In January 1919 delegates from about thirty countries gathered in Paris to remake the world. Few peace conferences raised such hopes, and few have been judged so harshly.

Wilson's vision

A year earlier, in January 1918, Woodrow Wilson had set out the Fourteen Points, his program for a just peace. The first called for "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at," meaning no more secret treaties. Others called for freedom of the seas, lower trade barriers, arms reductions and borders drawn along lines of nationality. The last declared that "A general association of nations must be formed" to guarantee the independence and territory of "great and small states alike." That general association of nations became the League of Nations. Wilson's language of self-government was heard far beyond Europe.

The Paris Peace Conference

The real decisions were made by the leaders of the victorious great powers: Wilson, David Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France and Vittorio Orlando of Italy. The defeated powers were not allowed to negotiate; the terms were presented to them. Clemenceau, whose country had been invaded twice in his lifetime, wanted security against Germany above all. Lloyd George, facing voters who wanted Germany to pay, also feared driving Germany into revolution. Wilson put his faith in the League.

The Treaty of Versailles with Germany was signed in June 1919, on the 28th, five years to the day after the Sarajevo assassination. Germany lost Alsace-Lorraine to France and other land to Belgium, Denmark and the new Poland, about 13 percent of its European territory, along with all its colonies, which were handed out as League "mandates." Its army was capped at 100,000 men and it was banned from having tanks, military aircraft or submarines; the Rhineland was demilitarized. Article 231, the "war guilt" clause, held Germany and its allies responsible for the war's loss and damage, giving the legal basis for reparations. In 1921 the total was set at 132 billion gold marks, though much of that sum was never expected to be paid. Separate treaties dealt with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire; Hungary lost about two thirds of its territory.

Too harsh or too weak?

The most famous critic was the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who resigned from his country's delegation. In "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" (1919), Keynes argued that the reparations would wreck Europe's economy, and he called the settlement a "Carthaginian peace," recalling Rome's destruction of Carthage. His book shaped opinion for decades.

Later historians, such as Margaret MacMillan and Sally Marks, have pushed back. They note that Germany paid only a fraction of the sum, that its industry was left intact while much of France and Belgium lay in ruins, and that the peace Germany imposed on Russia at Brest-Litovsk was far harsher. On this reading, the settlement was neither as crushing as Keynes claimed nor firm enough to be enforced, and the road to the Second World War ran mainly through the choices of the 1930s. A fair verdict may be that the treaty was too harsh to reconcile Germany and too weak to restrain it.

Empires fall, promises broken

Four empires collapsed during or after the war: the Russian, the German, the Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman. New states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia emerged, and minority treaties tried, with limited success, to protect peoples left on the wrong side of new borders. The British Empire survived the war and even grew, taking League mandates in the Middle East and Africa. Beyond Europe, self-determination proved selective. Japan proposed a clause affirming the equality of races in the League's founding agreement; a majority of the commission supported it, but the racial equality proposal was blocked when Wilson ruled that it needed unanimous support. When the conference gave Germany's rights in Shandong to Japan instead of returning them to China, students in Beijing protested on 4 May 1919. Koreans had risen against Japanese rule that March, Egyptians rose against the British, and a young Vietnamese activist later known as Ho Chi Minh petitioned the conference in vain. At home, the United States Senate rejected the treaty, and the United States never joined the League.

Remembering

Postwar societies invented new ways to mourn. The Imperial War Graves Commission gave every soldier the same headstone, regardless of rank or class, a principle some wealthy families fought but which held. On 11 November 1920 Britain buried an Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, and France laid its Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe soon after. The red poppy of remembrance came from a poem by the Canadian army doctor John McCrae, written in 1915: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row."

Worked example: reading a war memorial

Almost every town in Britain, France and the old dominions has a memorial listing local names. Pick one. Read what it says: "glorious dead," "for king and country," or simply the names. Notice what is missing: colonial soldiers and laborers, the Chinese Labour Corps, men shot for desertion and women killed in munitions explosions were often left off. A memorial records grief, but it also makes an argument about what the war meant. Honouring the dead while asking whose story is being told is a small exercise in the clear thinking that free citizens need.