The end of the Paris Peace Conference

At eleven in the morning on 21 January 1920 the leaders of the peace conference met for the last time in their existing form, in the office of the French foreign minister at the Quai d’Orsay. Around the table sat the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, Italy’s representative Giacomo de Martino, the Japanese ambassador Keishirō Matsui and two Frenchmen: the outgoing prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, and his successor, Alexandre Millerand. Clemenceau, who for a year had presided over the conference opened on 18 January 1919, signed one last reply to an American note on the Adriatic, then rose and left the room, and Millerand took the chair. A moment later Curzon reminded those present that in December, in London, the powers had decided to end the current session of the conference soon after the treaty with Germany came into force. From now on the great political questions would be settled by governments in direct talks, and day-to-day business by a permanent conference of ambassadors in Paris. That day, therefore, the Paris Peace Conference came to an end in the form in which it had for a year decided the map of the world.

What really happened on 21 January

Popular chronologies state that the conference closed with “the inaugural General Assembly of the League of Nations”. This is not true. The Covenant of the League of Nations, which formed the first part of the Treaty of Versailles, came into force together with the whole treaty on 10 January 1920. The first meeting of the League Council took place in Paris on 16 January. The first Assembly of the League – the gathering of representatives of all member states – did not meet until 15 November 1920, in Geneva. No League assembly met on 21 January. What did end that day was the session of the peace conference, and its principal participants were leaving Paris.

According to the American series of diplomatic documents, Foreign Relations of the United States, it was the Council of Foreign Ministers that met on 21 January. The meeting lasted less than two hours and closed at 12.50 p.m. Curzon explained that, with the departure of the British and Italian prime ministers, David Lloyd George and Francesco Saverio Nitti, the illness of the Italian delegate Vittorio Scialoja and his own return to London, the conference could no longer operate in its existing form. He announced that Britain would be represented in the new body by its ambassador in Paris, Lord Derby. The Italians wanted to keep the option of sending ministers to meetings, and Millerand stipulated that heads of government could sit in place of the ambassadors when necessary. Thus was born the Council of Ambassadors, also called the Conference of Ambassadors, which in the years that followed carried out the Paris treaties and settled disputes that governments did not wish to take on themselves.

The main argument for 21 January as the end of the conference, then, is that on that day its directing body ceased to function. Historians point out, however, that work on the peace went on. The treaties with Hungary and Turkey had not yet been signed, and the whole peace process was formally completed only by the Treaty of Lausanne of July 1923.

The final weeks

The last phase of the conference began on 10 January 1920. That afternoon, in the building on the Quai d’Orsay, representatives of Germany and the powers exchanged instruments of ratification, and the Treaty of Versailles came into force. The German delegation was then led by the diplomat Kurt von Lersner, successor to Count Brockdorff-Rantzau. The Germans also signed an additional protocol in which they undertook, among other things, to pay compensation for the fleet scuttled at Scapa Flow. From that day the war with Germany was formally over, and all the treaty’s provisions came into effect: the borders, disarmament, the occupation of the Rhineland, the articles on penalties.

In the second week of January Lloyd George and Nitti arrived in Paris, and within a few days the powers tried to settle matters that had been outstanding for months. In accordance with Article 227 of the treaty, on 15 January they sent the Dutch government a note demanding the surrender of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been living in exile in the Netherlands since November 1918. A few days later the Dutch refused. On 20 January the Council approved the list of Germans whose extradition the powers were to demand under Article 228. When, at the beginning of February, the list of almost 900 names – among them Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff – was handed to Lersner, he refused to accept it and resigned. In the end there were only a dozen or so trials before a German court in Leipzig.

On 16 January the head of the Hungarian delegation, Count Albert Apponyi, who had been handed the peace terms a few days earlier, addressed the Council. He argued that Hungary, after two revolutions, Communist rule and Romanian occupation, was in no position to fulfil them, and asked for plebiscites in the territories being detached. The powers did not change the essential provisions, and the treaty was signed at Trianon on 4 June. On the same day, 16 January, the Council decided to allow trade with Russia through the Russian cooperatives. It stipulated that this did not mean a change of policy towards the Soviet government, but in practice it was the beginning of the end of the blockade of Soviet Russia. In mid-January the powers recognised Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia de facto, without, however, promising them any military help against the advancing Red Army.

The question that took up most time was Fiume, still occupied by Gabriele D’Annunzio’s legionaries. Lloyd George and Clemenceau agreed a compromise with Nitti and on 20 January presented the Yugoslavs with an ultimatum: either accept it or the secret Treaty of London of 1915, more favourable to Italy, would come into force. Washington protested. In a telegram of 19 January Secretary of State Robert Lansing asked whether the British and French intended from now on to settle the affairs of Europe without the United States and merely inform America of their decisions. The reply to that telegram was the last document Clemenceau signed as president of the conference. On 20 January the Council also dealt with the occupation of the plebiscite areas in East and West Prussia, Upper Silesia, Cieszyn Silesia and Schleswig. The British agreed to send warships to Gdańsk (Danzig) and Memel (Klaipėda), and Marshal Ferdinand Foch was to allocate battalions to the remaining areas.

Clemenceau departs

The end of the conference coincided with the fall of its president. President Raymond Poincaré’s term was drawing to a close, and everyone expected the “Father of Victory” to succeed him. On 16 January, however, at a preparatory meeting of republican parliamentarians, Clemenceau lost to the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Paul Deschanel, by 389 votes to 408. He was harmed by his abrasive character, his anticlericalism and accusations that in Paris he had given way to the Anglo-Saxons, especially over the Rhineland. He withdrew his candidacy; on 17 January the National Assembly elected Deschanel, and on 18 January Clemenceau tendered his government’s resignation. Millerand became prime minister. Clemenceau never returned to politics, and when the Council considered on 21 January who should sign the reply to the Americans, he said he had agreed to stay on a few days longer only to see the Italian question through.

The other peacemakers were leaving too. President Woodrow Wilson had been partly paralysed and cut off from the world since his stroke in October, and the American delegation had left Paris as early as December 1919. At the Council’s meetings in January 1920 the United States was represented only by Ambassador Hugh Wallace, as an observer without plenipotentiary powers. Lloyd George went back to London, and Orlando had been replaced by Nitti. Of the “Big Four” who had decided the fate of Europe in the spring of 1919, none was any longer at the table.

The League of Nations without America

The entry into force of the Treaty of Versailles meant the birth of the League of Nations. In accordance with the Covenant, the first meeting of its Council was convened by the President of the United States. It took place on 16 January 1920 in the Salon de l’Horloge at the Quai d’Orsay, under the chairmanship of the former French prime minister Léon Bourgeois, one of the spiritual fathers of the League. The Council comprised representatives of the four permanent members – Britain, France, Italy and Japan – and four elected ones: Belgium, Brazil, Greece and Spain. The fifth permanent seat, intended for the United States, remained empty. The League’s Secretary-General since 1919 had been the Briton Eric Drummond. The Secretariat worked at first in London and moved to Geneva only on 1 November 1920; two weeks later the first Assembly met there, with 41 states taking part. The Belgian foreign minister, Paul Hymans, was elected its president.

The United States never joined the League. On 19 November 1919 the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles both with the Republicans’ reservations and without them. On 19 March 1920, in the final vote, 49 senators voted for ratification with reservations and 35 against – a few votes short of the required two-thirds majority. Wilson preferred defeat to compromise with the Republican leader Henry Cabot Lodge. In the autumn of 1920 Americans elected as president the Republican Warren Harding, who wanted a “return to normalcy”, and in August 1921 the United States concluded separate peace treaties with Germany, Austria and Hungary.

Unfinished business

As the leaders left Paris, Europe was far from peace. In the east the Polish–Soviet War was under way, and in Anatolia Greeks and Turks were fighting. The conference had not drawn Poland’s eastern borders; the fate of Upper Silesia, Warmia and Masuria and Cieszyn Silesia was yet to be decided by plebiscites; and the Free City of Danzig existed only on paper. The treaties with Hungary and Turkey were signed in June and August 1920, and from then on the prime ministers met at a succession of conferences: in London, at San Remo, at Spa and beyond. The Council of Ambassadors dealt with border disputes, from Cieszyn Silesia and Memel to the recognition of Poland’s eastern border in March 1923.

Significance

The end of the conference revealed the weakness of the order it had built. The Versailles peace was the work of three powers, and in January 1920 one of them, the United States, was withdrawing from Europe; the second, Britain, believed less and less in harsh terms for Germany; and the third, France, was left with a treaty that nobody but itself intended to enforce firmly. With the Senate’s rejection of the treaty, the American and British guarantee to France collapsed, and the League of Nations lost the state that was to have been its mainstay. When the real tests came a decade later – the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, the Italian attack on Ethiopia and German rearmament – the League, without America and later without Japan, Germany and Italy as well, was unable to stop them.

Meanwhile the German sense of grievance grew with every month the treaty was in force. The demands for the surrender of the Kaiser and of the “war criminals”, Hindenburg at their head, which the government in Berlin could not and would not meet, united almost the whole of German opinion against the victors. On the right anger was mounting, and only a few weeks later it erupted in an attempted coup in Berlin. In Munich in February 1920 Adolf Hitler announced the programme of a party one of whose first aims was the abrogation of the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain. The order that the Paris peacemakers left in the hands of the Council of Ambassadors and the League of Nations was to last less than twenty years.