Even many of the people most deeply involved with the peace process recognized their shortcomings early on, in some cases before the text had even been drafted. The dozens of statesmen, diplomats, and advisers who assembled in Paris in 1919 have come in for heavy criticism for writing treaties that failed to give Europe a lasting peace. Still, it is the Treaty of Versailles for which the Paris Peace Conference will probably be best remembered, and most often damned. The Treaty of Sèvres in particular created the conditions for massive change in Turkey, Central Asia, and the Middle East. None of the other treaties bear such a heavy historical responsibility for the world they created or the conflicts that followed, although perhaps they should. The treaty and the conference are thus closely linked but not quite synonymous. Thus the conference had as much to do with post-war politics as perceptions of pre-war guilt.īut the centerpiece of the Paris Peace Conference was always the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after a teenaged Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, had assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. Hungary came out much worse than Austria did, largely to punish Hungarians for their postwar flirtation with a communist movement. These treaties meted out relatively lenient terms to Austria, especially given the Austrian elite’s central role in starting the war in 1914. Germain with Austria in September 1919 the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria in November 1919 and the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary in June 1920. The conference also produced the Treaty of St. The sultan had approved the treaty, but Kemal then led an army that deposed the sultan, threatened a renewal of war in the Middle East, and forced a true negotiation at Lausanne. Sèvres had partitioned Turkey, ceding much of its territory to Armenia, Greece, France, and Britain, with Italy receiving a large zone of influence in southern Anatolia. Lausanne was a renegotiation prompted by the failures of the one-sided Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920 but immediately rejected by Turkish forces loyal to the war hero Mustafa Kemal. It has also contributed to the image of the Paris Peace Conference as one motivated primarily by vengeance.Īlthough the senior statesmen stopped working personally on the conference in June 1919, the formal peace process did not really end until July 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed by France, Britain, Italy, Japan, Greece, and Romania with the new Republic of Turkey. Opening the Paris Peace Conference on such a historic anniversary served to remind the French of why, ostensibly, they had fought the war and who would pay for the damages this time. Those terms had included not just the loss of territory, but an occupation and a large financial indemnity, which the French paid ahead of schedule. Although the anger in France over these events had largely dissipated outside of right-wing circles by 1914, the First World War reawakened the memory of the harsh terms that Germany had imposed on France a half a century earlier. That event had occurred at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, which had resulted in the unification of Germany and the seizure by the new Germany of two formerly French provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. The Paris Peace Conference began on January 18, 1919, on the anniversary of the coronation of the German Emperor Wilhelm I in the Palace of Versailles in 1871. The process of peacemaking lasted longer than the First World War it endeavored to end. Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson speaks with the author, Michael Neiberg( Find more great reads on the Here & Now bookshelfīook Excerpt: 'The Treaty Of Versailles: A Concise History' A new book, " The Treaty Of Versailles: A Concise History," looks at how that treaty was assembled and examines its mixed legacy. The Treaty of Versailles was the most important agreement that came out of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which followed the end of World War I. (AP Photo) This article is more than 5 years old. They are, left to right, David Lloyd George, of Great Britain, Vittorio Orlando, of Italy, Georges Clemenceau, of France, and Woodrow Wilson, United States President. The Big Four of the Allies chat while gathering in Versailles for the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I, in this 1919 photo.
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