Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan

Very good

I have been after a copy in hardback for some time. I have tried reading the paper back version, but print is too small.

Following the cataclysm of the Great War, victorious European and American leaders were left in the unenviable position of determining what should be done with the wreckage of Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and other nations of eastern Europe. Never before in history had there been a need to simultaneously redraw the borders of so many lands. The decisions made by the Allied leaders at the Paris peace conference of 1919 were contentious, heated, sometimes illogical, misinformed, wise, capricious, and more. And the outcomes caused by the resulting Treaty of Versailles affect large portions of the world to this day. The story of how those leaders reached those decisions has the potential to make for compelling reading, but the volume of details necessary to fully explain that tale can also drown it. Such is the case with Margaret MacMillan’s “Paris 1919.”

No bones about it: this is a challenging book. It’s more scholarly than popular in style and it’s not the sort of book you’ll want to take on holiday. This isn’t a criticism, just a statement of fact. I admit to having approached it like a plate of broccoli; I didn’t finish it because I was enjoying it so much as I finished it because I felt it was good for me. The initiating causes of what we now call World War I are complex and the consequences of its aftermath more complex still. It might just be that there are no shortcuts if one really wants to have a firm grasp on it all. If you approach the subject with this attitude, you just might make it through all 494 pages of this book.

MacMillan’s text is best when she’s discussing the personalities behind the treaty negotiations, including the “Big Three”: America’s Woodrow Wilson, Great Britain’s David Lloyd George, and France’s Georges Clemenceau. Wilson is drawn in relatively unflattering terms as an exasperatingly stubborn and preachy moralizer, a man who relied on his own inflated sense of intuition rather than his experienced diplomatic corps, and someone who was naive about european politics. Lloyd George generally comes off well as a savvy politician, wit, and masterful orator (but who could at times show a shocking unfamiliarity with the geography of nations whose fate he was deciding). Clemenceau is described as a generally wise elder statesman who has the inside track on european affairs…and the motivations of his bitter historical rivals, the Germans. One gets the feeling that he was the realistic pragmatist to Wilson’s dreamy, half-informed naif. There are many other personages thrown into the mix as Paris was filled with petitioning leaders and aspiring leaders-to-be, all angling for their piece of a future Europe or one of its colonies.

Where I struggled with this book was in its repetitious chapters regrading the details of national borders, their geography, and the names of all of the small towns that comprised them. This is all important information if one wants to understand the facts informing the decisions made by the allied leaders, but it makes tough sledding for a reader with only moderate interest. This is where the book succeeds better as a scholarly record that a popular account. Many of these details are repetitiously sleep-inducing and one of the primary reasons that I thought I might not actually have the drive to finish it. Having said that, if you have the will to keep plowing ahead, you’ll generally be rewarded by the underlying drama.

Deliberations over where national lines should be drawn was really an impossible task that no group of men, no matter how wise and thoughtful, could have concluded satisfactorily. Their charge was to divide Europe and its colonial possessions in a way that served the need for justice, defuse the potential for future conflict, leave Germany economically viable and weak (but not too weak), and realign borders so that like people would be together. But what did “like people” even mean? How could groups of people be ordered in cohesive patterns when the contradictory criteria of ethnicity, shared culture, language, and religion are considered simultaneously? It turns out that there’s often no way to meet all of these conditions in a single solution. More often than not, the final decision resulted in two or more sides that were unhappy with the result. The history of European and Asia Minor is simply too complex to arrive at a univariate solution for binding people together under a single flag. Combined with this complexity was the fear that making the wrong decision could lead to political unrest that would drive new nations to revolution and into the waiting arms of the Bolsheviks—a very real and ominous concern which constantly shadowed the thoughts of the Big Three as they deliberated.

MacMillan draws some conclusions at the book’s finale when she flatly asserts that the Treaty of Versailles was not responsible for setting the stage of World War II. The reparations levies against Germany were not “crushing” as they are commonly described today. The treaty had provisions for payments that were conditional on Germany’s ability to pay and were tied to the country’s economic performance, and there were many “creative financing” tricks used to reduce the money owed. Further, the allies seemed to have little stomach for vigorously enforcing the terms of the Treaty as the years wore on. MacMillan believes that the idea that the Treaty was to blame for Germany’s misfortunes of the 1920s was mostly just convenient propaganda for Hitler and the Nazis.

There’s no doubt that MacMillan has completed a thorough reconstruction of what transpired at the 1919 peace conference—and I applaud her for her efforts to paint a detailed picture of events and discussions that took place almost a full century ago by carefully assembling thousands of disparate scraps. This is an important record of what happened at one of the most fateful diplomatic gatherings in modern history, and in that way, it serves as a valuable reference for historians everywhere. It just may not make for the most compelling casual reading, taxing the attention spans of all but the most dedicated reader.