Europe in an Age of Dictatorship, 1919–39555The most important authors of the postwar world
were Clemenceau and Lloyd George, neither of whom
felt bound by Wilson’s program. Lloyd George had run
for reelection in the Khaki Election of December 1918
promising to punish German “war criminals” and saying
“I’ll hang the Kaiser!” Clemenceau scoffed at Wilsonian
idealism with snide reminders that even God presented
only ten Commandments; Europe, he added on another
occasion, might consider Wilsonian moral leadership
when he ended racial segregation in the United States.
Unlike the situation at Vienna in 1815, the Allies were
never so divided that they invited Germany to partici-
pate in negotiations. German diplomats had their first
formal meeting with Allied diplomats in May 1919,
when a draft treaty was presented to them; Clemenceau
introduced the treaty by saying, “The time has come to
settle accounts” (see illustration 28.1).The Germans,
given no chance to negotiate compromises, bitterly
called the treaty a diktat(a dictated peace) but nonethe-
less signed it in June 1919; the German response to the
peace treaty (in contrast to the French response to the
Frankfurt Treaty of 1871) became one of the most se-
vere problems of the following generation and a major
factor in the resumption of war in 1939.
The Versailles Treaty returned Alsace and Lorraine
to France, awarded frontier territory to Belgium, re-
stored to Denmark land lost in the war of 1864, and
made major concessions to Poland (see map 28.1). The
most controversial decision gave part of western Prussia
to the reborn state of Poland (which Prussia had played
a leading role in destroying in the eighteenth century);
this created a Polish Corridor to the Baltic Sea, but it
isolated East Prussia as an exclave surrounded by
Poland and it fostered German hatred of the treaty sim-
ilar to the French reaction to the loss of Alsace in 1871.
Germany was also stripped of all colonies and Russian
territory annexed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in
- The Saar River basin, a coal-rich region in the
Rhineland, was detached from Germany; France was
given control of the Saar mines for fifteen years, after
which a plebescite would determine the status of the
region. The German army was limited to 100,000 men
(intentionally smaller than the Polish army). Germany
was denied heavy artillery, submarines, and an air force,
and the entire Rhineland was demilitarized.
The most controversial section of the Versailles
Treaty was Article 231, known as “the war guilt clause.”
This article made Germany accept responsibility for
causing the war. On this basis, the German nation was
to pay reparations for all civilian damage caused by the
war (in contrast to the indemnity payments that France
had been made to pay in 1815 and 1871)—a subject
destined to become another of postwar Europe’s great-
est controversies. When critics asked Clemenceau if he
thought that future historians would conclude that Ger-
many had caused the war, he answered that they cer-
tainly would not conclude that Belgium had invaded
Germany in 1914. As a concession to Wilson and to
ensure the enforcement of the treaty, the Allies also
created a permanent international assembly known as
the League of Nations—whose founding covenant
spoke of reducing armaments and ending war but estab-
lished few instruments of enforcement. The Versailles
Treaty was thus an awkward compromise among the
victors, and it remained controversial among them
(especially in Britain), so they never did a good job
of enforcing it.
The secondary treaties signed at Paris registered
the collapse of two great empires, recognized more
than a dozen new countries, and addressed territorial
problems that would remain unresolved throughout the
twentieth century. The Habsburg monarchy had bro-
ken apart in mid-1918, creating separate states of Aus-
tria and Hungary. Minority populations of the empireIllustration 28.1
The Versailles Peace Treaty.The peace treaty with Ger-
many in 1919 was severe, although no worse than the treaties
imperial Germany imposed on France in 1871 or Russia in 1918.
From the German point of view, shown in this contemporary
cartoon, the Big Three (from the left, Wilson, Clemenceau, and
Lloyd George) were executing Germany.