The scope and ambitions of the peace conference went beyond anything that had come before. Geographically, politically, socially, and economically, it was to redraw the boundaries of the known world. The collapse of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires washed away the imperial system that had dominated Europe since the Middle Ages, and in its place long-suppressed nationalistic ambitions, encouraged by wartime promises from the Allies, rose and took hold from the Baltic to the Middle East.
Economically, both the victors and the defeated were ruined. The subjugation of industry to military needs, the loss of working-age populations to the front, and the ravages of war had led to a breakdown in production. Germany and Central Europe were in the early stages of mass starvation, and France was only months behind. Across the continent, nation after nation was reduced to famine and despair.
In January 1919, the leaders of Europe and their allies gathered in Paris to hammer out the terms of peace and build a new order out of the ruins. Twenty-seven nations were invited to participate, representing three quarters of the world’s population. The major powers came full of expectations. The sacrifice in blood and treasure spent in subduing Germany weighed heavily on them and hardened them against compromise. Below the surface, though, lurked important differences. The wartime pressures that had bound them together so effectively had dissipated and would reveal competing interests and visions for the future.
The size of the delegations and the prominence of their members reflected the ambition of the undertaking. Britain, France, and Italy were represented by their prime ministers, and the English and American delegations each had several hundred members.
President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to attend was resisted by his closest advisers. The day after the cessation of hostilities against Germany, Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, wrote in his diary:
I had a conference this afternoon with the President at the White House in relation to the Peace Conference. I told him frankly that I thought the plan for him to attend was unwise and would be a mistake. . . . I pointed out that he held at present a dominant position in the world, which I was afraid he would lose if he went into conference with the foreign statesmen; that he could practically dictate the terms of peace if he held aloof; that he would be criticized severely in this country for leaving at a time when Congress particularly needed his guidancthis country fore; and that he would be greatly embarrassed in directing domestic affairs from overseas.2
Lansing also wrote, “I am convinced that he is making one of the greatest mistakes of his career and will imperil his reputation. . . . I prophesy trouble in Paris and worse than trouble here. I believe the President’s place is here in America.”3
The American government had prepared well in advance. In the autumn of 1917, it organized a secret project called “The Inquiry” consisting of one hundred and twenty-six geographers, historians, economists, scientists, and lawyers brought together to anticipate issues likely to come into play once the war was over. Their conclusions convinced Wilson to embark on a new course that would challenge the foundations of traditional diplomacy.
Ten months before the armistice, President Wilson laid out his vision for peace in a speech before a joint session of Congress. Intended to rally the American public and the Allies and to restore their sense of moral purpose after bloody years of war, Wilson proposed a plan in which the defeated powers would be invited to join a new society of nations based on openness, equality, and collective security. His Fourteen Points described the creation of an international body to settle disputes, open navigation of the seas, universal free trade, mutual disarmament, and the disposal of territorial claims according to the wishes of their inhabitants. The speech established the American position based on moral grounds rather than territorial interests.
The American delegation arrived in Paris on December 14, 1918, led by President Wilson. It was the first time a U.S. president had traveled overseas, and a hundred thousand people turned out to greet him.
Despite their grasp of the issues, the Americans had given surprisingly little thought to what they were to do once they reached Paris. Members of the American delegation received only a single instruction before leaving. They “must be on board [the USS George Washington] at Hoboken by 10:15 of the evening of December 3, 1918. The President would embark the following morning at 9:00 and the ship would sail immediately.”4 At sea, the secretary of state addressed the American negotiators and confessed that “he knew of no plan of organization nor schedule of procedure,”5 inspiring one to describe the American effort as “a magnificent improvisation.” Concern over the absence of a strategy was widespread. One of the principal American delegates, General Tasker Bliss, wrote, “I am disquieted to see how hazy and vague our ideas are. We are going up against the wiliest politicians in Europe. There will be nothing hazy or vague about their ideas.”6 He was right.
The men Wilson faced were well prepared and had a clear sense of what they wanted and how to get it. They did not share Wilson’s lofty idealism and were suspicious of his proposals. The European powers were driven by a desire for reparations from Germany and the fear that Germany would rise again if it were not properly shackled, impoverished, and dismembered. Lloyd George had just won election by a popular vote larger than any recorded in English history by campaigning that England would have “the uttermost farthing” from Germany and would “search their pockets for it.”7 One of his ministers had bragged, “We shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak,”8 while the French finance minister promised to balance France’s budget and pay off the national debt with payments from Germany.
In French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Italian Premier Vittorio Orlando, Wilson faced seasoned politicians who were well-informed, confident, sophisticated, and headstrong. Clemenceau, known as the Tiger by his countrymen, was a fighter. As a young man he had spent time in prison for dueling, and although he was a medical doctor by training, he had spent most of his career editing radical newspapers and honing his political instincts as a member of the National Assembly. Before he came to power he was famous as a political spoiler and was able to boast that in his career he had overthrown eighteen cabinets. This was Clemenceau’s second time as prime minister, having first served from 1906 to 1909. Praised as “the Father of Victory,” he was at the height of his powers and had just been reelected by a landslide of three-to-one in the Chamber of Deputies. Although eighty years old, Clemenceau was a tireless worker and would wake up during the peace conference every day at three o’clock in the morning and would often work until eleven at night. Secretary of State Lansing wrote of the French leader:
Of the four heads of States Mr. Clemenceau . . . was, in my judgment, the dominant figure and the strongest man of the many strong men who participated in the negotiations at Paris. . . . Clemenceau possessed a strength of character and a forcefulness which would have raised him above his colleagues. Persistent though patient, he was always ready, when the moment arrived, to use all his skill and cleverness in debate to obtain a decision which would be in the interest of his country. Every question was viewed by him in the light of how it would affect France.9
Lloyd George had been the youngest member of Parliament when he was first elected in 1890, and had held several cabinet positions, including chancellor of the exchequer, minister of munitions, and war secretary. He lacked Wilson’s gravitas and Clemenceau’s guile, but he had powerful charisma. The other delegates soon found that “it was simply impossible not to like him. His cheerfulness, his vivacity, his never-failing good nature, and his delightful humor”10 quickly won them over and made him remarkably effective.
Rounding out the Big Four was Orlando. Of the heads of state, his strength lay in oratory and clarity of thought. None of the others was his superior in presenting a clear, concise, and comprehensive argument in an extemporaneous debate. Unfortunately, he spoke no English, which largely limited his participation to is
sues that affected Italy directly.
Italy had come to Paris to collect on promises made years earlier by the Allies to entice it to switch sides and join them in the war. In the 1915 Treaty of London, Italy had been assured parts of Austro-Hungary, holdings on the Adriatic (including the Dalmatian coast), Germany’s African colonies, and portions of the Ottoman Empire. Orlando was there to see that this was not forgotten. Beyond what they had been offered, Italy also had territorial designs down the coast as far south as Albania. Italy saw this as a chance for economic and territorial gains that would finally allow it to dominate the Adriatic, extend its reach across the Mediterranean, and make it a great power.
The city that hosted them was a battered shell of its former self. In Paris there was hardly any coal or fuel, butter was unknown, and prices for basic necessities were beyond the reach of most Parisians. Transportation, when it could be found, was three to four times the normal cost, and the price of a hotel room doubled and tripled during the conference. The delegates lived in luxury (in the midst of the deprivation, one American negotiator wrote to his wife, “I am living more luxuriously than I ever did in all my life before.”11), and accommodating them became such major business that expenditures by delegates and visitors during the negotiations surpassed France’s revenue from foreign trade. Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes wrote, “We are here in this ancient and most wonderful city of Paris— a motley band of high brows, more or less high brow, gathered together for the most amiable purpose of settling the peace of the world.”12 The fact that much of the war had been fought within a day’s drive of Paris and their French hosts had a visible stake in the outcome was not lost on the delegates. “We felt,” a member of the British delegation wrote, “like surgeons operating in the ballroom with the aunts of the patient gathered all around.”13
The Americans settled in offices above the cabaret Maxim’s. The delegation of several hundred included personal aides and assistants for the five commissioners, as well as technical advisers on international law, economics, finance, food, labor, shipping, and military and naval affairs. The American delegation stayed at the palatial Hotel Crillon. A symbol of eighteenth century Parisian decadence, it was built by King Louis XV in 1758 in the heart of Paris at the front of the Champs-Elysees on the Place de la Concorde. It had been a favorite of Marie Antoinette, who had often entertained there, and its grand salons were decorated with seventeenth-century tapestries, gilt and brocade furniture, and Louis XVI chests and chairs. Its 103 guest rooms and 44 suites accommodated the American delegates in a style far removed from the realities of postwar Paris. The British occupied the equally exclusive Hotel Majestic, one of the largest hotels in Paris, and made their offices in the adjacent Hotel Astoria, and the other delegations took up residence in various hotels and buildings throughout the city.
More than a month passed between the negotiators’ arrival and their first meeting. The delegations took time to settle into their quarters, but the delay was also intended by Clemenceau to let the fever of popular sentiment surrounding Wilson’s arrival die down. Wilson’s impassioned advocacy for a just peace had made him an international celebrity, and British economist John Maynard Keynes remarked, “When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history.”14
The major players began to size each other up the moment they reached Paris. The time between Wilson’s arrival and the start of negotiations was filled with a shadow dance between Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and the president. Wilson was a powerful, unknown quantity, and the British and French prime ministers were eager to learn what they were up against. “All the European delegates,” Lloyd George wrote, “were especially concerned to discover what President Wilson was like, what he was after and what he meant to insist on.”15
Clemenceau, who had had the least exposure to Wilson, was especially wary. Lloyd George described how “Clemenceau followed his movements like an old watchdog keeping an eye on a strange and unwelcome dog who has visited the farmyard and of whose intentions he is more than doubtful.”16
The Allies had originally intended to invite Germany to join the discussions once they had decided on terms for a preliminary settlement, but the challenges of reaching agreement among themselves proved greater than anyone expected. The Allies had also drawn their own lessons from France’s diplomatic victory at the Congress of Vienna and had no inclination to give Germany a chance to do the same in Paris. Having brought Germany to concede to an armistice, the Allies saw themselves as victors. But though Germany was broken, it was not defeated. Although by all accounts its ability to prosecute the war was exhausted, its forces and borders remained intact and its people defiant.
Because it would be too unwieldy for all twenty-seven nations to meet, decision-making authority was vested in a Council of Ten, composed of the heads of state and foreign ministers of the four principal allies and Japan. Their secret meetings were held at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai D’Orsay in French Foreign Minister Stephen Pichon’s majestic private office. A high-domed ceiling supported a heavy chandelier, the walls of the room were lined with heavy oak Doric paneling that framed Rubens’ tapestries copied from the Marie de Medici paintings in the Louvre, and carvings of cupids at play crowned the main door. Two large windows bordered by heavy green silk curtains looked out over a sculpted garden outside. At the center of the room was a plain empire table, where Clemenceau sat with his back to a massive fireplace crackling with great logs. Huddled around him were the other heads of state and foreign ministers, and a parade of experts, assistants, and secretaries.
The dizzying array of issues before the peace conference was too great for the Allied leaders to explore in detail themselves. A more systematic approach was needed, and reflecting the fever for mechanizing war and peace in the modern era, the negotiators arrived at an industrial solution. Questions were parceled out to panels of experts that in turn delegated subcommittees to hear testimony and produce reports. Fifty-eight commissions were formed during the course of the conference, which would hold over sixteen hundred official meetings.
Of the Fourteen Points, the creation of a League of Nations was dearest to Wilson’s heart. In it he saw the philosopher’s stone of international affairs, a device that would harmonize relations between states, resolve territorial disputes, and address frictions before they erupted into conflict. Wilson also looked to the League of Nations to make up for weaknesses in other areas of the peace, as it would allow flaws in the treaty to be corrected later. As he told his wife, “One by one the mistakes can be brought to the League for readjustment, and the League will act as a permanent clearinghouse where every nation can come, the small as well as the great.”17 Calling it “the key to the whole settlement,”18 Wilson insisted that the League of Nations take precedence above all territorial, economic, military, and other issues before them and be incorporated into the peace treaty with Germany. Wilson saw the League, in the words of one member of the American delegation, as “the distinctive achievement differentiating this peace settlement from those of the past, which had invariably resulted in nationalistic rivalry and war.”19 It was to be a new constitution for mankind.
Others were more skeptical. When asked his opinion, Clemenceau said, “I like the League, but I do not believe in it.”20 Even Wilson’s own secretary of state wondered if it made enough room for the darker parts of human nature. “There is in it too much altruistic cooperation,” Lansing wrote. “No account is taken of national selfishness and the mutual suspicions which control international relations. It may be noble thinking, but it is not true thinking.”21
The League was the first order of business, and on January 25, the full conference established a commission headed by Wilson on the League of Nations. It had nineteen members, two each from the Big Four and Japan and nine from the smaller countries. Their first meeting was on February 3 and they met every day on the third floor of the Hotel Crillon in the residence
of the president’s adviser, friend, and confidant, Colonel Edward House, seated around a large wooden table in his dining room covered with red cloth, with interpreters seated behind. Wilson and House worked day and night to prepare a draft before Wilson’s scheduled return to the United States for a month on February 14. It was an impossibly short time.
President Wilson, House wrote, had one of the “most difficult and complex characters I have ever known.”22 He was famously stubborn, and capable of deep moral insights but also of vindictiveness and terrible personal grudges. He had presided over the entry of the United States into the war, which he convinced both himself and the nation could be justified only by upending the traditional balance of power system and replacing it with one governed by universal principles of ethical behavior.
After Wilson, the animating force behind the League of Nations was House, whose low profile concealed the fact that he was a master behind the scenes. One of his principal roles was to make sure there were no surprises. “I try,” he said, “to find out in advance where trouble lies and to smooth it out before it goes too far.”23 An honorary Texas colonel, House was one of a curious breed of powerful presidential advisers apart from the official hierarchy who from time to time appear in American history. When Wilson was elected, House was offered the choice of any cabinet position he wished. He turned them all down to serve “wherever and whenever possible.” With no official post, his power derived solely from his influence with Wilson, which was so complete that House was provided his own living quarters at the White House.
Great Negotiations Page 10
