margaret macmillan paris 1919 six months that changed the world

Hitler would blame Versailles for more ills than it created, but the signatories often could not enforce their writ. There was, Wilson declared, 'disgust with the old order of things,' but in most decisions the old order in fact prevailed, and corrosive problems, like Bolshevism, were shelved. The council's other members horse-traded for spoils, as did Greece, Poland and the new Yugoslavia. The austere and unlikable Wilson got nothing returning home, he suffered a debilitating stroke. The Italians, who hadn't won a battle, and the French, who'd been saved from catastrophe, were the greediest, says MacMillan the Japanese plucked Pacific islands that had been German and a colony in China known for German beer.

As a rush to make expedient settlements replaced initial negotiating inertia, appeals by many nationalities for Wilsonian self-determination would be overwhelmed by rhetoric justifying national avarice.

Although President Wilson had insisted on a League of Nations, even his own Senate would vote the league down and refuse the treaty.

and Italy, was busy preparing a 'just and lasting war.' Six months of parleying concluded on June 28 with Germany's coerced agreement to a treaty no Allied statesman had fully read, according to MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto, in this vivid account. A joke circulating in Paris early in 1919 held that the peacemaking Council of Four, representing Britain, France, the U.S.

Margaret macmillan paris 1919 six months that changed the world