Treaty of Versailles

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The Treaty of Versailles

This postwar map of Europe in 1919 shows in green, the various new countries that were created and their borders.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. After over four years of war, an armistice was finally reached on November 11, 1918. The United States entry into the war in April 1917 helped save the day for the Allies. American money, machines, and troops provided a morale boost for Britain and France, while sealing the fate of an exhausted Germany.

The end of the war left the combatants to decide what a postwar Europe would look like. Delegates from around the world met in Paris to reach a final settlement. Given the great destruction caused by the conflict, many arrived in terribly bitter moods.

In the impressive Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — once the seat of the kings of France — the peace terms of WWI were signed on June 28, 1919.

The English wanted revenge. David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, wanted the Germans to pay for the war and promised to "squeeze the orange until the pips squeak" at the conference. The French, too, were furious, especially French foreign minister Georges Clemenceau, nicknamed "the Tiger.” Germany had run roughshod over its lands, destroying farms and industries. Nearly half its young men had been killed or wounded. Now it was payback time, and time to make sure that Germany could not make war again. Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States, wanted "peace without victory," but could not convince the rest of the Allies to show mercy toward the defeated Germans. The compromise in Paris was a harsh peace that satisfied no one.

The old monarchies had fallen. Austria-Hungary was split into independent Austrian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovakian republics, while Serb leaders incorporated South Slavs into the new state of Yugoslavia. In Germany, moderate socialists declared Germany a republic on November 9. The new German leaders agreed to the Allied terms of surrender and on November 11 the Great War officially ended.

Lloyd George of Britain, Orlando of Italy, Clemenceau of France, and Wilson of United States all met in Paris in 1919 to discuss the Versailles Treaty.

The peace conference began in January 1919. Although twenty-seven nations were represented, Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy held the power. The conference dragged on for months as “the Big Three” debated the best ways and means of finalizing the peace and punishing Germany. In June 1919, they finally reached a settlement. The Peace of Paris comprised five separate treaties — one each with Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, and Turkey, which formed from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The most notable of the five was that which dealt with Germany — the Treaty of Versailles. Clemenceau wanted revenge, but he also wanted to protect his country from a highly industrialized and more populous Germany. Wilson was desperate to save the idea of a League of Nations, an international “Covenant” for resolving international crises. In return for Clemenceau's adoption of the League, Wilson agreed to impose severe penalties on the Germans in the Treaty of Versailles.

Most of the terms were deemed acceptable to the parties involved, though some French howled that the treaty was not harsh enough and some Americans cried that Wilson had sacrificed his ideals. In the end, the treaty divided Germany's colonial territories between Britain, France, and Japan, though they were to be managed as League of Nations “mandates.” France got the territory of Alsace-Lorraine, which it lost to Germany in 1871. To satisfy Clemenceau's demands, Germany was forced to limit its army to 100,000 and to demilitarize the Rhineland, which bordered Belgian and French territory. Germany also had to renounce the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. So far, so good.

The League of Nations, created to prevent such disastrous conflicts from ever happening again, broke ground for its assembly building in Geneva, a city in neutral Switzerland.

German negotiators were stunned to find that the treaty also contained a “war guilt clause,” which proclaimed Germany solely responsible for the war and thus solely responsible for paying reparations for it. The German people now owed an unspecified amount in reparations to the Allies — a blank check that would continually be cashed in the years to come. Germans had expected a compromise peace, in part because they had surrendered peacefully after Wilhelm's abdication. Faced with a British naval blockade that had caused widespread shortages, Germany's new leaders reluctantly signed the treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on June 28, 1919, five years to the day of Ferdinand's assassination.

Germany was indeed guilty of waging war. German militarists bore special responsibility for widening the war to further their goal of territorial expansion. But so too were the French, the British, the Austrians, and the Russians, all of whom had war aims in August 1914, as well as the will to pursue them. France wanted Alsace-Lorraine. Russia, Britain and France all wanted to prevent German commercial expansion. Austria wanted to expand southward. All of Europe was guilty, but Germany was forced to accept full blame.

And in the end, the Versailles Treaty created more problems than it solved. As French general Ferdinand Foch presciently observed: "This is not a peace but an armistice for twenty years."

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INVESTIGATION HOME

REPARATIONS:
Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France, pushed for the harsh treatment of Germany after the war. He predicted in his memoirs that France would again face serious trouble with Germany in 1940.

VERSAILLES:
Take a panoramic tour of the famous Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.

THE TREATY:
So steep was the monetary penalty contained within the Treaty of Versailles that Germany gave up trying to pay it after only one year.