch of contentment than it was quite equal to?”Wilson wanted power and he wanted to do great works. What brought the two sides of his character together was his ability, self-deception perhaps, to frame his decisions so that they became not merely necessary, but morally right. Just as American neutrality in the first years of the war had been right for Americans, and indeed for humanity, so the United States’ eventual entry into war became a crusade, against human greed and folly, against Germany and for justice, peace and civilization. This conviction, however, without which he could never have attempted what he did in Paris, made Wilson intolerant of differences and blind to the legitimate concerns of others. Those who opposed him were not just wrong but wicked…There are many reasons to dislike Wilson. He was a prejudiced man with serious race problems, and his notion of “self-determination”, which sounds so noble and just, was never meant to apply to non-whites. At the same time, the notions underlying the League of Nations and his Fourteen Points were breathtakingly ambitious, a rare historical moment when a leader at a particular point in time tried to change the fabric of the universe. It inspired people from around the world. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in the Hall of Mirrors on June 28, 1919 – the anniversary of Princip’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which touched off the whole mess – is rightly remembered for its failures (both actual and perceived, the perception being as important as the reality). The geographical reorganizations, the indemnities, and the indignities touched off a parade of horribles that lasted into the next century. It sowed World War II, Vietnam, wars in the Balkans, and perennial Middle Eastern instability. It separated people who should’ve been together, and crammed together those who should’ve been separate. No one, of course, set out to accomplish a near-total disaster. MacMillan’s excellent, elegantly written book does a masterful job of showing just how bad can be good intentions.
Do you know what I hate? I hate it when I find out that something I have known for years and years is not actually true. As a case in point, take the Treaty of Versailles. I hadn’t really thought about it all that much, but if asked I would have said that it would have most likely come out of a peace conference and that peace conference would have been held at Versailles. I know, I can be terribly literal at times. I also would have guessed that the conference might have lasted a few days, maybe a week – maybe two weeks, tops.What peace conference lasts for six months and has virtually all of the leaders of all of the major powers in the world attending for the whole time?I was a little concerned when this started and said that the US, unlike other powers of the day, had no interest in taking anything from anyone else and was purely an unequivocal force for good. You might be able to say something like that at the end of a series of lectures, but saying it at the start simply takes away any hope of objectivity. The odd thing was that I didn’t really come away feeling that the US had been an unequivocal force for good – in fact, Woodrow Wilson comes across as a partisan fool. I had no idea the US was not in the League of Nations and that this could largely be attributed to Wilson despising Republicans so much as to alienate those who might have supported such a move.MacMillan has set herself a huge task here – and that is to look at this peace conference (The Paris Peace Conference) at the end of the First World War and to show how all too many of the problems facing the world today had their origins at this time. The problems she outlines are perennials like the Israel and Palestinian question, Iraq, Communism in China and Russia, nation states in Central Europe and the rarely harmonious Balkans. All of these can trace either their origins or at least some horrible push along their fatal path from this time.One of the consequences she doesn’t agree with is that this Peace Conference, and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in particular, were the cause of the Second World War – typical, really, as this was about the only consequence I thought I knew. The lecture on German reparations is fascinating. I had always just thought it was received wisdom that the sheer onerousness of the reparations was what inevitably led to Hitler and Co. But MacMillan challenges this view and I think rather successfully. She points out that the Germans at the time sought to make the ‘reparations’ sound much worse than they actually were. Also, she points out something else I didn’t know – that Germany didn’t actually make many payments. I really do need to read more about this period – but if Germany was not making any reparation payments it might be going a little far to say that they caused an onerous burden on them that brought about the next war.I had thought that everyone knew why the First World War began – but apparently this is a question that is vigorously debated and is therefore highly controversial and inconclusive. If that is the case then it does seem a little bit of a stretch to make Germany the monster in the whole affair.I also didn’t know Italy was quite so powerful at the time and knew little or nothing about Greece and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. To be honest, I feel like someone who thought they knew quite a bit about a period of history and suddenly have discovered that I know next to nothing about it.The Australian Prime Minister of the time – Billy Hughes – also rates more than one mention. A traitor to the Labor Party and a racist pig; it is hard not to loath him, and he comes out of this series of lectures particularly loathsome. This review makes me sound quite ignorant, and that is probably fair, although at least I did know New Zealand is on this side of Australia – which is more than could be said for the British Prime Minister at the time. My ignorance would seem to be of much less moment.This was a time when many seeds were being planted. At the time it was probably impossible to know quite how these seeds would develop (or the monsters some would turn into). All the same, what becomes clear is that racism played a remarkable role in world affairs at the time and that the victims of racism generally were more than able to spot when and how they are being patronised. Their response over the years has been the cause of much trouble. This is a lesson that we have repeatedly failed to learn– compare and contrast with Iraq (let’s just have it as one country – it will be easier to administer that way), Yugoslavia (ditto) or China (let’s chop it into lots of bits ruled by foreigners, it will be easier to administer that way). The US policy of National Determination as the core belief to direct the way forward was much more likely to be applied in Europe – where at least the people had the good sense to be white – than in China, India, Indochina, Africa – where the people couldn’t even get that right.It is too easy to believe that what is now has always been – but it is important to remember that many of the nation states in Europe are remarkably recent and that people did not necessarily immediately rush to become citizens. Nationalism is one of the things I dislike most in the world. With so many nations coming into being at the time (Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Soviet Russia) and so many others being less than a hundred years old (Italy and Germany), and others disappearing (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tzarist Russia, Soviet Hungary), it does seem strange to me that nationalism would have taken such a tight hold on the world quite so quickly. But then, people do like to belong.The myth is that after the First World War there were reparations and this brought about the Second World War which ended with the Marshall Plan where everyone was treated fairly and therefore peace and love reigned supreme. In fact, it seems neither of these might be true, as after the Second World War, according to Wikipedia, “John Gimbel comes to the conclusion, in his book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany, that the "intellectual reparations" taken by the U.S. and the UK amounted to close to US$10 billion, equivalent to around US$100 billion in 2006 terms.”This is a wonderful introduction to this period and something that has whetted my appetite for more.If there is one criticism it is a general one with the Modern Scholar lectures – and that is the stupid idea of saying stuff like, “Following the lecture a student asked …” This is so clearly false and set up. I’ve been to lots of lectures and am yet to hear a coherent and germaine question asked following any of them. If they are going to pretend there are students asking questions following the lectures they should at least make it realistic and ask something about Global Warming or Quantum Theory perhaps.
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If the star-rating system were based on facts told, Paris 1919 would be a solid five. The six months the Allied leaders spent in Paris leading up to the Treaty of Versailles was filled to overflowing with how the defeated nation of Germany would be treated, how land formerly claimed by Germany would be divided, who would get what (with everyone vying for their share of the pie.) What came across strong and clear was how much two allied nations England and France mistrusted each other during these dealings and the arrogance in claiming land as their own when, what business does anyone have in assuming to lay claim over another people? The reader certainly gets a feeling for the persons of Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson and the part they played as well as lesser characters who have ended up standing the test of time. There was something about the writing that dulled the senses after a time; it really was an overload. Perhaps excellent for the scholar in his research; almost too much for a more casual reader.
—Linda
This is pretty good - well written, structured, no noticeable weird ideological quirks, good balance of anecdotes and data, etc, etc. On the other hand, the book seems to be more concerned with what's important than what is interesting, at least for my particular interests. There's a great deal about the, well, really big important decisions and failures and successes, focusing on Poland, Austro-Hungary, Ottomans, Germany, etc, and some about the League of Nations and all that.I think the point is to follow through the diplomatic and political wrangling behind the decisions, but often there's also a great deal of general information which is already staggeringly well known, in a general sort of way. (Germany was made to sign a treaty it was unhappy with. The Ottoman empire got dismembered, etc, etc.) So sometimes I had the sense of the book being more of a collection of essays about "stuff that happened after WW1", (albeit a lively and interesting one) with the conference itself being more of a common touchstone than about the conference. This seems like a bit of a shame, because there seems to have been a ton of weirdness going on around the edges that is only mentioned in passing, for the sake of colorful scene setting. There were dozens of countries and delegations there, trying to achieve any number of things. Most of them, presumably, failed (or history would bother to remember them,) but I still would have liked to know a lot more about it. It's not just because I like knowing about the weird stuff (c'mon, who doesn't like the weird stuff?) but because it seems like it would give more of an insight into the context and praxis of that point in history. From here, those decisions all seem so ephemeral, that what I really wanted from the book was more of an understanding ot the logic of the moment, what people(s) seemed to have thought was achievable, or at least worth making a noise about, because I already know how it ended.
—Tamara
I wanted to find out more about Europe after WW1 and in the inter-war years, so this seemed like a good place to start.We talk about the 1914-18 war, the “Armistice” that ended it and the subsequent “Treaty of Versailles”. But I had not really appreciated that there was a full six months between the end of the war and the treaty finally being signed in May 1919. And I had not really understood that the treaty involved so such more than just the assessment of reparations to be taken from Germany; there were so many competing and contradictory claims by virtually every other European country as well as China and Japan, the carving-up of what remained of the Turkish empire, the spoils of the African colonies and of course divvying-up of the Middle East.Nothing on that scale had ever been attempted before, and Wilson, Lloyd-George and Clemenceau, (the leaders of the US, Britain and France who were the main players), had no conception of how complex and time-consuming it was to become. Their initial hopelessly ambitious scheme, further complicated by Wilson’s vision of setting up a League of Nations at the same time, was to have a preliminary set of meetings of the “key players” to set out the general terms and have the League hammer out the details of the claims before holding negotiations with Germany.What actually happened was predictable in hindsight: the “lesser” nations were having none of that, and bitter infighting broke out immediately. In the end there never was time for more than the initial meetings, nor for setting up the League. Despite that, it was stunning to learn that there was so much horse-trading right up to the last minute, that nobody actually read the final treaty in its entirety before it was handed to the Germans to sign. And it was simply handed to them; there was to be no discussion. Later when L-G and Wilson did have time to review the treaty with Germany, the feeling was that it was much more punitive than they had intended.McMillan gives a real sense of what it must have been like to be in the Versailles sessions and what the human cost was, in particular to the three leaders, with plenty of detail about the forceful arguing and emotions that ran so high during those months. At the time, in England and France anyway, the popular sentiment was to “hang the Kaiser” and “squeeze the Germans till they bled”, so it was understandable that the negotiators found it difficult to make the terms more reasonable. Later, that sentiment had mostly been replaced by a realization that it was to nobody’s benefit if Germany was destroyed economically, but by then it was too late.*She makes the point that far too much time passed between November, when Germany sued for peace and when the treaty was actually signed. In that time she says that Germany had apparently “forgotten” what desperate straits the country had been in; in addition, the Allies had never actually marched into Berlin as victors so the Germans had not got a sense of having lost; rather, they had come to feel that a ceasefire had simply been proclaimed without any blame being assigned. So, the terms of the agreement were met with outrage, and not just because the Germans had been led to believe they would be negotiable in some way.There is a lot of sense to this argument, but it rather undermines her position that the terms of the Treaty were not ultimately that harsh (because only a fraction of the reparations were ever taken) and that they were not (as is widely supposed) the direct cause of the rise of Nazism and the catastrophe of WW2. However, I’m not a historian so I can’t really assess the strength of her arguments, (particularly after reading just one book on the subject since the 5th Form) but I am motivated now to read more about the post-1919 world. Overall, Paris 1919 was pretty good, although a bit too much like a textbook, and for me not quite in the class of Sleepwalkers or Postwar, two of the books that set me off on this quest.*(Contrast that with the post-WW2 era when much more care was taken not to punish the German people too much. Throughout the fifties, my parents were appalled that Germany continued to “get off so lightly” but much as I hate to admit it, as events turned out it was the right thing to do.)
—Will
