The First World War (1914-1918)
Senior 6 · History
The First World War (1914-1918)
Lesson 5 of 5
25 min
On 7 May 1919, four years to the day after a German submarine sank the liner Lusitania, the Allies handed the German delegation the draft peace treaty. Germany had not been invited to negotiate; it could reply only in writing. Eight days later a huge crowd gathered outside the Reichstag in Berlin to protest against what the Germans called a Gewaltfrieden, a peace imposed by force. Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann resigned rather than sign. Facing an Allied ultimatum and the threat of renewed war, the National Assembly accepted the treaty, and on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after Sarajevo, two German ministers signed it in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Compare the two pictures below: one shows how the treaty was received, the other how it was concluded.
Definition
Diktat: a dictated settlement imposed without negotiation; the word Germans used for the Treaty of Versailles.
Reparations: payments a defeated state is made to pay for the damage caused by a war.
Demilitarised zone: an area in which a state may keep no troops or fortifications. The Rhineland became one.
Plebiscite: a vote of the inhabitants of a territory to decide which state it should belong to, as in Schleswig (1920) and Upper Silesia (1921).
Mandate: a former German or Ottoman territory placed by the League of Nations under the administration of one of the victors, which was supposed to govern it in the interest of its inhabitants.
The treaty was drafted mainly by the "Big Four": Georges Clemenceau of France, David Lloyd George of Britain, Woodrow Wilson of the United States and Vittorio Orlando of Italy, who walked out for two weeks in April and May over Italy's claims. Their aims clashed.
| Leader | Main objectives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Clemenceau (France) | Security against Germany: a permanently weakened German army, the Rhine as a military frontier, Alsace-Lorraine returned, large reparations | France had been invaded in 1870 and 1914; its north-east was devastated, and about 1.4 million French soldiers had died |
| Lloyd George (Britain) | Destroy the German navy and take its colonies; make Germany pay, as voters demanded in the December 1918 election; but keep Germany as a trading partner and a barrier to Bolshevism, and avoid French domination | Britain's interests were at sea, in trade and in the empire |
| Wilson (USA) | A peace based on his Fourteen Points: self-determination, open diplomacy, free trade, reduced armaments, and above all a League of Nations | He believed a just peace and collective security would prevent future wars |
| Orlando (Italy) | The lands promised in the secret Treaty of London (1915), and the port of Fiume | Italy had lost about 600,000 soldiers |
Japan, also at the table, gained Germany's rights in Shandong in China, but its proposal to write racial equality into the League Covenant was blocked in April 1919. China refused to sign the treaty.
| Type | Terms |
|---|---|
| Territorial (Europe) | Alsace-Lorraine to France; the Saar under the League for 15 years, with its coal mines given to France; Eupen-Malmedy to Belgium; northern Schleswig to Denmark after a plebiscite; West Prussia and Posen to Poland, creating the "Polish Corridor"; Danzig a free city under the League; union with Austria forbidden. Germany lost about 13 per cent of its European territory and about a tenth of its population. |
| Colonial | All overseas colonies given up (Article 119), later shared out as League mandates, including Ruanda-Urundi to Belgium |
| Military | Army limited to 100,000 volunteers; no conscription, tanks, military aircraft or submarines; a navy of six battleships; the Rhineland demilitarised and occupied by Allied troops for up to 15 years |
| Financial | Germany to pay reparations; the sum was fixed in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks. Article 231 stated the responsibility of Germany and its allies for the loss and damage caused by the war |
| International | The Covenant of the League of Nations formed Part I of the treaty; Germany was excluded from the League until 1926 |
Important
Source analysis: two articles of the treaty
Article 119. "Germany renounces in favour of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers all her rights and titles over her oversea possessions."
Article 160 (1). "By a date which must not be later than March 31, 1920, the German Army must not comprise more than seven divisions of infantry and three divisions of cavalry. After that date the total number of effectives in the Army of the States constituting Germany must not exceed one hundred thousand men, including officers and establishments of depots. The Army shall be devoted exclusively to the maintenance of order within the territory and to the control of the frontiers."
Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany, signed at Versailles, 28 June 1919, official English text.
Article 119 is a single sentence, yet it decided the future of Rwanda, Burundi, Tanganyika, Togo, Cameroon, Namibia and Germany's Pacific islands. Notice to whom the colonies are surrendered: not to their inhabitants but to the "Principal Allied and Associated Powers", who then divided them among themselves. Article 160 shows the treaty's other face: it reduced the army of a great power to a police force for internal order and frontier control. Germans saw it as humiliation; the French saw it as the minimum guarantee of their security. Ask of each clause who wrote it, in whose interest, and whom it left out.
| Achievements | Failures |
|---|---|
| Formally ended the war with Germany and set up the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization | Germans of every party saw it as a Diktat; it fed nationalist resentment and the myth that the army had been "stabbed in the back" |
| With the other Paris treaties, gave independent states to Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, the Baltic peoples and others | Self-determination was applied unevenly: Germans in Austria and the Sudetenland could not join Germany, and colonial peoples were not consulted at all |
| Disarmed Germany, for a time, and returned Alsace-Lorraine to France | The United States Senate refused to ratify it, so America never joined the League, and France was left without its promised Anglo-American guarantee |
| Introduced the idea that colonies were a "trust" to be supervised internationally, through the mandates | Reparations caused years of dispute, including the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 |
| Left Germany united, which a harsher peace might have prevented, giving it a chance to rebuild as a democracy | Italy felt cheated of its "victory"; Japan's racial equality proposal was rejected; China lost Shandong; Soviet Russia was excluded |
Important
Source analysis: Keynes's verdict. John Maynard Keynes, a British Treasury adviser at the conference, resigned in protest and published this attack in December 1919:
"The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe,—nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia […]. The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues, being preoccupied with others,—Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to do a deal and bring home something which would pass muster for a week, the President to do nothing that was not just and right."
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Macmillan, London, 1919), chapter VI, "Europe after the Treaty".
Keynes called the settlement a "Carthaginian peace", after the Roman destruction of Carthage. His book sold widely, especially in Britain and the United States, and made many people in both countries feel that Germany had been wronged, which later weakened their will to enforce the treaty. In 1946 the French economist Étienne Mantoux replied in The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes, arguing that Germany could have paid if it had wished to. Historians since the 1970s, such as Sally Marks, have argued that reparations were heavy but payable, and Margaret MacMillan (Peacemakers, 2001) that the peacemakers cannot be blamed for the decisions taken by others in the 1930s. The French writer Jacques Bainville had made a different criticism in 1920: the treaty was too harsh to be accepted by Germany, yet too mild to stop it recovering. Each verdict reflects its author's country and moment as well as the evidence.
Warning
Three claims to avoid. (1) "Versailles caused the Second World War." It created grievances, but twenty years, the Depression and the choices of Hitler and other leaders lie between them (next two units). (2) "Reparations destroyed the German economy." The 1923 hyperinflation had roots in wartime borrowing and in government policy, and Germany paid only part of the sum. (3) "Article 231 is the war guilt clause, so it uses the word guilt." It speaks of "responsibility" for loss and damage; the label "war guilt" came from the German reaction.
Tip
Judge the treaty by stated criteria. For "How far was the Treaty of Versailles a success?", set out your criteria first: Did it meet its makers' aims? Was it fair by the standards of the time (compare the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that Germany imposed on Russia in 1918, which took far more land and people)? Did it keep the peace? Then reach a judgement for each criterion, and an overall one.
Important
Discuss. In Paris in 1919 Africans were discussed but not heard: Article 119 transferred Rwanda without consulting a single Rwandan, while a Pan-African Congress meeting in the same city asked in vain for a voice. Was the peace of 1919 a peace for Europe only? What does your answer suggest about the meaning of "self-determination" in 1919?
"The Treaty of Versailles: 100 Years Later", a public lecture by the historian Margaret MacMillan at Gresham College, London (2019). It is long: use its chapters. Watch the sections on Keynes's economic critique and on whether Versailles led to the Second World War, and note the evidence she uses against the common view.
Practice
Further reading
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the tables, the definitions and the exercises.
