lkpebay.blogg.se - Making history the second world war editor crash

The French recovered Alsace and Lorraine, ceded in 1871 after defeat to Prussia, but were not allowed to annex the Rhineland in perpetuity. The resulting peace treaty was therefore a messy compromise between the Big Three.

The great misconceptions of the First World War.

The legacy of the Romanovs: how is the last Russian royal family remembered in Russia?.

US president Woodrow Wilson was more detached from European specifics: his consuming ambition was to create a League of Nations to guarantee peace and security. He feared that too punitive a peace would feed a desire for revenge and encourage the spread of Bolshevism across the continent. The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, though anxious to gain reparations from Germany, saw the German economy as vital to the recovery of Europe. Clemenceau and the French were focused obsessively on controlling Germany, whose population was 50 per cent larger than that of France and whose economy in 1913 had been the most advanced in Europe. Nor were the three major Allied powers of one mind. So, the Paris conference was an attempt to clean up the mess: the peacemakers did not start with a blank slate. Out of the debris, nationalist politicians and their armies were already creating new states, such as Czechoslovakia, and resurrecting old states like Poland. The whole map of Europe had been ripped apart by war and revolution, bringing down four great dynastic empires – the Romanovs, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Ottomans – that had ruled the centre and east of the continent for centuries.

In trying to unpack the argument that the peacemakers – deliberately or not – sowed the seeds of future conflict, we need first to remember that the fate of Germany was not the only issue on their agenda. The fate of Germany was not the only issue on the peacemakers' agenda

Was Versailles a treaty of peace? Or did it set the stage for another great war? Were the victor powers at Paris ‘peacemakers’ – or actually ‘warmakers’?

And so, after victory in the Great War, the French relished their chance to repay that humiliation with interest, formally administering the Reich’s last rites in the place where it had been born.īut almost as soon as the ink was dry, participants and commentators debated Clemenceau’s verdict. This had been a deliberate act of political theatre by his chancellor, Count Otto von Bismarck, to rub French noses in the degradation of their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The start date, 18 January, was the anniversary of the day in 1871 when Wilhelm I had been proclaimed as emperor of the new German Reich in the Hall of Mirrors. He told the assemblage: “We are here to sign a treaty of peace.” Both the timing and venue had been carefully calculated by the French.

“ Une belle journée,” Georges Clemenceau, the French premier, declared tearfully.