Versailles, Treaty of

Versailles, Treaty of (1919).The Treaty of Versailles ended World War I between Germany and the Allied nations. On 6 October 1918, Prince Max von Baden, the Reich Chancellor, appealed to President Woodrow Wilson to take steps leading to an armistice based on Wilson's Fourteen Points. The Allies had never endorsed this progressive peace program; they acceded to most of it, however, because in the armistice negotiations Wilson had managed the confiscation or internment of virtually all Germany's machines of war.

At the Paris Peace Conference, the president's priority was the inclusion of the Covenant of the League of Nations as an integral part of the treaty. Despite grave reservations, the British, French, and Italian leaders bowed to the massive public support Wilson's proposal enjoyed throughout Europe. But the peacemakers used their acceptance as a lever to gain concessions from him on other vital issues. For example, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa coveted the captured colonies of (respectively) New Guinea, Samoa, and German Southwest Africa. These claims defied the idea of “mandates,” the League's arrangement for guiding incipient states along the path to self‐government. In this, as in other quarrels, Wilson found himself in a minority of one. The territories were designated as mandatories but were ultimately assigned on the basis of military occupation.

At another juncture, Georges 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. Vittorio Orlando claimed for Italy the Yugoslav port city of Fiume and left when Wilson refused to indulge him. Japan, too, threatened to bolt as it insisted on retaining economic control over Shantung. Wilson was able to moderate some of these demands, albeit in less than satisfactory compromises. From Japan, he wrung a pledge (honored in 1922) to restore Chinese sovereignty in Shantung through mediation by the League. In the case of France, he and Clemenceau settled on a fifteen‐year occupation of the Rhineland. The crisis over Fiume, alas, was never resolved at Paris.

The acrimony came to a head when British prime minister David Lloyd George added military pensions to the already astronomical reparations bill that France had presented against Germany. On the verge of physical collapse, Wilson at last capitulated. Then came Article 231—a declaration saddling Germany with the moral responsibility for allegedly having started the war. The reparations section and the “war‐guilt” clause would spark unending controversy. In all of this, Wilson anticipated that, once wartime passions had cooled, the League could redress the injustices.

Because he had so many difficulties in keeping faith with the spirit of the Fourteen Points, and because (largely for other reasons) the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson, in his own time and in history, would bear the main burden for its shortcomings. Yet many scholars today contend that the territorial provisions were not nearly as bad as disillusioned contemporaries and revisionist historians believed them to be; and that, without the president's intermittent heroic exertions, some of the settlement's 440 conditions would have been far more severe. Nevertheless, this remains the most controversial peace treaty of the twentieth century.
[See also World War I.]

Bibliography

Thomas A. Bailey , Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace, 1944.
Arno J. Mayer , Politics and Diplomacy of the Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919, 1967.
Arthur Walworth , Wilson and His Peacemakers, 1986.
Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elizabeth Glaser, eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, 1998.

Thomas J. Knock