Treaty of Versailles

About the Author

The four main public negotiators of the Treaty of Versailles, referred to as the Council of Four, were the leaders of the Allied and Associated powers. Vittorio Orlando, the Italian prime minister, held a decidedly junior role among the negotiators. Italy did not share a border with Germany, had never been in the field against the German army alone, and had little interest in Germany's postwar fate, so the treaty's terms held little consequence for Orlando. The more important authors of the treaty were the leaders of the powers that had forced the Germans into an armistice based on the battles in France.

Georges Clemenceau was born in 1841 in the Vendée, in western France. He earned a degree as a medical doctor and worked as a journalist and as a teacher before entering politics in 1870, as France was losing the Franco-Prussian War. He became prime minister of France in November 1917, at a point when French morale was at its lowest. Famously, after becoming prime minister, he addressed the National Assembly of France (in March 1918) with the words “Je fais la guerre!” (I make war!). Having guided France to victory in the war, he dictated many of the peace terms in the interest of destroying Germany as a threat to French security. As an author of the treaty, Clemenceau was relentless in his opposition to Wilson and was largely responsible for the vengeful tone of the treaty. Defeated in the presidential election of 1920, he gave up politics and retired from politics. He died in 1929.

David Lloyd George was born in 1863 and worked as a lawyer before entering politics. He rose from being minister of munitions and secretary of state for war to becoming prime minister of a multiparty coalition government in Britain in December 1916. He was the only Welshman ever to hold the office. Initially, Lloyd George was inclined to accept most of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points as a basis for the peace. Britain had no claims on European territory and expected its colonial claims to met with no contestation, so a far-reaching European peace seemed worthy of pursuit. Just before the peace conference began, the British coalition government held an election to seal its pursuit of the peace terms. The coalition was overwhelmingly reelected, but everywhere he traveled on the campaign, Lloyd George was confronted with an electorate that demanded that he “hang the Kaiser.” Disinclined to lead public opinion as opposed to appease it, Lloyd George found himself most often allied with Clemenceau in the effort to write a treaty that would punish the Germans. He continued to dominate British politics through the 1920s and in the 1930s promoted a program of economic reform along the lines of America's New Deal. He was still a member of Parliament when he died in 1945.

Before becoming president, Woodrow Wilson had served as president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey. He was a leading intellectual of the day, holding a doctorate in politics and history from Johns Hopkins University. Wilson was first elected to the presidency in 1912 and was reelected in November 1916, on a platform that claimed he had kept the United States out of war. Within another five months, German sinkings of American ships led Wilson to call on Congress to declare war on Germany and join the side of Britain, France, and Italy. As the United States built its tiny army into a formidable force capable of fighting in Europe, Wilson issued the Fourteen Points as a public list of American war aims, and it was well received. But implementation of war aims involves achieving victory, which led Wilson into some very confusing circumstances at the peace table. American troops did not reach the Continent until the summer of 1918, and their performance in the field amounted to little more than providing cannon fodder to the more experienced Germans. Yet the U.S. potential as a future source of men and material was so enormous for the future that the country's entry into the war was the key factor in forcing Germany to the peace table.

Upon arriving in Europe, Wilson toured Europe and was acclaimed a hero in both victorious and defeated nation-states for his presumed ability to dictate the terms of the peace according to the Fourteen Points. Still, his peoples' sacrifices were too negligible for him to have the same moral bearing on the writing of the treaty as men like Clemenceau and Lloyd George, whose peoples had lost a generation of young men to the war with Germany. Regardless, the Fourteen Points demanded an almost impossible magnanimity on the part of the victors toward the defeated Germany, and Wilson did not prove to be a very successful negotiator for them as a result. After leaving the presidency in 1921, Wilson stayed on in Washington, D.C., and died in 1924.

The four major negotiators were supported by their foreign ministers, the French foreign minister Stephen Pichon, the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, the U.S. secretary of state Robert Lansing, and the Italian foreign minister Sidney Sonnino. There was also a rotating Japanese delegation of two ambassadors, but the power to dictate the really important terms of the treaty lay entirely in the hands of Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson. Counseling them were numerous lawyers, advisers, diplomats, and politicians, most notably André Tardieu, a French politician who helped write up the territorial concessions to which Germany would have to agree; Philip Kerr, Lloyd George's personal secretary, who seemed to play an outsized role in British decision making; Harold Nicolson of Britain, who kept a copious diary; John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who would soon after write a scathing review of the treaty's provisions; and Edward M. House of the United States, a close personal friend of Wilson's who acted as a sounding board for the president's lofty ambitions and became a go-between for the various negotiators.