Seventy delegates from twenty-seven nations attended the opening of the Paris Peace Conference at the Versailles Palace on January 18, 1919. The delegates met with great expectations. A young British diplomat later wrote that the victors “were journeying to Paris . . . to found a new order in Europe. We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace.”1

This idealism was strengthened by President Wilson’s January 1918 peace proposal, the Fourteen Points. Wilson stressed national self-determination and the rights of small countries and called for the creation of a League of Nations, a permanent international organization designed to protect member states from aggression and avert future wars.

The real powers at the conference were the United States, Great Britain, and France. Germany and Russia were excluded, and Italy’s role was limited. Almost immediately the three Allies began to quarrel. President Wilson insisted that the first order of business be the League of Nations. Wilson had his way, although Prime Ministers Lloyd George of Great Britain and, especially, Georges Clemenceau of France were unenthusiastic. They were primarily concerned with punishing Germany.

The “Big Three” were soon in a stalemate over Germany’s fate. Although personally inclined to make a somewhat moderate peace with Germany, Lloyd George felt pressured for a victory worthy of the sacrifices of total war. Clemenceau also wanted revenge and lasting security for France, which, he believed, required the creation of a buffer state between France and Germany, Germany’s permanent demilitarization, and vast German reparations. Wilson, supported by Lloyd George, would hear none of this.

In the end, Clemenceau agreed to a compromise. He gave up the French demand for a Rhineland buffer state in return for a formal defensive alliance with the United States and Great Britain. Both Wilson and Lloyd George also promised their countries would come to France’s aid if it was attacked.

The Treaty of Versailles was the first step toward re-establishing international order, though it was an order that favored the victorious Allies. Germany’s colonies were given to France, Britain, and Japan as League of Nations mandates. Germany’s territorial losses within Europe were minor: Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, and parts of Germany were ceded to the new Polish state (see Map 28.4). The treaty limited Germany’s army to one hundred thousand men and allowed no new military fortifications in the Rhineland.

More harshly, the Allies declared that Germany (with Austria) was responsible for the war and therefore had to pay reparations equal to all civilian damages caused by the war. The actual reparations figure was not set, however, leaving open the possibility that it might be set at a reasonable level in the future when tempers had cooled.

Other agreements reached in Paris also had far-reaching consequences for the course of the twentieth century. In eastern Europe, Poland regained its independence (see Map 19.1), and the independent states of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and a larger Romania were created out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (see Map 28.4). A greatly expanded Serbian monarchy united Slavs in the western Balkans and took the name Yugoslavia.

Promises of independence made to Arab leaders were largely brushed aside, and Britain and France extended their power in the Middle East, taking advantage of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. As League of Nations mandates, the French received Lebanon and Syria, and Britain took Iraq and Palestine. Palestine was to include a Jewish national homeland first promised by Britain in 1917 in the Balfour Declaration (see “The Arab Revolt” in Chapter 29). These Allied acquisitions, although officially League of Nations mandates, were one of the most imperialistic elements of the peace settlement. Another was mandating Germany’s holdings in China to Japan (see “The Rise of Nationalist China” in Chapter 29). Germany’s African colonies were mandated to Great Britain, France, South Africa, and Belgium. The mandates system left colonial peoples in the Middle East, Asia (see Chapter 29), and Africa bitterly disappointed and demonstrated that the age of Western and Eastern imperialism lived on.