The Paris Peace Conference opens

At 3 p.m. on 18 January 1919, in the French Foreign Ministry building on the Quai d’Orsay, the President of France, Raymond Poincaré, opened the peace conference that was to bring the Great War to an end. In the conference hall sat plenipotentiaries of some two dozen states of the victorious coalition and the British dominions, from the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, to the envoys of Cuba, Siam and the Hejaz. There were no representatives of Germany or its allies among them, nor of Russia, which had fought on the side of the Entente for three years. The date was not chosen by chance: exactly 48 years earlier, on 18 January 1871, the German Empire had been proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Over the next eighteen months the conference that formally opened that day prepared five peace treaties and the Covenant of the League of Nations. The order established in Paris was to last a mere twenty years, and its revision became the programme of the states that unleashed another war in 1939.

After the armistice

Hostilities on the Western Front ceased on 11 November 1918, after the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne. The armistice was not peace. It was extended month by month, and each extension brought new demands on Germany. Earlier, in September and November, Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria-Hungary had laid down their arms. All the Central Powers were beaten, but two of them, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, were falling apart before the victors’ eyes, and in Germany a revolution had been under way since the sailors’ mutiny at the turn of October and November. A few days before the conference opened, the government and volunteer Freikorps units had crushed the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, and on the day after the opening, 19 January, Germans voted for a National Assembly.

In eastern Europe the war was far from over. In Russia, ruled since the Bolshevik coup by Vladimir Lenin, civil war was raging, and the Red Army was moving into the lands being vacated by German troops. Poles were fighting Ukrainians for Lwów (Lviv) and Eastern Galicia, and in Greater Poland an uprising against the Germans had been under way since December. In the Hungarian–Romanian War, fought since November, the Romanians were advancing deep into Transylvania as the Hungarian army withdrew. The conference was therefore not only to set down peace terms for the defeated but also to draw the borders of states that were only just coming into being, often on territory still being fought over.

France decided the choice of Paris. Neutral Switzerland was also considered, but the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, argued that the capital of the country that had suffered most had a natural right to host it. The President of the United States decided to lead the American delegation in person, although no sitting president had ever travelled to Europe. He landed at Brest on 13 December 1918, and Parisians greeted him as a saviour. For millions of Europeans his Fourteen Points, promising a just peace, national self-determination and a league of nations, were the promise of a new world. The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, came to Paris after a crushing victory in the December election, in which his coalition had promised that Germany would pay for the war. The Italian prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, wanted above all to secure the territorial promises Italy had been given in 1915 for entering the war.

The Council of Ten

The conference’s leaders were already meeting before it opened. On 12 January 1919 the heads of government and foreign ministers of France, Britain, Italy and the United States gathered in the office of the French foreign minister, Stéphen Pichon, on the Quai d’Orsay. Formally this was a session of the Supreme War Council, which had coordinated the Allied war effort since 1917. In mid-January two representatives of Japan joined it. Thus was born the Council of Ten, also called the Supreme Council: two delegates from each of the five great powers. For the first two months it was this body, not the assembly of all the delegations, that took the most important decisions.

In the week before the opening the Council settled the conference’s rules of procedure. The main dispute was over the number of seats at the table. The great powers gave themselves five plenipotentiaries each and the smaller allies between one and three. Belgium, almost entirely occupied throughout the war, formally protested at being given only two seats, as did Serbia. Lloyd George would not give way, pointing out that Belgium had fielded a quarter of a million soldiers and the great powers millions. In the end Belgium and Serbia received three delegates each, the same as Brazil. Poland and Czechoslovakia, states formally created only a few months earlier, were given two seats each. The British dominions – Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand – and India received their own representation, for which the Canadian prime minister, Robert Borden, had fought hard. The Americans feared that this would give the British Empire extra votes, but Lloyd George backed the dominions.

The rules divided the participants into categories. The “powers with general interests” – the United States, the British Empire, France, Italy and Japan – were to take part in all sessions and commissions. The “powers with special interests” were to be invited only when their affairs were under discussion. States that had merely broken off diplomatic relations with Germany, such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay, were listed separately. Neutral states and “states in the process of formation” could be heard at the great powers’ invitation. The question of Montenegro, then being absorbed by Serbia, was postponed. On Russia’s representation the rules said only that the conference would settle its terms when it came to Russian affairs.

The session of 18 January

President Poincaré opened the session. His speech was an indictment of the Central Powers. There was no longer any need, he said, for inquiries into the origins of the war, for “the truth, bathed in blood, has already escaped from the imperial archives”, and France bore no responsibility whatever for the catastrophe. He listed in turn the wartime services of every ally, from Britain to Siam, and mentioned Poland, which, “restored to life”, had sent its troops to aid the Allies. He demanded justice, meaning reparation for those who had suffered, punishment of the guilty and guarantees of security for the states most exposed to attack. At the same time he said that the days when diplomats redrew the map of empires on the corner of a table were over, and that new borders must be drawn in the name of the peoples. He announced the creation of a League of Nations. Finally he returned to the date. On this same day, he recalled, forty-eight years earlier, on 18 January 1871, an invading army had proclaimed the German Empire in the palace of Versailles, an empire consecrated by the theft of two French provinces. Born in injustice, he said, it had ended in disgrace, and those assembled were to undo the wrong it had done. He declared the conference open and left the hall, shaking the delegates’ hands as he went.

Clemenceau became temporary chairman. Wilson proposed him, in English, as permanent chairman, calling it a tribute to France but above all to the man. Lloyd George seconded the motion, joking that had he not remembered from his schooldays that Clemenceau was already a famous politician then, he would have taken the tales of his age for legend, and admitting that the two of them often quarrelled “because we are two Celts”. The Italian foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, added his support on Italy’s behalf. The seventy-seven-year-old “Tiger” was elected unanimously. The vice-chairmen were representatives of the other great powers: Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Lloyd George, Orlando, and the Japanese Prince – then still Marquis – Kinmochi Saionji. The French diplomat Paul Dutasta was elected secretary-general, and Professor Paul Mantoux interpreted the speeches as they were delivered. The conference’s languages were French and English, which marked the end of French’s monopoly in diplomacy.

In his speech Clemenceau said that those assembled had come as friends and must leave as brothers. “The League of Nations is here. It is in yourselves,” he urged, adding that President Wilson had already sketched out the conference’s programme. He then set out the order of business. First came the responsibility of the authors of the war, second the punishment of crimes committed during the war, and third international labour law. Delegations were to submit memoranda on these matters, as well as on the territorial, financial and economic questions that concerned them. Clemenceau stressed that the question of responsibility was urgent and announced the circulation of a memorandum by two Paris law professors on the criminal responsibility of the former Kaiser, Wilhelm II. He also announced that the next session would deal with the League of Nations. No one else spoke. The session closed at 4.35 p.m.

Who sat at the table, and who was missing

The rules provided for some seventy plenipotentiaries. According to the minutes, the United States was represented by Wilson, Lansing, the diplomat Henry White and General Tasker Bliss, and the British Empire, besides Lloyd George, by the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law and the dominion prime ministers, among them the Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes. France was represented by Clemenceau, Pichon, the finance minister Louis-Lucien Klotz, André Tardieu and Jules Cambon, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch was also listed among the French delegates. At the table sat the Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pašić, the Czechoslovak foreign minister, Edvard Beneš, the Romanian prime minister, Ion I. C. Brătianu, the Chinese delegates with their foreign minister, Lu Zhengxiang, and Emir Faisal representing the Hejaz. Greece, whose delegation was led by the prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, was represented that day by the foreign minister, Nikolaos Politis.

Poland was represented at the opening by Roman Dmowski, president of the Polish National Committee, which the Allies had recognised since 1917 as the representative body of the Poles. Two days earlier, on 16 January, Ignacy Jan Paderewski had become prime minister in Warsaw, and a compromise between him, Józef Piłsudski and the Paris committee ended the dispute over who spoke for Poland. Dmowski became Poland’s first delegate, and Paderewski was to join him in the spring. On 29 January Dmowski spent several hours presenting Poland’s territorial claims to the Council of Ten. The Polish cause was backed by France, which saw a strong Poland as a counterweight to Germany. Lloyd George was sceptical, fearing that too many Germans within Poland’s borders would become the source of a future war.

Japan, one of the five great powers, was represented at the opening by its ambassadors in London and Paris, Sutemi Chinda and Keishirō Matsui. The head of the delegation, the former prime minister Saionji, left Japan only on 14 January and reached Paris at the beginning of March. The delegation’s real leader was Baron Nobuaki Makino, who first took his seat on the Council of Ten on 20 January. The Japanese took little interest in European affairs. They cared above all about three things: taking over Germany’s former rights in the Chinese province of Shandong, the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator, and writing the principle of racial equality into the Covenant of the League of Nations. They spoke so rarely on European matters that they were sometimes called the “silent partners”. Japan was the only great power from outside the Western world, and its delegates soon found that great-power status did not mean full equality for them.

Prime Minister Orlando does not appear in the minutes of the opening either. Italy was represented that day by Sonnino and Senator Giuseppe Salvago Raggi. In Rome a cabinet crisis was under way following the resignations of Leonida Bissolati and Francesco Saverio Nitti; it ended with a government reshuffle on 18 January itself. Orlando missed the meetings of the Council of Ten from 13 to 20 January and returned to it on 21 January.

The defeated were not invited. The conference was an assembly of the victors, who were first to agree terms among themselves and only then present them to their enemies. At first it was imagined that these would be preliminary terms, to be followed by a proper peace congress with the Germans taking part. That did not happen. The German delegation was summoned to Versailles only at the end of April, and on 7 May it was handed the finished text of the treaty, on which it could submit only written observations. In Germany this gave rise to the conviction that the peace was an imposed diktat.

Russia was not at the table at all. The great powers did not recognise the Bolsheviks, and the “White” governments of Admiral Alexander Kolchak and General Anton Denikin were represented unofficially in Paris by the former tsarist foreign minister Sergei Sazonov. Lloyd George warned the Council of Ten that the Bolsheviks were stronger than they had been a few months earlier and that none of the Western states would send a million soldiers to Russia to overthrow them. On 22 January the Council called on all the parties fighting in Russia to agree a ceasefire and hold talks on the Princes’ Islands near Constantinople. The Whites refused, the Bolsheviks gave an evasive answer, and nothing came of the initiative. The map of eastern Europe was drawn in Paris without the state that before the war had ruled a large part of it.

The first weeks

On 25 January the second plenary session decided that the League of Nations would be an integral part of the peace treaty and set up commissions: on the League Covenant, chaired by Wilson, and on responsibility for the war, reparations, labour legislation, and ports, waterways and railways. In time there were more than fifty commissions. The smaller states soon realised that the plenary sessions merely rubber-stamped decisions taken elsewhere. Wilson, despite French misgivings, achieved his aim. On 14 February he presented the draft Covenant of the League of Nations to a plenary session, and the following day he sailed home for several weeks. Earlier, on 13 February, the Japanese had tabled an amendment on racial equality in the League commission. On 19 February an anarchist shot Clemenceau, but the prime minister was back at work within a few days.

When Wilson and Lloyd George returned to Paris in mid-March, the Council of Ten proved too large and too prone to leaks. From 24 March the most important questions were settled in the privacy of their studies by the “Big Four”: Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Orlando. Japan was not part of this circle. The foreign ministers met separately as the Council of Five. In April came the sharpest crises: the Italians walked out of the conference when Wilson rejected their claims on the Adriatic, and the Japanese threatened to leave if they did not get Shandong. They got it.

The long shadow of Paris

The Paris conference prepared five treaties: the Treaty of Versailles with Germany (28 June 1919), the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria (10 September 1919), the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria (27 November 1919), the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary (4 June 1920) and the Treaty of Sèvres with Turkey (10 August 1920). The last was never implemented, because the Turks under Mustafa Kemal overturned it on the battlefield and in 1923 won a new treaty at Lausanne. Formally the conference ended in January 1920, when the League of Nations began its work after the Treaty of Versailles came into force. The United States, whose president had created the League, never joined it, because the American Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles.

Poincaré’s words about a peace of justice met with widespread disillusionment in the defeated countries. The Germans, who had asked for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points, felt that the principle of self-determination had been applied wherever it could harm them and ignored wherever it could help them: the Austrians were forbidden to unite with Germany, and the Sudeten Germans were included in Czechoslovakia. The exclusion of the defeated from the negotiations, followed by the presentation of a finished text, became the basis of the legend of the “Versailles diktat”. Revision of the treaty was the goal of every government of the Weimar Republic, and Adolf Hitler built his political career on the struggle against it. His demands of the 1930s – rearmament, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, Danzig – were one blow after another against the Paris settlement, and the Western powers, themselves unsure of its fairness, gave way to him for a long time. In Hungary revisionism born of the Treaty of Trianon pushed the country into alliance with Germany, and the same happened in Bulgaria.

Some of the victors were disappointed too. Italian nationalists spoke of a “mutilated victory”, which opened the road to power for Benito Mussolini. In Japan the rejection of the racial equality principle was remembered as proof that the West did not treat the Japanese as equals, while the award of Shandong to Japan sparked the patriotic May Fourth Movement in China. Japan, still a partner of the Western powers in Paris, began its conquest of Manchuria twelve years later and left the League of Nations in 1933. The Soviet Union, absent from Paris, regarded the whole Versailles order as the work of powers hostile to it, and in 1922 at Rapallo it came to terms with Germany, the system’s other outcast.

Poland came away from Paris with access to the sea and most of Greater Poland and Pomerania, but Gdańsk became the Free City of Danzig, and plebiscites were to decide Upper Silesia, Warmia and Masuria. The Poles had to win their eastern border by themselves. The Paris compromise over Danzig and the “Corridor” lasted twenty years. In 1939 it was the demand that Danzig be handed over and for an extraterritorial road across Pomerania that gave Hitler his pretext for the war with which the Second World War began.