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Margaret MacMillan

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Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World Paperback – January 1, 2003

by Margaret MacMillan (Author), Richard Holbrooke (Foreword), Casey Hampton (Designer)

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National Bestseller

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Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award
of the Council on Foreign Relations

Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end all wars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.

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January 1, 2003
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0375760520
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978-0375760525
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“The history of the 1919 Paris peace talks following World War I is a blueprint of the political and social upheavals bedeviling the planet now. . . . A wealth of colorful detail and a concentration on the strange characters many of these statesmen were keep [MacMillan’s] narrative lively.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“MacMillan’s book reminds us of the main lesson learned at such a high cost in Paris in 1919: Peace is not something that can be imposed at the conference table. It can grow only from the hearts of people.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Beautifully written, full of judgment and wisdom, Paris 1919 is a pleasure to read and vibrates with the passions of the early twentieth century and of ours.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“MacMillan is a superb writer who can bring history to life.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“For anyone interested in knowing how historic mistakes can morph into later historic problems, this brilliant book is a must-read.”
—Chicago Tribune

From the Inside Flap

National Bestseller

New York Times Editors? Choice

Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize

Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award
of the Council on Foreign Relations

Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

For six months in 1919, after the end of ?the war to end all wars,? the Big Three?President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau?met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities?Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them?born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.

From the Back Cover

National Bestseller
"New York Times Editors' Choice
Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize
Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award
of the Council on Foreign Relations
Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
For six months in 1919, after the end of "the war to end all wars," the Big Three--President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau--met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities--Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them--born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.

About the Author

Margaret MacMillan received her Ph.D. from Oxford University and is provost of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto. Her previous books include Women of the Raj and Canada and NATO. Published as Peacemakers in England, Paris 1919 was a bestseller chosen by Roy Jenkins as his favorite book of the year. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize and was a finalist for the Westminster Medal in Military Literature. MacMillan, the great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George, lives in Toronto.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Woodrow Wilson Comes to Europe

On december 4, 1918, the George Washington sailed out of New York with the American delegation to the Peace Conference on board. Guns fired salutes, crowds along the waterfront cheered, tugboats hooted and Army planes and dirigibles circled overhead. Robert Lansing, the American secretary of state, released carrier pigeons with messages to his relatives about his deep hope for a lasting peace. The ship, a former German passenger liner, slid out past the Statue of Liberty to the Atlantic, where an escort of destroyers and battleships stood by to accompany it and its cargo of heavy expectations to Europe.

On board were the best available experts, combed out of the universities and the government; crates of reference materials and special studies; the French and Italian ambassadors to the United States; and Woodrow Wilson. No other American president had ever gone to Europe while in office. His opponents accused him of breaking the Constitution; even his supporters felt he might be unwise. Would he lose his great moral authority by getting down to the hurly-burly of negotiations? Wilson¹s own view was clear: the making of the peace was as important as the winning of the war. He owed it to the peoples of Europe, who were crying out for a better world. He owed it to the American servicemen. "It is now my duty," he told a pensive Congress just before he left, "to play my full part in making good what they gave their life's blood to obtain." A British diplomat was more cynical; Wilson, he said, was drawn to Paris "as a debutante is entranced by the prospect of her first ball."

Wilson expected, he wrote to his great friend Edward House, who was already in Europe, that he would stay only to arrange the main outlines of the peace settlements. It was not likely that he would remain for the formal Peace Conference with the enemy. He was wrong. The preliminary conference turned, without anyone's intending it, into the final one, and Wilson stayed for most of the crucial six months between January and June 1919. The question of whether or not he should have gone to Paris, which exercised so many of his contemporaries, now seems unimportant. From Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta to Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton at Camp David, American presidents have sat down to draw borders and hammer out peace agreements. Wilson had set the conditions for the armistices which ended the Great War. Why should he not make the peace as well?

Although he had not started out in 1912 as a foreign policy president, circumstances and his own progressive political principles had drawn him outward. Like many of his compatriots, he had come to see the Great War as a struggle between the forces of democracy, however imperfectly represented by Britain and France, and those of reaction and militarism, represented all too well by Germany and Austria-Hungary. Germany's sack of Belgium, its unrestricted submarine warfare and its audacity in attempting to entice Mexico into waging war on the United States had pushed Wilson and American public opinion toward the Allies. When Russia had a democratic revolution in February 1917, one of the last reservations that the Allies included an autocracy vanished. Although he had campaigned in 1916 on a platform of keeping the country neutral, Wilson brought the United States into the war in April 1917. He was convinced that he was doing the right thing. This was important to the son of a Presbyterian minister, who shared his father's deep religious conviction, if not his calling.

Wilson was born in Virginia in 1856, just before the Civil War. Although he remained a Southerner in some ways all his life‹in his insistence on honor and his paternalistic attitudes toward women and blacks he also accepted the war's outcome. Abraham Lincoln was one of his great heroes, along with Edmund Burke and William Gladstone. The young Wilson was at once highly idealistic and intensely ambitious. After four very happy years at Princeton and an unhappy stint as a lawyer, he found his first career in teaching and writing. By 1890 he was back at Princeton, a star member of the faculty. In 1902 he became its president, supported virtually unanimously by the trustees, faculty and students.

In the next eight years Wilson transformed Princeton from a sleepy college for gentlemen into a great university. He reworked the curriculum, raised significant amounts of money and brought into the faculty the brightest and the best young men from across the country. By 1910, he was a national figure and the Democratic party in New Jersey, under the control of conservative bosses, invited him to run for governor. Wilson agreed, but insisted on running on a progressive platform of controlling big business and extending democracy. He swept the state and by 1911 "Wilson for President" clubs were springing up. He spoke for the dispossessed, the disenfranchised and all those who had been left behind by the rapid economic growth of the late nineteenth century. In 1912, at a long and hard-fought convention, Wilson got the Democratic nomination for president. That November, with the Republicans split by Teddy Roosevelt's decision to run as a progressive against William Howard Taft, Wilson was elected. In 1916, he was reelected, with an even greater share of the popular vote.

Wilson's career was a series of triumphs, but there were darker moments, both personal and political, fits of depression and sudden and baffling illnesses. Moreover, he had left behind him a trail of enemies, many of them former friends. "An ingrate and a liar," said a Democratic boss in New Jersey in a toast. Wilson never forgave those who disagreed with him. "He is a good hater," said his press officer and devoted admirer Ray Stannard Baker. He was also stubborn. As House said, with admiration: "Whenever a question is presented he keeps an absolutely open mind and welcomes all suggestion or advice which will lead to a correct decision. But he is receptive only during the period that he is weighing the question and preparing to make his decision. Once the decision is made it is final and there is an absolute end to all advice and suggestion. There is no moving him after that." What was admirable to some was a dangerous egotism to others. The French ambassador in Washington saw "a man who, had he lived a couple of centuries ago, would have been the greatest tyrant in the world, because he does not seem to have the slightest conception that he can ever be wrong."

This side of Wilson¹s character was in evidence when he chose his fellow commissioners‹or plenipotentiaries, as the chief delegates were known‹to the Peace Conference. He was himself one. House, "my alter ego," as he was fond of saying, was another. Reluctantly he selected Lansing, his secretary of state, as a third, mainly because it would have been awkward to leave him behind. Where Wilson had once rather admired Lansing's vast store of knowledge, his meticulous legal mind and his apparent readiness to take a back seat, by 1919 that early liking had turned to irritation and contempt. Lansing, it turned out, did have views, often strong ones which contradicted the president's. "He has," Wilson complained to House, who noted it down with delight, "no imagination, no constructive ability, and but little real ability of any kind." The fourth plenipotentiary, General Tasker Bliss, was already in France as the American military representative on the Supreme War Council. A thoughtful and intelligent man who loved to lie in bed with a hip flask reading Thucydides in the original Greek, he was also, many of the junior members of the American delegation believed, well past his prime. Since Wilson was to speak to him on only five occasions during the Peace Conference, perhaps that did not matter.

The president's final selection, Henry White, was a charming, affable retired diplomat, the high point of whose career had been well before the war. Mrs. Wilson was to find him useful in Paris on questions of etiquette.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks (January 1, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375760520
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375760525
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.05 x 1.31 x 9.17 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #173,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #29 in First Nations Canadian History
- #96 in WWI Biographies
- #197 in International Diplomacy (Books)

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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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Richard Holbrooke
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R. J. Marsella

How Good Intentions Collided With Real World Considerations To Shape the History Of the Last 100 Years

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2017

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Paris 1919 is a wide ranging and yet concisely written history of one of the seminal events of the 20th century. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War The leaders of the Allied nations, particularly the USA, Great Britain and France met to ostensibly put the pieces back together after the collapse of the Austria- Hungarian empire, the Ottoman Empire and Germany. The book includes a remarkable level of detailed anecdotal stories that illuminate the characters and interactions of the major personalities involved. Wilson, LLoyd George , Clemenceau and many others cross the stage in these pages as maps are redrawn, ethnic and tribal rivalries that had been dormant under the rule of now defeated empires are reawakened and a defeated Germany is chastised by the victors.
Incredibly well researched and written this is an entertaining and fascinating book that brings to light the immense political pressures and difficulties faced by the Allies who were negotiating the fate of the world. It makes it clear that while the intentions were good as evidenced by Wilson's 14 points ( included as an appendix) , real world considerations and political jousting created the need for compromises and decisions that ultimately had tragic consequences. The author concludes that history has simplified these complex factors into essentially a formula that blames the stringent terms of the Treaty Of Versailles on what was to follow in Germany and lead to the rise of Hitler ,and makes a sound case that the reality and circumstances were much more complicated. From the Middle East to Eastern Europe to Africa and Asia the horse trading and decisions made in these fateful days , so well described in these pages, have echoed down the decades and many of those decisions shape the world we still live in almost 100 years later.
Wilson's dream of a league of nations fairly constituted of nations of self -determined peoples seems naive in retrospect; a case of good intentions colliding with reality that had innumerable and still not fully realized long term implications.

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MJ

Too Lofty a Goal: MacMillan Sets the Record Straight

Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2016

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n addition to being a superb and very readable account of events that transpired in 1919 and their aftermath, Margaret MacMillan's "Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World" is a book with purpose. She sets out to debunk, I believe successfully, the long-embraced view that Germany was a victim of a vindictive peace. Without ignoring the political difficulties that the Western powers faced and the failure of their efforts, MacMillan places blame squarely where it belongs; at the feet of Adolf Hitler. Hitler's propaganda war made the fragile Treaty of Versailles an easy target for his own demagoguery.

MacMillan traces the theory of German victimization back to arguments first made by John Maynard Keynes at the time of the Paris peacemaking process. The Western powers, according to Keynes, placed such a crushing financial burden on Germany that the defeated state and its people were doomed to failure. Yet as MacMillan points out, Germany ended up paying a fraction of what had been required, and all payments were suspended as early as 1932. The Treaty of Versailles was never vigorously enforced, and Germany had more ability to wiggle out of obligations then has historically been espoused. But perhaps most significantly, the catastrophic intervening depression between the two wars set much of the world into an economic tailspin. Germany was no exception.

As a major explanation for what went wrong in 1919, MacMillan focuses on the rise of nationalism that was spreading around the world like wildfire. The Western powers struggled to draw borders in areas overflowing with nationalistic fervor that defied attempts to contain peoples and sentiments within neatly drawn lines. As if all this was not enough, the three major Western powers had to contend with the tatters of four major collapsed empires: Germany, Austria – Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.

The complexities of the task might well have relegated to failure any attempts to put Humpty Dumpty back together. Nationalism had been on the rise since the mid-19th century, and the outbreak of WWI only fueled its flames. The peacemakers were faced with the impossible task of trying to impose order on an irrational world that almost defied resolution.

MacMillan aptly describes the personal dynamics that complicated the peacemaking process. Woodrow Wilson brought his myopic brand of idealism from a largely isolationist United States. His was a country still on the rise with more limited power than it would have by the time it entered WWII. Wilson was often at odds with France's Georges Clemenceau who was vigorously defending a country that had already suffered a humiliating defeat to Germany some 50 years earlier. Clemenceau's realpolitik was comprehensible. Meantime, David Lloyd George (who was Macmillan's great-grandfather) struggled to hold together a British Empire on the wane. The three Western leaders were, indeed, an unusual trio with both overlapping, but woefully competing agendas.

MacMillian certainly acknowledges that the peacemaking process was severely flawed. From the beginning, Wilson's ill-defined 14 points, while well-intentioned, greatly complicated the task by fortifying countless nationalist groups clamoring for self-determination. The world was becoming almost hopelessly fractured by voices of competing claims to territory.

One of the major failures of the Paris peacemaking process was to forge a fair and more lasting resolution between China and the rising power of Japan. China, rightfully so, felt betrayed by the Western powers, and particularly by Wilson, when the formerly German-occupied Shantung region of China was ceded to Japan. And Japan was not much happier with the Western powers for their failure to recognize its principle of international racial equality, contributing to the rise of Japanese nationalism. Again, Wilson was viewed as the ultimate sell-out on this point.

MacMillan describes Paris to have been the "center of the world government" for the first six months of 1919. And indeed it was. In addition to the main players, it was populated with such colorful and disparate figures as T.E. Lawrence, doffed in Arabian robes, and Ho Chi Minh, at the time a dishwasher in a Parisian kitchen. MacMillan provides dimension into these and other characters swirling in and around the near hysteria of the negotiating process.

MacMillan writes eloquently about the French capital in 1919 as a city of culture, fashion, and intellectual thought. While the peace conference is the centerpiece of MacMillan's book, she does not ignore how the table of Paris is exquisitely set around it. In addition to presenting a comprehensive narrative of the events and forces propelling the world inexorably towards the second world conflagration of the twentieth century, MacMillan succeeds in bringing to life the dynamic personalities, and their respective entourages, who struggled in vain to forge a peace purportedly to end all wars.

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Penmachine

Men who tried to fix the world, but left it broken still

Reviewed in Canada on August 5, 2004

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This book demonstrates why I am in awe of historians. The scope of research and the way MacMillan pulls it together coherently are remarkable.
Political leaders were more honest about the warlike nature of nations a hundred years ago. Before the human and financial enormities of the Great War, leaders and citizens assumed that wars were what countries did. It was how they grew and gained influence. In Paris, MacMillan reveals, some wanted to change that. But they didn't.
Perhaps they couldn't have. My impression from the book is that, while Woodrow Wilson in particular wanted (at least in theory) an end to war, and an end to the old land-grabbing power-mongering that led to it, nearly everyone at the Paris Peace Conference (including Wilson himself) was looking out for their own countries' interests, even if those countries didn't exist yet. It took an even more horrible conflict 20 years later, as well as the Cold War, to bring peace to Europe, and even that dissolved in the Balkans and elsewhere in the 1990s.
MacMillan shows that the Peace Conference delegates tried very, very hard. Often they were working at cross-purposes, and the results were, in the end, almost total failure. But they did not know it at the time. Maybe we never do.

3 people found this helpful

Mark Kelly

A valuable addition to the scholarship of Versailles

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 21, 2019

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No one book is ever going to do justice to, or shine light on, all of the aspects that went into formulating the Treaty of Versailles, but this particular one throws a lot of light on the major actors who helped produce the treaty. It's a fascinating insight into the characters of those concerned, and well worth reading to inform the readers further. A work of real scholarship.

Bookworm

Availability of book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 17, 2019

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I have been after a copy in hardback for some time. I have tried reading the paper back version, but print is too small.

John Murray

Wonderful!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2018

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Brilliant history of the creation of the Versailles Peace with Germany. Highly recommended

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Magisterial stuff with a wonderful eye for the illuminating anecdote

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2016

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Magisterial stuff with a wonderful eye for the illuminating anecdote; even in the most obscure corners of the diplomatic world in 1919.

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