1919 Versailles: The End of the War to End All Wars

by Charles L. Mee Jr.

World War I and the Versailles Treaty that followed produced the most serious upheaval in a long and stormy course of modern world history. Four great empires - Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and Turkey - were part of the war's rubble. Far from restoring order, the diplomats who met in 1919 at Paris and Versailles plunged the world into the chaos of the twentieth century. Here, from award-winning historian Charles Mee, is the account of what happened when the three most powerful heads of state gathered to establish a new order.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, World War I, European History, World History, Politics

478 pages, Paperback

First published February 13, 2014

About the author

Charles L. Mee is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts. He is also a professor of theater at Columbia University. (Source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Sonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this is a completely readable book about the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Once you read this book you can't help but come to the conclusion that WWII was certainly inevitable based on the state of the uneasy peace after WWI. Easily the person who comes out looking worst is Georges Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister - although the man was unstoppable. But Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George don't fare too well either. These three men, under the guise of the principles of sovereignty, wreaked havoc w/ Eastern European borders and set the stage for further conflict and resolution. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to know how WWI ended - or rather was suspended.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is always easier to start a war than to end one, let alone win it. … Harshness and vengeance nearly always return to haunt those who impose them. But of all the lesson that Versailles leaves us with, certainly the most insistent is that of the inability of the few any longer to govern the many.”

Exhaustive rendering of how the world’s leaders--especially France’s Clemenceau, Britain’s Lloyd George and America’s Wilson--crowned the horror of World War One with the charade of a “peace” that virtually guaranteed World War Two. That’s not news to most readers, but Woodrow Wilson’s role in raising then dashing international hopes may be.

“[Wilson] believed in words, in their beauty, in their ability to move people, in their power to give shape, and structure, and cohesion to the world--in their power, he appeared to believe, to transform reality.”

Wilson conducted secret negotiations with the Germans before the armistice, tempting them with a peace based on his famous Fourteen Points which he could not subsequently deliver. Mee describes Wilson as having the worst traits of our last two presidents, plus a bit of LBJ. Most of us know the nasty old Republicans killed Wilson’s League of Nations; we’re wrong. Wilson killed the League and most of his other talking points. (By the way, he started having strokes before he was elected, not as a result of his campaign to sell the treaty to the people.)

“How can I talk to a fellow who thinks himself the first man for two thousand years who has known anything about peace on earth?” asked French PM Clemenceau.

Like the conference, the book loses direction after the assassination attempt on Clemenceau, and Wilson's and Lloyd George’s mid-term escape to their respective countries. Mee wanders off into social criticism and twaddle.

“When he wrote his biography of George Washington, [Wilson] avoided primary sources and wrote the book entirely out of secondary sources. When he was president he rarely read the newspapers and only cursorily glanced at weekly press summaries.”

A must read for students of the horrible carnage that wracked the world a hundred years ago. Also a necessary palliative for those hypnotized by imperial presidents since.

“As time went on, [Wilson] seemed neither as idealistic nor as cunning as he was thought to be.”
There’s a reason Woodrow Wilson is absent from the pantheon of Democrat saints. Read this to find why.

“This war was fought by the United States to destroy forever the conditions which produced it. Those conditions have not been destroyed. They have been supplanted by other conditions equally productive of hatred, jealousy, and suspicion.” wrote US Secretary of State Lansing.

[Andrew Scholes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good history of the end of WWI

There was a lot about how Germany was brought to its knees and was left out of any negotiation in the treaty. This helped to lead to WWII.

[Mac McCormick III · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the centennial of World War I passed, I decided I wanted to read up on the Treaty of Versailles. 1919 Versailles: The End of the War to End All Wars by Charles L. Mee Jr. was one of the two books I picked. Mee did a very good job of introducing the main players: Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson providing good insight into their backgrounds and what influenced their thoughts and decision-making processes. He also does a good job of describing the chaotic and disjointed nature of the negotiations between the Allies in Paris. One of the more interesting aspects of the book is his use of the observations of supporting players such as Keynes and Smuts. The negotiations between the Allies and the treaty's presentation to the Germans is roughly divided by a discussion of dadaism and surrealism that seems out of place in the book. I'm guessing that Mee intended it to illustrate how surreal the process of creating the treaty was, but it went on far too long and seemed irrelevant. It paints none of the three main players in a positive light, but it does shed some positive light on some of the supporting players such as Smuts. Except for the dadaism/surrealism section, 1919 Versailles is a very readable book, but that section does drag it down in the middle; but for it, I probably would have given it four stars.

[Jeff Crosby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found parts of this book fascinating. However, it was at times a tedious read. While most of the book is centered around Wilson, Lloyd-George and Clemenceau, it lacks a strong narrative thread.

I liked the book because the subject interests me, but at times it was a slog.

[Timber · Rating 1 out of 5]

I seem to be the odd one out, not enjoying this book at all. However, I’m not usually into politics and maybe reading this as an ebook didn’t help. I found it as chaotic as the unfortunate approach to the Versailles treaty.

To recognize 100 years, I thought it would be a good way to understand more about the end of the World War I and how such a tremendous tragedy couple occur again in a relatively short time.

I enjoyed reading the background about the big three heads of state involved - England’s Lloyd George, France’s Clemenceau, United States’ Woodrow Wilson. Their rise to power and their personalities were well captured. However, I then lost track of what was happening when and who was involved! Maybe because I didn’t recognize so many of the names or because the actual events were just so chaotic.

How frustrating and how sad it was to read about the loss of the ideals that stopped the fighting, as they got lost amongst the politics of each of the nation’s leaders. While acknowledging the monumental challenge involved, how did it come to such a small handful of individuals that decided on the fate of the world. I guess that is the whole point....

But I just got too frustrated with the events and with the flow of the book, and how depressing it all was (again, the whole point I guess!).

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover of this remarkable book pictures the three principals who negotiated the Versailles Treaty ending World War I: David Lloyd George of England, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the United States. They're all smiling. But when the treaty was eventually signed seven months after the Armistice that ended the fighting, they weren't smiling any longer. The travesty these three men imposed on an unsuspecting world led inexorably to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and the even worse carnage of World War II. And in 1919 Versailles, playwright and historian Charles Mee expertly lays bare the double-dealing, manipulation, and sheer vindictiveness that produced this tragic set of consequences.

A tight focus on the men who wrote the World War I peace treaty

Scores of books have been written about the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath. The legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, who was a junior member of the British delegation, savaged the agreement soon after its signing. His The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published just months after the Treaty was signed, was a worldwide bestseller. For years afterward, the topic was a favorite of academics. And still today the books keep coming. But none that I've come across dig so deeply into the personalities and interpersonal conflicts of the men who wrote the treaty as well as Mee's 1919 Versailles.

Read this remarkable book, and you'll understand how things could go so badly wrong.

Three arrogant, manipulative, and egotistical men led the way

All three of the principals (George, Clemenceau, Wilson) were arrogant, manipulative, and egotistical. They came to deeply distrust one another. And none of the three listened more than rarely to advice from the hundreds of advisors who accompanied them to Paris (where the negotiations actually took place). Both George and Wilson were flagrant adulterers. And Clemenceau was openly vindictive. It was he who dominated the discussions as the peace conference chair. He was a rude, nasty man, and he was primarily responsible for the draconian provisions of the treaty. The picture Mee paints of him suggests he may well have been a sociopath.

All three men, too, were products of the 19th century. Clemenceau had been born in 1841, Wilson in 1856, and George in 1863. The youngest of them was thus 37 at the turn of the 2oth century. With attitudes and opinions formed in another era, perhaps it's not so surprising that they failed to understand the dynamics and the needs of the societies they governed.

Woodrow Wilson could have dominated the conference

Woodrow Wilson had famously attempted to set the agenda for the peace conference with his Fourteen Points. If he had demonstrated even a hint of the skill that had gotten him elected President of the United States he might well have upstaged Clemenceau and dominated the conference. At the outset of the negotiations he was wildly popular throughout Europe. It was to him that the Germans went to press for peace, and the understanding they reached with him was that the Fourteen Points would be the basis for a peace settlement. If Wilson had gone over the heads of Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George and spoken to the European public, he might well have pushed the French and English into a corner from which there was no escape.

Instead, however, Wilson sat meekly through the sessions, deferring to Clemenceau at almost every opportunity. He sacrificed every advantage in favor of pressing for the incorporation of the Covenant of the League of Nations into the final settlement. And that, of course, proved to be pointless, since he proved unable even to persuade the US Senate to approve the agreement.

Nobody read the treaty until it was too late

Many history books gloss over the sheer complexity of the challenge that the peace conference confronted. In addition to the principal combatants—Germany, France, Britain, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, and the US—dozens of other nations became involved. After all, this was the First World War. And the conference had been convened to rationalize those interests, a clearly impossible task. In fact, as the arguments heated up in Paris, the most controversial questions were frequently farmed out to "commissions" that were empowered to draw up proposed solutions. In most cases, the commissions came back at the last minute with extreme proposals they fully expected the principals to moderate. But instead their proposals were incorporated into the draft treaty. Nobody read the treaty before it was printed. Nobody. And the principals stoutly refused to make any changes once the Germans protested the clearly unreasonable terms.

The scales were tipped against Germany

As Mee notes, "All of the most extreme provisions that Allies had contemplated seemed to have made their way into the finished treaty . . . In every instance, it seems, the scales had been tipped against Germany: the treaty was a work of malice."

In fact, many participants in the conference as well as the Germans (who were not invited to participate) had fully expected that the conference would offer a set of proposals to which the German government could then make counterproposals. But that was not to be. The principals decreed otherwise. In the end, Clemenceau, George, and Wilson effectively told the Germans to accept the treaty as written or face an invasion of their homeland.

Mee's concluding assessment of the treaty's effects are savage. "[F]ar from restoring order to the world," he writes, "they took the chaos of the Great War, and, through vengefulness and inadvertence, impotence and design, they sealed it as the permanent condition of our century."

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

World War I and the Versailles Treaty that followed produced the most serious upheaval in a long and stormy course of modern world history. Four great empires - Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and Turkey - were part of the war's rubble. Far from restoring order, the diplomats who met in 1919 at Paris and Versailles plunged the world into the chaos of the twentieth century. Here, from award-winning historian Charles Mee, is the account of what happened when the three most powerful heads of state gathered to establish a new order.

[David Bisset · Rating 4 out of 5]

A flawed Treaty?

It certainly was imperfect. Its genesis was was shambolic. It was hated by all shades of opinion in Germany. Hitler despised it, of course. The statement did their best, but it was not sufficient. The descriptions of events in this book are frequently surreal. However, it is an enthralling narrative.

[R.J. Montemayor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Details

What I wanted to read. A detailed account of what transpired during the making the treaty. Very readable and informative.

[Rachel Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good account of the end of the war and the treaty. It's rather astonishing to see how just awful most of the people involved were, or at least, how very not seeking justice or good.

[Mario · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty interesting, but it also had a lot of portions that could have been cut without taking away from the book.

[Ricardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought it as a bargain offer, expecting not much else than a view of the treaty signing that officially brought the Great War to a close. A memory refresher from school days, with added colour, if you will. It was far better than this. Bigger, wider, deeper, psychological even, this is a book for the ages.

Charles L. Mee, Jr., got help from library researchers in three Western countries to retrieve, weave and reflect on firsthand accounts of plenipotentiary acolytes and diplomatic players onstage. His painstaking work conceives a very ample and surprising picture of the many political motions the Armistice put in place. We tour the spent French fields, we get a sense of the policies of the time, and plunge into cabinet meetings and subtle plots that became the lifeblood of Paris for many months. The author vividly portrays Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau -- the Big Three, the ones who, through scores of underlings and tactics, clashed, cajoled and distilled diverging, sometimes opposed, views of how Europe could recover; how powerfully France should rise from the mud; and how, when, and by what amount Germany should pay for the war.

What we see is human despair on scales great and small -- stories about the occupation of Shantung province in China, about the stance and habits of Japanese diplomats, about alarming Bolshevik doings mostly ignored. There are rolling disputes over the Rhineland, the port city of Fiume and the Saar Valley, possibly the only area left for large-scale coal producing in Western continental Europe. There are, exposed, the backroom midwar deals that must suddenly be fulfilled or discarded, with consequences for each path. And, most of all, there's the certainty that months of brutally detailed work and harrowing discussions completely failed to bring about any semblance of real peace, unconnected as the Treaty signed at Versailles was from all-around reality and from any feasible outcomes or future negotiations and alliances. In all, 1919 shored up the rise of despair-led autocratic politicians and officially established a completely wrecked-up continent which would rip itself apart again in just twenty years. Exactly a century after, not only the world hasn't recovered; it seems to be cycling toward a very similar, impossible situation. This book, then, is an essential masterclass to help us understand more completely the mess that WE'RE into.

[Red Tide · Rating 5 out of 5]

Important insights

This was an eye opener, both frightening and informative. I knew something about the treaty and that it was probably the main cause of the second world war but to read that many staffers on the allied delegation actually predicted that it would destabilize Europe and would cause war to break it in a generation was mind boggling. The fact that decision makers ignored those assessments and even realized that they were true, as they rammed the document down Germany's throat was truly scary.

The background of the signers was new to me with the exception of Woodrow Wilson. To read that European diplomats and heads of state considered the League of Nations a joke was a surprise. Wilson proclaimed freedom and dignity for all peoples, except in the words of European diplomats "his own blacks". He hosted the first ever White House movie showing and his pick was "The Clansman" better known as "Birth of a nation". He single handedly propelled the movement to create Confederate memorials across the nation (which hadn't existed prior to his encouragement - these were considered treasonous from 1865 to 1915).

The attitude of his colleagues at Princeton wasn't a surprise, he wasn't pedantic but not much of an academic. Still to read how he enabled the shaping of the treaty was kind of shocking. The short-sightedness of the treaty signers was a good object lesson in allowing decisions of national or international importance to rest with unprepared and delusional leaders.

It was a good insight into the origins of the German-Soviet Alliance. The redrawn map of Europe explained the Italian expansion into the Balkans and Africa. It took me a while to read but was certainly worth it.

[Johannes J Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it please

I live in this world, real time, the 20th and 21st century. The real world, not the one the dumb chosen politicians live in. I read many war stories and no one is different. It is about murder, maiming, killing and the making of “heroes “ and of veterans who are for most of it living corpses. When will politicians ever learn how to use their “power” to avoid physical confrontation - they remain the savages in society.
But as the book point out, they are elected by the masses, not because they are leaders, or visionaries, or their creativity, or intellect or any sought after humane quality, so WHY?
The book show and prove the lowest humane quality in the chosen leaders of the leading nations of the world and their inabilities to solve basic problems. And their ignorance and arrogance and vanity and they have that ability to command war.
May I break for a poke please, my wife just asked me “so what, what do you achieve writing this?”
The book in part answers why we got a Hitler, a Wilson, Trump and important why the world will never settle. Good luck to the few who will shortly be able to escape to Mars.
Read this book.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Charles Mee, author of the definitive history of the summit that ended World War II, MEETING AT POTSDAM, tries very hard and fails to do the same thing for the close of World War I in 1919 VERSAILLES. It doesn't work, since Mee knows no foreign language thoroughly, a great hindrance at elucidating that cunning fox Clemenceau, and anecdotes do not make up for a lack of discussion of how Versailles sowed the seeds for another, bloodier war. This is a missed opportunity by an author who should know better.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the most part, this is a very readable and informative account of the "peace" treaty that was negotiated by the victors of World War I, which was so punitive toward Germany that it almost guaranteed there would shortly be another World War.

The author included a chapter about the surrealism movement that the war gave rise to, which doesn't seem to belong in this book. However, you can easily just skip this chapter since it doesn't really add anything to the narrative.

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tough book for me to review. I read it mainly to understand what brought about WWII. In that respect I wasn't disappointed. At times I found the book rambling and I often put it down for large periods of time.
All these diplomats and politicians so proud of themselves who ultimately were despised by their constituents.

[Tychos Elk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent books. Exposes the folly of peace rooted in vengeance, and arrogance on the part of the "victors". As a fun exercise look up what Lord Balfour said about Cle.menceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining and informative

A fairly detailed account of the personalities and negotiations. Astonishing details such as the fact that none of the signatories seem to have read the complete document.

[Dayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

So nicely detailed, one gets to learn which leader is a cry baby, which. one is a liar, and which one is lacking in any leadership skills.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting coverage of a fretful time. No leader come out of the treaty negotiations looking good. Seems clear that there were not many simple solutions to some very complex territorial problems.

[Debi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An in-depth look into the makings of the Treaty of Versailles. The people involved, conversations, outcomes are all well researched. If interested in WWI, this book will complete your knowledge.