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Paris 1919 Paperback – June 13, 2019

by Margaret MacMillan (Author)

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Previously published as Peacemakers

Between January and July 1919, after the war to end all wars, men and women from all over the world converged on Paris for the Peace Conference. At its heart were the leaders of the three great powers - Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Kings, prime ministers and foreign ministers with their crowds of advisers rubbed shoulders with journalists and lobbyists for a hundred causes - from Armenian independence to women's rights. Everyone had business in Paris that year - T.E. Lawrence, Queen Marie of Romania, Maynard Keynes, Ho Chi Minh. There had never been anything like it before, and there never has been since.

For six extraordinary months the city was effectively the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China and dismissed the Arabs, struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews.

The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; failed above all to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. They tried to be evenhanded, but their goals - to make defeated countries pay without destroying them, to satisfy impossible nationalist dreams, to prevent the spread of Bolshevism and to establish a world order based on democracy and reason - could not be achieved by diplomacy. Paris 1919 (originally published as Peacemakers) offers a prismatic view of the moment when much of the modern world was first sketched out.

Print length

592 pages
Language

English
Publisher

John Murray
Publication date

June 13, 2019
Dimensions

5.08 x 1.61 x 7.83 inches
ISBN-10

1529325269
ISBN-13

978-1529325263
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ John Murray (June 13, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 592 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1529325269
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1529325263
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 1.61 x 7.83 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #788,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #567 in International Diplomacy (Books)
- #1,124 in World War I History (Books)
- #7,326 in World War II History (Books)

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283 ratings

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Margaret MacMillan

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Margaret MacMillan was the Warden of St Antony’s College and a Professor of International History at the University of Oxford from 2007-17. Her books include Women of the Raj (1988, 2007); Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (2001) for which she was the first woman to win the Samuel Johnson Prize; Nixon in China: Six Days that Changed the World; The Uses and Abuses of History (2008); and Extraordinary Canadians: Stephen Leacock (2009). Her most recent book is The War that Ended Peace. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, University of Toronto and of Lady Margaret Hall, St Antonys College and St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, and is an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. She sits on he editorial boards of International History, the International Journal and First World War Studies. She is a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum and of the Central European University.

She has several honorary degrees including from the King's College, the Royal Military College, Ryerson, Western Ontario, Calgary, Memorial, and the American University of Paris. In 2006 Professor MacMillan was invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2016 became a Companion. She became a Companion of Honour in 2018.

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Dennis Rutzou

Very good but needs patience to get through.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 1, 2014

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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.

One person found this helpful

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Piper

Fast Transaction!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 7, 2014

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

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 8, 2017

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

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Paul Willis

Excellent account of the Peace Conference. Extremely readable.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 13, 2015

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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.

3 people found this helpful

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VV

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 10, 2014

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Fast delivery. Product as described. Thank you.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 22, 2008

A superb and very readable account of the policies and personalities of those who concocted the peace settlement at the end of the First World War. The general story will be known to most who have an interest in the period, but here we have details that will be known to only a few. The pen portraits of Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau are excellent and flesh out the picture that many readers will already have of them, but so are those of participants the names of whom figure in few text-books, like Billy Hughes, the coarse prime minister of Australia, or Prince Saionji and Baron Makino of the Japanese delegation, to mention just a few. And there is a wonderful set piece near the end about the closing scenes at Versailles.

The negotiations and the differences between the peace makers are set out in lucid detail, together with the nicely ironic comment, often as asides in brackets. The author pilots us skilfully through the complications of the Balkans, and only the treatment of the admittedly tortuous developments in Syria and Mesopotamia (Iraq) are a little on the stodgy side. There are model succinct summaries of the past history of the areas under discussion, and equally succinct ones of what happened to them after the peace treaties, right up to the present day.

As at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, there is constant mistrust among the peace makers: France did not want a strong Italy; Britain (looking back to the rivalry before the Entente of 1904) distrusted France; Italy constantly tried to thwart the new Yugoslavia and was in competition with Greece. It should be no surprise to any student of politics that double standards were constantly in evidence: statesmen who had got what they wanted described the demands of others as `greedy' (except, unfortunately, for Lloyd George who was bewitched by Venizelos of Greece, possibly the greediest of the lot). There was the sordid haggling over the allocation of reparation payments from Germany, with contempt being shown to little Belgium's claim for a fair share of them. The high-minded and high-handed Wilson simply overruled the majority vote in one of the commissions that the Covenant of the League should include a racial equality clause proposed by the Japanese. He then compensated the Japanese with another betrayal of his own principles by accepting the Japanese claim on Chinese Shantung.

Macmillan is particularly illuminating on the Japanese. They were initially included in the Supreme Council which made all the decisions, but were then simply dropped. The service chiefs in Britain and the United States were already contemplating that one day they would have to go to war with Japan - not altogether surprising, since Japan was clearly already set on expansion.

But the Supreme Council often gave only cursory attention to areas outside of Europe, and did not listen carefully to what experts could tell them. This accounts to a large extent to the shambles they made in the Middle East. The consequences, as far as the Arabs were concerned, took some time to show themselves; but the stupidity of the peace makers' dealings with Turkey proper were quickly exposed by the success of Kemal Ataturk, who swiftly destroyed the Treaty of Sèvres which had been imposed on the Sultan.

Only Clemenceau wanted the League of Nations to have `teeth': he saw it first and foremost as an organization to prevent future German aggression. The other members of the Supreme Council were not prepared to sacrifice any of their sovereignty; and even President Wilson, for whom the League was of greater importance than anything else, knew that Congress would never stand for giving the League real power and did not press for it.

Macmillan concludes that Germany was actually better placed after the Versailles Settlement than it had been in 1914: Poland was now a barrier against Russia, and in the South East there were only small states instead of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is presumably what Andrew Roberts had in mind when he commended the book as `splendidly revisionist and daringly politically incorrect'. Splendid though this book is, I can see only one other sentence, on p. 476, that would merit that description, and it is one of only two sentences in the book with which I disagree: if you read article 231, you can hardly say, as she does, that this has been inaccurately described as `the war guilt clause'.

My other disagreement is that the Sykes-Picot Agreement had not promised Palestine to the French (p.427): only the Upper Galilee. The rest was to be under joint British-French-Russian protection.

I cannot fully agree with the author's conclusion, which might perhaps be called revisionist. So many parts of the Peace Settlement left time-bombs, many of which detonated in the Nazi period and some of which (Kosovo, Iraq, Israel-Palestine) are still detonating today. Some of the advice which the peace makers received, but ignored, warned them of the dangers. But Macmillan thinks that the main responsibility for allowing them to detonate lies with the decisions taken or not taken by the next generation, not with the peace makers: `They tried, even cynical old Clemenceau, to build a better order. They could not foresee the future and they certainly could not control it. That was up to their successors.'

These very few criticisms aside, I have nothing but praise for this fine achievement.

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Spirensis

An armistice for twenty years.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 17, 2017

"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.

7 people found this helpful

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FictionFan

Unintended consequences...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 1, 2019

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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...

15 people found this helpful

M. Baerends

Versailles

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 25, 2019

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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.

8 people found this helpful

M. McClure

Eccellent Survey of Versailles Treaty

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 26, 2017

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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.

7 people found this helpful

david jarman

The Peace to end all hope of peace

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 26, 2014

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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.

8 people found this helpful

R Helen

Worth a read!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 15, 2013

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This book is an excellent resource for those studying early twentieth century history. It covers all the major topics of the Treaty of Versailles in great detail, and the personalities, as well. MacMillan's main idea seems to be that the Treaty of Versailles, despite how history has remembered it until now, was not the main thrust behind World War Two. It's flaws, of which there were many, did not inevitably lead to Hitler's rise; rather it was the twenty years of decision-making and action in between the two wars that bare the true responsibility. Yes, there were many problems in the treaty, but it was how the main players chose to respond to that reality which determined the course of history. The peacemakers were dealing with a complex dynamic of falling empires, emerging cultures and nationalities, and political, social, and cultural upheaval. They tried valiantly to solve all those problems and come up with a working solution in a new world order of negotiation and self-determination.
Rather then denigrate them, as historians have done for the past 80 years, they should be seen as they were; strong leaders who, despite their own biases and political constituencies, tried to change the world for the better. They weren't perfect; many times their own needs came first; but we should see them as champions of a new era of diplomacy, as far as they were able.

In that sense, MacMillan has presented us a revisionist history of the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath. Perhaps being a great granddaughter of David Lloyd George may have been a driving principal behind her attempt to shine a new and more positive light on the "Big Four" and their proceedings in Paris. I think she's done a noble job, though.

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