The Treaty of Versailles

JUN 28 1919 · 12:00

The signing of the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors, 28 June 1919. Place: Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles Figures: David Lloyd George, Britain · Georges Clemenceau, France · Woodrow Wilson, United States · Vittorio Orlando, Italy (walked out) · the German delegation, made to sign at gunpoint Carthaginian Peace The treaty's Article 231, the war-guilt clause, assigns Germany sole responsibility for the war. Reparations are set at 132 billion gold marks. The Rhineland is demilitarized. Alsace-Lorraine returns to France. A Polish Corridor severs East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The German overseas empire is stripped and distributed as League of Nations mandates. The German army is capped at 100,000 men with no air force, no submarines, no heavy artillery. John Maynard Keynes resigns from the British delegation in protest and writes The Economic Consequences of the Peace within months. His thesis: the reparations are mathematically impossible to pay, and the attempt to enforce them will radicalize German politics until another war becomes inevitable. The book is widely read and largely ignored. The League That Couldn't The treaty also creates the League of Nations, the first attempt to overlay Westphalia with a planetary collective-security institution. Wilson proposes; Wilson cannot get the US Senate to ratify; Wilson collapses on a speaking tour in October 1919. The United States never joins the League it conceived. Without American participation, the League cannot enforce collective security where it matters. Japan invades Manchuria (1931); the League protests; nothing happens. Italy invades Abyssinia (1935); sanctions imposed and then quietly dropped. Munich (1938) is negotiated entirely outside the League framework. The Westphalian system's first attempt at collective enforcement has failed within twenty years, and a German war for which Versailles is widely blamed is, by 1939, twenty years and three months away. Video: The Great War channel on the 28 June 1919 signing in the Hall of Mirrors, with John Maynard Keynes's prophetic verdict on the reparations regime.