Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
by Margaret MacMillan
Summary
For six months in 1919, Paris was the government of the world. The victors of the Great War gathered to remake the map, and MacMillan's history plants the reader inside the negotiating rooms with the Big Three: Woodrow Wilson, arriving with his Fourteen Points and a messiah's reception; Clemenceau, twice invaded in one lifetime, wanting Germany held down; and Lloyd George, brilliant, slippery, holding an empire's contradictions together with charm.
The book's method is a grand tour of the conference's in tray, a chapter at a time: the invention of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, the carve up of the Ottoman Middle East that drew the borders of Iraq, Syria and Palestine, Poland resurrected, China's Shantung handed to Japan and the May Fourth movement ignited, Greece launched toward catastrophe in Anatolia, the racial equality clause Japan proposed and the conference killed, petitioners from Ho Chi Minh to the Zionists waiting in hotel lobbies. MacMillan has an eye for the personalities, the gossip is excellent throughout, and a fairness that keeps the book from melodrama.
Her central argument overturns a century of received wisdom: Versailles was not the cause of Hitler. The treaty was harsh, but less harsh than legend, barely enforced, and blamed later for outcomes that appeasement, depression and choice produced. The peacemakers failed at plenty; she itemises exactly what, and acquits them of the rest.
Around six hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the origin of the modern world's borders told as human drama, with the century's most famous scapegoat retried.
Historical Context & Significance
Paris 1919 won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2002, along with the Duff Cooper Prize and a shelf of others, and it made Margaret MacMillan, then a Toronto professor, one of the most read historians in the language; the book was first published in Britain as Peacemakers.
The family connection is part of its story: MacMillan is Lloyd George's great granddaughter, a fact she deploys with scholarly discretion and interviewers never tired of. Her rehabilitation argument, that the treaty's reputation as the seedbed of Hitler owes more to Keynes's polemic and later politics than to the document itself, moved the scholarly consensus visibly, and the book became the standard popular account of the conference in time for the centenary.
MacMillan's later career, The War That Ended Peace, the BBC Reith Lectures, confirmed the position this book established: the explainer of how wars begin and how peaces fail, trusted on both counts.