The
Treaty of Versailles (
Traité de Versailles) was the most important of the
peace treaties that brought
WW1 to an end. The Treaty ended the
state of war between
Germany and the
Allied Powers. It was signed on
28 June 1919 in
Versailles, exactly five years after the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which had directly led to the war. The other
Central Powers on the German side signed separate treaties. Although the
armistice, signed on
11 November 1918, ended the actual fighting, it took
six months of Allied negotiations at the
Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. The treaty was registered by the Secretariat of the
League of Nations on 21 October 1919.
Of the many provisions in the treaty, one of the most important and controversial
required "Germany [to] accept the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage" during the war (the other members of the Central Powers signed treaties containing similar articles). This article,
Article 231, later became known as the
War Guilt clause. The treaty required Germany to disarm, make ample territorial concessions, and pay
reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. In 1921 the total cost of these reparations was assessed at
132 billion marks (then $31.4 billion or £6.6 billion, roughly equivalent to US$442 billion or
UK£284 billion in 2019). At the time economists, notably
John Maynard Keynes (a British delegate to the Paris Peace Conference), predicted that the treaty was too harsh—a "
Carthaginian peace"—and said the reparations figure was excessive and counter-productive, views that, since then, have been the subject of ongoing debate by historians and economists. On the other hand, prominent figures on the Allied side, such as French
Marshal Ferdinand Foch, criticized the treaty for treating Germany too leniently.
The result of these competing and sometimes conflicting goals among the victors was a
compromise that left no one satisfied, and, in particular,
Germany was neither pacified nor conciliated, nor was it permanently weakened. The problems that arose from the treaty would lead to the
Locarno Treaties, which improved relations between Germany and the other European powers, and the re-negotiation of the reparation system resulting in the
Dawes Plan, the
Young Plan, and the indefinite postponement of reparations at the
Lausanne Conference of 1932.
Although it is often referred to as the "Versailles Conference", only the actual signing of the treaty took place at the historic palace.
Most of the negotiations were in Paris, with the "Big Four" meetings taking place generally at the
Quai d'Orsay.
