The Treaty ended the
state of war between
Germany and the
Allied Powers. It was signed 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles .
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In January 1919, John Maynard Keynes traveled to the Paris Peace Conference as the chief representative of the British Treasury. The brilliant 35-year-old economist had previously won acclaim for his work with the Indian currency and his management of British finances during the war. In Paris, he sat on an economic council and advised British Prime Minister
David Lloyd George, but the important peacemaking decisions were out of his hands, and President Wilson, Prime Minister Lloyd George, and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau wielded the real authority. Germany had no role in the negotiations deciding its fate, and lesser Allied powers had little responsibility in the drafting of the final treaty.
It soon became apparent that the treaty would bear only a faint resemblance to the Fourteen Points that had been proposed by Wilson and embraced by the Germans. Wilson, a great idealist, had few negotiating skills, and he soon buckled under the pressure of Clemenceau, who hoped to punish Germany as severely as it had punished France in the Treaty of Frankfurt that ended the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Lloyd George took the middle ground between the two men, but he backed the French plan to force Germany to pay reparations for damages inflicted on Allied civilians and their property. Since the treaty officially held Germany responsible for the outbreak of World War I (in reality it was only partially responsible), the Allies would not have to pay reparations for damages they inflicted on German civilians....
Keynes, horrified by the terms of the emerging treaty, presented a plan to the Allied leaders in which the German government be given a substantial loan, thus allowing it to buy food and materials while beginning reparations payments immediately. Lloyd George approved the “Keynes Plan,” but President Wilson turned it down because he feared it would not receive congressional approval. In a private letter to a friend, Keynes called the idealistic American president “the greatest fraud on earth.” On June 5, 1919, Keynes wrote a note to Lloyd George informing the prime minister that he was resigning his post in protest of the
impending “devastation of Europe.”...
At Smuts’ urging, Keynes began work on
The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It was published in December 1919 and was widely read. In the book, Keynes made a grim prophecy that would have particular relevance to the next generation of Europeans:
“If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.”https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/keynes-predicts-economic-chaos .
Dishonorable mention ...
“It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone’s malignity. When prices rise, it is due to the profiteer; when wages fall, it is due to the capitalist. Why the capitalist is ineffective when wages rise, and the profiteer when prices fall, the man in the street does not inquire. Nor does he notice that wages and prices rise and fall together. If he is a capitalist, he wants wages to fall and prices to rise; if he is a wage earner, he wants the opposite. When a currency expert tries to explain that profiteers and trade unions and ordinary employers have very little to do with the matter, he irritates everybody, like the man who threw doubt on German atrocities. (In World War I) We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet taking mankind in mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold someone to obloquy.
If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.”
― Bertrand Russell,
Sceptical Essays
1925-10-5_16 Locarno Treaties ..
