Paris Peace, Versailles Treaty—Some Definitions

In historical and political writing as well as in journalism, we often hear the terms "Paris Peace" and "Versailles Treaty" used interchangeably. While usage often trumps "correctness" in our daily discourse and elsewhere, there is a good reason for all of us to differentiate between these two terms.

The Paris Peace of 1919 is what we call the settlement that consisted of five different treaties plus some other arrangements set up as late as 1924, but as a direct continuation of the treaty agreements. We might even say that dating the Paris Peace to 1919 is problematic, since several parts of the of the settlement, including two of the five treaties, were actually concluded in 1920. Further, various elements of the treaties of the Paris Peace were designed to be carried out in the future (settlement of reparation sums, for example, or the plebiscites on disputed borders). So the "1919" Peace of Paris was really set up over several years, though the Paris Peace Conference lasted, technically, from January 18, 1919 to January 21, 1920.

As far as treaties go, the results of Paris peacemaking were as follows. The Allies (leaving out Russia) signed separate treaties with each of the five Central Powers: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). The treaties are nicknamed after the French palace in which they were signed, and indeed in the twenties were often called the treaties of the Paris suburbs. They were:

Treaty of Versailles—Germany, 28 June 1919
Treaty of St. Germain—Austria, 10 September 1919
Treaty of Neuilly—Bulgaria, 27 November 1919
Treaty of Trianon—Hungary, 4 June 1920
Treaty of Sèvres—Ottoman Empire, 10 August 1920

Note that Austria and Hungary started the war as one country, or at least as components of the same empire, under the same monarchy. But the pressures of war led to their dissolution into separate pieces in the last days of World War I.

Note also two things about the treaty with the Ottoman Empire. First, that the Allied signatories did not include the United States. The USA had actually only signed on as an "associated" power, not an "allied" power in the first four treaties, since the close connection with European designs and problems was already a political problem. But the Treaty of Sèvres, for a number of reasons, was especially unpalatable, so the treaty with the Ottoman Empire was not put forward by the "Allied and Associated Powers." In the end, also, the Treaty of Sèvres would be renegotiated after the Turkish War for Independence and after new forces took charge of Turkey. All this resulted in a new treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne. But that is a story for much later.

Woodrow Wilson Crosses the Water

There is much more to say about the origins of the conference, but as the day approaches, it is well worth pointing out that the American President, Woodrow Wilson, was by this time ninety years ago, already in Europe, indeed, had been for a month. Wilson's presidential ship, The George Washington, steamed out of New York Harbor with great fanfare on December 4, 1918, preceded by the battleship Pennsylvania. Wilson's convoy reached the French naval center of Brest on December 13. Wilson had brought with him a team of 150 experts he called "The Inquiry,"--mostly academics, attorneys, and international finance experts--organized by Edward Mandell House, Wilson's closest advisor (as Wilson said, "my alter ego"). The Inquiry had been working for over a year on materials and policies related to the conference. Three days before The George Washington reached Brest, Wilson called the whole delegation, including The Inquiry, together. "Tell me what is right, and I'll fight for it," he told them.

Landing, Wilson proceeded to tour Paris, Rome, and London, to the adulation of admiring, sometimes almost hysterical crowds. Wilson was, after all, the head of the great decisive power which had intervened in European affairs when the Allies backs were against the wall, in 1917.

More on the President later, but for the moment we are tracking him--elated by the public opinion of London, Rome, and Paris--as he arrives back in Paris to settle into the Hotel Crillon and get ready for the business of the conference--or, in his terms, the fight for what was right.

A Little Diplomatic History

In a sense, the Paris Peace Conference wrote the script for the century—or should I say, at least the century—to follow. Very few diplomatic gatherings in human history have compared to it, either the in the size of the settlement and scope of issues or in the immensity of the conflict which the gathering ostensibly existed to settle. Only a couple of comparable settlements come to mind: the Peace of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna.

In the first, the multiple powers engaged in the Thirty Years War (along with some that weren't) held meetings, sporadic at first, that ended up with two seats of negotiation at two towns in Westphalia, Münster and Osnabrück (two because in essence, the Spaniards refused to negotiate with Protestants). The two resulting treaties go to make up the Westphalian Peace (1648), and ended not only the Thirty Years War, but a number of other conflicts, including the Dutch war of independence from the Spanish Monarchy. And the settlement of borders, river rights, and the like, lasted for well over a hundred years, even if "peace" was interrupted frequently. At least, there were few "general" wars involving all the Great Powers.

This was big.

So was that other great peace negotiation, the Congress of Vienna. This huge (and costly) meeting put a cap on the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon in 1814 and 1815. Here, the victorious Allies (Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia plus others) met to deal out punishment to the French after France had run roughshod over Europe for nearly two decades. Napoleon was banished to a Mediterranean island but escaped and returned to France for a Hundred Days during the Congress, understandably confusing the negotiations. But defeated in a "close-run" affair at Waterloo, the Corsican—doomed to a fate which was linked to islands—was exiled to island of St. Helena, a place with an excellent and healthy climate, but one which was several thousand miles from Europe. So the Congress continued and eventually ended with a coherent rebalancing of the European order. In the 1648, case, even if some states lost their local struggles, there were no clear winners and losers overall, though the Spaniards no doubt considered that their loses in the peace were grave. In 1814/15, the Congress opened with the clear dichotomy of the vanquished (France), and the victors (most of everyone else). Yet the brilliant maneuvers of the great French diplomat Talleyrand and the willingness of Louis XVI's younger brother, Louis XVIII, to exercise restraint in the remonarchization of France led France into a position of guarded equality with the victors. And like the Westphalia Peace, the Vienna Peace lasted a long time: ninety-nine years. Again, this is not to say there were no wars in Europe, but there were no "general" wars involving all the largest Powers at once.

In both the great peacemaking gatherings in the Europe of the great states—in essence modern Europe--the negotiations were genuine. Both victors and vanquished—where it even makes sense to use those terms—were truly represented in the negotiations of the gatherings and in the final settlements and the documents reflecting these settlements.
The long and short of these stories is this: these great settlements were complicated and no doubt flawed in all kinds of ways; yet they set up workable international orders. If we look at the contemporary evidence and subsequent historical analysis, we will probably agree that these settlements of the European order were durable at least in part because there was genuine negotiation. The "losing" powers played active roles in the peacemaking process. When one side made demands that were extreme, someone on the other side of the table glowered at them. Since the negotiations started with truces only, and not with some kind of disarmament, the victors were quite hesitant to restart costly and brutal wars just to gain some strip of territory.

I say all that to say this: the Paris Peace was not negotiated in this sense. As we shall see.

Blogging the Peace of Paris, 1919

The Paris Peace Conference opened on January 18, 1919, just ninety years ago. This great diplomatic summit meeting which produced five treaties was supposed to create a settlement that would conclude the Great War. That conflict itself had been advertised in various settings as "the war to end war." Hence, in some quarters—and certainly from the standpoint of public relations—there were high expectations that the resulting peace settlement would be something grand. The French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, was referring to these expectations when he entitled his 1930 memoir of the conference Grandeurs et misères d'une victoire (Grandeurs and Misfortunes of a Victory). Yet Clemenceau's title catches something of the cynical attitude that flowed in and around the conference. In his magnificent 1974 book The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell emphasized deeply ironic modes of the war that altered, as he thought, even the ways of remembering and interpreting the past ever since. Fussell was thinking more about the battlefield, but the irony marked the thinking of many about the settlement of the war as well, as Clemenceau's title suggests.

Design of a Violent Century is the beginning of a year-long project for me. It is my intention to "blog" the conference in a sense. In part I am looking to journal the conference—tell what was happening at a given time, etc. In part I intend to write a series of mini-essays on the history of the conference, its meaning, its consequences.

I am a historian by profession, and I have spent much of the last thirty years thinking about the Paris Peace Conference (in particular the Versailles Treaty, one of its most important diplomatic instruments). I have written a book about one small corner of the conference, and I have written a book about the Great War itself. I continue to work in the area of border settlements on Germany's border, and more generally the ethnic violence that was related to World War I and its conclusion. In this blog, I intend to develop some of my ideas in greater detail and to elucidate some aspects of peacemaking in 1919 that have not really made it into classrooms and textbooks from my own research, from recent literature, and from contemporary observers as well.

Caveat lector: While historians have periodically tried to rehabilitate the Paris Peace and its components, my view of the peacemaking is much more colored by the less than altruistic aspects of peacemaking and by the really terrible world that issued from the conference. Some historians still wish to see the conference in rosy terms, especially American historians. Yet with such works as Richard Blanke's Orphans of Versailles to Paul Hehn's A Low Dishonest Decade, historical research is still broadening and deepening our knowledge of the ways in which the Paris Peace settlement (along with the war itself and various earlier trends) helped create the terrible, violent century that followed.