Treaty of Versailles
The peace with Germany was signed in the Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after Sarajevo. The conference had opened in January with delegations from thirty-two countries and was run by four men — Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando — with the defeated states excluded from the negotiation entirely. Germany was presented with the terms in May and given three weeks to comment in writing. The provisions were territorial, military, financial and moral. Alsace-Lorraine to France, the Polish corridor and Upper Silesia to Poland, the Saar under League administration for fifteen years, all colonies confiscated, the army capped at 100,000 men with no tanks, aircraft or submarines, the Rhineland demilitarised and occupied, and reparations to be fixed later by a commission. Article 231, which made Germany accept responsibility for the loss and damage caused by the war, was drafted as a legal basis for the reparations claim and was read in Germany as a confession of guilt. The German delegation called it a dictated peace and signed under protest and a threat of invasion. Keynes resigned from the British delegation and published a book predicting that the economics would not work. The most quoted verdict is Foch's, who thought the terms too lenient and said it was not a peace but an armistice for twenty years. He was out by sixty-five days. The separate treaties with the other defeated powers followed in the Paris suburbs — Saint-Germain with Austria, Trianon with Hungary, Neuilly with Bulgaria and Sèvres with the Ottomans. Each is resented in its own country to this day, and the Ottoman one was torn up by force at Lausanne in 1923.
- Year: 1919 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
