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Versailles: The Peace Terms That Made Another War Inevitable
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 ended the killing — but its punishing terms, broken promises, and the War Guilt Clause planted the seeds of a second catastrophe. This is how the peacemakers failed.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Can a peace treaty cause a war? That's not a rhetorical provocation.
The Paris Peace Conference opened in January nineteen nineteen. The dominant figures were three men: Woodrow Wilson of the United States, David Lloyd George of Britain, and Georges Clemenceau of France.
The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June twenty-eighth, nineteen nineteen, exactly five years after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, imposed conditions on Germany that were sweeping, punishing, and in several respects deeply destabilizing. Germany lost territory on multiple fronts.
Wilson had promised a peace based on his Fourteen Points. What he got was something considerably different.
In Germany, the treaty landed as a shock and a humiliation combined. The government had accepted the armistice partly on the basis of Wilson's Fourteen Points.
The Treaty of Versailles was the most prominent but not the only peace agreement to come out of the Paris conference. The old empires had been shattered, and the map of Europe and the Middle East had to be redrawn from scratch.
The Treaty of Versailles failed on the terms it set for itself. It didn't create a durable peace.
Four years of industrial warfare had killed an estimated twenty million people, military and civilian combined. Millions more had been wounded, disabled, or psychologically broken.
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