Paris 1919

Detailed and a lot of information, but I thought it needed a conclusion with the impact that those decisions that were made in 1918 have had subsequenty.

This was a fast transaction and the book was in great shape.I recommend this vender to shppers and would use again without reservation.

A brilliant and entertaining account of the Peace Conference, the main actors, and the issues. Hard to put down. The companion book, the Road to War is just as good.

extraordinary book, a revelation in many ways, worth every bit of time and money

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"Peacemakers" by the Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan describes the six months of negotiations that took place in Paris. She does so mainly from the perspective of the main actors involved. The "Big Four" David Lloyd George (Britain), Vittorio Orlando (Italy), Georges Clemenceau (France), and last but not least Woodrow Wilson (United States) met informally 145 times and made all the major decisions, which in turn were ratified by the others.The book is based on thorough research and painstaking archival work, yet is lively and entertaining to read. As a great-granddaughter of Lloyd George, she tends to favour her famous ancestor to some degree but admits that his knowledge had great gaps (her geography is sometimes a bit fuzzy as well).However, I strongly oppose the validity of her conclusion that the conditions imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles would not have prevented the rise of Adolf Hitler. It is true, in hindsight the terms of the 1919 Peace Treaty do not appear that harsh. But she completely ignores the psychological impact of (some of) these on public opinion in Germany. Especially, article 231, often known as the War Guilt Clause, became a major theme of Adolf Hitler's political career. His struggle against the "Shame of Versailles" and for the rebuilding of German military power, the recovery of the lost eastern provinces, and last but not least the restoration of German pride fostered his rise to power.The Congress of Vienna in 1815 ended the Napoleonic Wars in a way that was generally acceptable to all the major powers in Europe, even the defeated France. It established a general peace on the continent for some 50 or - if you will - some 100 years. In 1919 there were no negotiations with the defeated nations - they were only allowed to comment on the terms the victors had agreed on. After the Treaty of Versailles Marshal Ferdinand Foch said "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years". And so it came to pass: on September 1st, 1939 the world witnessed the beginnings of yet another World War that reached near apocalyptic levels.

Margaret Macmillans "Peacemakers" is the book I wished had been written when I was a student (or as I covered the Peace Treaties year after year with my examination students beginning their exam courses). It is valuable on two levels. Firstly there is the obvious: a study of the drafting and setting up of the Peace treaties that ended the First World War. Macmillan writes in a clear readable manner, portraying the key participants, Wilson, Clemenceau & Lloyd George as very human characters, grappling with enormous issues but also showing up their flaws. Wilson for example, spending too much time on the creation of the League and failing to focus on the inconsistencies of Versailles re his 14 Points (especially concerning the German minorities left in Poland & Czechoslovakia). Equally his failure to see the need for US all party support dooms the settlement to US rejection.The book also shows clearly the emergence of the Anglo-Saxon alliance that is to develop as the 20th century progressed. Most of all it presents the three as facing a novel situation: no real precedents; the sudden German collapse presented no time to prepare for the peace; the pressure of public opinion limited the freedom of action and forced some decisions the three knew would cause future problems. Additionally they were hemmed in by a desire to prevent the further growth of a feared new ideology adopted by their earlier ally - Bolshevism. It is clear the ending of World War 2 was to be very different, much as a consequence of these 1919 issues: no big postwar conference, no deputations from smaller nations. Rather 1945 produced a peace that the Great Powers could realistically enforce on their own, and in their own interests.But perhaps the real value of the book is on another level. It is an excellent primer for the 20th century. Coverage is gloabal as Macmillan goes into detail about the creation and future problems not just of eastern & central Europe but also the Far and Middle East. For Example Japan's concerns over the inclusion of a League principle to guarantee racial equality reveal the depth of unease the west (and especially the white Dominions) had in dealing with a newly industrialised & strong Japan. There is also a clear explanation of the role the Great War played in the rise of an expansionist Japan in China which is not always dealt with in western textbooks.My only reservation is that perhaps like the Peacemakers Macmillan may have ignored the Germans. The full footnotes, bibliography and listing of unpublished sources lack any in German indicating a reliance only on what has appeared in English. Nonetheless, this is a key resource for those beginning courses on 20th century history, making clear the origin of what become the dominant problems and concerns that mark out the century's progression, or in many cases, regression.

Peacemakers is one of my favourite books. Magnificently written and researched, with quirky detail of the role players, mingled with sly humour makes almost every page a jewel. She emphasize the human characters in the making of history and small acts that have unforeseen, often huge, consequences. MacMillan knows the reader have a long, 100 year view since those events and provide that seemingly minor detail you were craving for, that is so easily left out. Great insight that set me off in directions I wouldn't normally have looked into. It is the second time I've read the book, and I'll do so again in the future. An exceptional, rare history book.

On the 28th of June 1919, the victors and vanquished of “the war to end all wars” gathered in Paris to sign the treaty that brought the Great War officially to an end – the Treaty of Versailles. Twenty years later, the world would be plunged into another devastating war. The generally accepted view is that the harsh terms meted out to Germany in the Treaty contributed to its economic collapse, creating the conditions in which Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, and thus were a major contributory cause of the Second World War. In this book, Margaret MacMillan looks in depth at how the Treaty was formulated and argues that, flawed though some of its terms were, the peacemakers did as well as they could in fairly impossible circumstances. She goes further, arguing that the reparations demanded from Germany were not as punitive as previous historians have suggested, and can’t be seen as having led directly to WW2.I’ll start by saying MacMillan failed to convince me of the latter, but mainly because I felt her argument was based on something of a false premise. In fact, I felt she over-emphasised the importance that history has given to the reparations element of the Treaty, thus enabling her to knock down an argument that few people would make in quite such black and white terms, except as a convenient shorthand. Saying that the reparations in the Treaty of Versailles caused WW2 seems to me the equivalent of saying that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused WW1. It’s true, but hardly the whole truth.In fact, though, her argument is only a tiny part of the book, crammed into a few pages at the end. The bulk of the book is a detailed look at the negotiations that led up to the Treaty and, like the war itself, ranges far beyond western Europe in scope. Macmillan first introduces us to the main peacemakers – the heads of government of the Allies. She sketches their characters and explains their motivations as they sat round the table – Wilson of the USA and his desire for a League of Nations, Lloyd George trying to defend and expand Britain’s empire, Clemenceau of France, after repeated Franco-German wars desperate to take this opportunity to crush Germany so it couldn’t represent a future threat, and Italy’s Orlando, out for a land grab of the other side of the Adriatic.MacMillan then takes us around the world, nation by nation, explaining how and why the peacemakers decided to carve them up and reshape them in the way they did. Some of their motivations were altruistic, to protect minority ethnic populations within nations and to give (some) peoples the right to self-determination. Some were designed to build a bulwark between western Europe and the newly revolutionary Russia. Some were simply a matter of expedience – the art of the possible. And some were frankly down to national greed and expansionism. Many of the decisions they made are still reverberating today, such as the uneasy amalgamation of different ethnicities and religions crammed together and called Iraq, or the decision to create a Zionist homeland for the Jews in land belonging to the Palestinians. The dismissive treatment of Arabs and Asians, and non-white people generally, isn’t unexpected but it’s still breath-taking in its arrogance, and we still pay the price for it every day. That’s not to say that the peacemakers could have somehow waved a magic wand and made all these problems disappear, and to that extent I agree with MacMillan. Even at the time, though, many warning voices were raised but ignored.MacMillan writes well and clearly, and spices the dry facts up with anecdotes that are revealing about the various personalities involved in the process. I’m afraid I have to admit shamefacedly to being far more interested in the major western powers than in all the little nations in the Balkans and the splintering Ottoman empire, so I found some chapters considerably more interesting than others, but that’s down to my biased worldview rather than MacMillan’s writing. While I found it tedious to learn all about these amalgamated countries which were created after WW1 only to disintegrate again post-WW2, I found that many of the sections gave a great deal of insight into the origins of some of our on-going problems today – Syria, Palestine, Iraq, even the background to the philosophical reasoning behind the rise of ISIS, although this book was published in 2001 before that became a thing. Closer to home, it also explains a lot about what happened in western Europe over the next couple of decades, and in the US and the Far East, too, to a degree. Perhaps the scope is a little wide, so that some parts, such as Japan and China, felt rather shallow and rushed, but that in itself gives some idea of the immense complexity the peacemakers were forced to deal with in a short space of time.Overall, then, although I found it hard going in places and found myself unconvinced by MacMillan’s attempt to absolve the Treaty from its role in contributing to WW2, I learned enough to make it well worth the time spent reading it. Sometimes, though, I think historians shouldn’t work quite so hard at finding a “revisionist” angle...

Magnum Opus on the phenomenally complex negotiations that took place in Paris in the first six months of 1919. This 500 page book takes some time, but it is worth it. Margaret McMillan writes very well indeed. She credibly points out the how foolish the many know-it-alls (such as the insufferable Keynes) were, when they used hindsight to blame the 'Big Four' and the series of treaties (notably Versailles but also Trianon, Sevres, Saint-Germain, and so on) coming out of the Paris Peace Conference for everything that has gone wrong ever since.In reality, the 'Big Four' were divided amongst themselves, and their power was limited with 3 out of 4 'victorious' countries being nearly bankrupt, with 100s of 1000s of troops demobilized each month, and with each of them being responsible to a critical electorate. The task before them was superhuman (having to fix Europe and the near East after having been completely shaken up), as well as intrinsically impossible: punishing the vanquished (but without harming them too much or else they could turn Bolshevik), creating stable, ethnically homogenous nation stages (but without ethnic cleansing, as happened on a massive scale after the next war), rewarding the victors with fancy new colonies (but without endorsing colonialism since the Americans found colonialism intolerable - except of course where it suited them, in Cuba and the Philippines).All in all, this is a very well balanced, thoughtful and interesting book about one of the most dynamic periods in history. As an unexpected bonus, the story is not limited to Europe alone but also very much includes the Middle East and even China and Japan.

Margaret MacMillan, as her excellent volume on the outbreak of the First World War did, has written another excellent book on a complex subject. She outlines all the vanity, machinations, special agendas and passions that went into the formulation of the Treaty of Versailles. It is usually considered a complete mess and one of the causes of the Second World War. Margaret MacMillan is more benign in her judgments, pointing out that the Treaty had little to do with Hitler's final agenda, although it was a good excuse, and that the task that the peacemakers had set themselves was virtually impossible to fulfill with all the ragged loose ends of ethnic identities and border lines that the dissolution of the old Empires had left. Margaret MacMillan has given an excellent summary that allows us to judge for ourselves.

pretty heavy going, took me a long time to wade through it - but that is the nature of the beast. this is history at its best - unassuming, non-judgmental, thorough, entirely credible, impeccably researched. alongside the bookshop shelves laden with strident volumes glorifying war or at least revelling in its horrors, there should be a near-empty one to make the point that hardly anybody writes about or is interested in PEACE. yet at every step Macmillan shows us how the even greater horrors of WW2 etc were set inexorably in train here in Paris 1919.if I had one BookFest question, it would be 'how did you decide in which order to go round all the countries whose futures had to be settled?' - as the process was broadly simultaneous; the book dots about rather randomly, yet still coheres.one slight qualm crept over me - it didn't seem nearly as revisionist as billed, except for an unusual tenderness towards Lloyd George, who was always more operator than statesman, and who must take a fair share of the blame for the avoidable errors. it turns out Macmillan is an undeclared descendant of his.ps. if you've enjoyed this, try Peacemaking 1919 by Harold Nicolson - a young diplomat who was there, and whom she often cites. febrile stuff.

Any student of WW1 history will have his/her knowledge of this era increased tenfold by what Margaret MacMillan has written. Versailles tried to achieve too much and MacMillan tells you exactly why it did not have the desired effect. There is only one thing I would add to this magnificent tome and that is the Allies did not succeed because they were not as ready to commit to peace as they were to war from 1914 onwards. Versailles was therefore an extension of the armistice not a peace treaty. From a political standpoint it spells out the reasons why the European Union in its existing format had to be formed and the dangers of overt nationalism.