Versailles, Treaty of

Versailles, Treaty of (1919).The Treaty of Versailles ended World War I between Germany and the Allied powers. On 6 October 1918, Chancellor Max von Baden appealed to President Woodrow Wilson to facilitate an armistice based on Wilson's Fourteen Points. The Allies had never endorsed this progressive set of war aims, but they now acceded to most of it because, in the armistice negotiations with Wilson, Germany had agreed to the confiscation or internment of virtually all of its machines of war.

At the 1919 Paris peace conference, the president's highest priority was the inclusion of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Despite grave reservations, the other Allied leaders— David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy—bowed to the massive public support that Wilson's proposal enjoyed throughout Europe. But the peacemakers used their acceptance as a lever to gain concessions on other issues. For example, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa coveted the captured colonies of (respectively) New Guinea, Samoa, and German Southwest Africa, which they occupied. Wilson favored making these territories League “mandates” (the League's arrangement for assisting ex‐colonial areas to self‐government). In the end, the territories were designated as mandates, but their administration was assigned to the occupying countries, an arrangement that critics charged perpetuated colonialism.

Clemenceau, implying that he might withdraw his endorsement of the League, demanded for France the coal‐rich Saar basin and military occupation of the Rhineland. Orlando claimed for Italy the Yugoslav port city of Fiume and stormed out of the conference when Wilson refused to indulge him. Japan, too, threatened to bolt as it insisted on retaining exploitative economic control over Shantung. Wilson succeeded in moderating some of these demands, but often in ways that opened him to criticism for compromising too much. From Japan he wrung a pledge (honored in 1922) to restore Chinese sovereignty in Shantung through mediation by the League. On the Rhineland issue, Wilson and Clemenceau settled on a fifteen‐year occupation. The crisis over Fiume was never resolved.

The acrimony deepened when Lloyd George added military pensions to the already astronomical reparations bill that France had presented against Germany. On the verge of physical collapse, Wilson eventually capitulated. Then came Article 231—a declaration saddling Germany with moral responsibility for the war. The reparations section and the “war‐guilt” clause would spark unending controversy, eventually helping to ignite a resentful nationalism in Germany. Throughout, Wilson hoped that, once wartime passions had cooled, the League would redress the injustices.

Ironically, the peace that Wilson worked so hard to shape was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. Some opponents charged that it did not keep faith with the spirit of the Fourteen Points; many others opposed the Leagues of Nations provision. Wilson, in his own day and in history, would bear the main burden for the shortcomings of the treaty and for the failure to steer some acceptable version through the Senate. Yet many subsequent scholars contend that the territorial provisions were not as bad as disillusioned contemporaries and later revisionist historians of the interwar period contended, and that, without the president's exertions, the document would have been far more severe than it was. Nevertheless, it remains the most controversial peace treaty of the twentieth century.
See also Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; World War II: Causes.

Bibliography

Thomas A. Bailey , Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace, 1944.
Arno J. Mayer , Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919, 1967.
Arthur Walworth , Wilson and His Peacemakers, 1986.

Thomas J. Knock