The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

But in seeking to explain Versailles’s Janus face, Bainville looked beyond the emotional cycle of crime and punishment to a deeper historical and structural feature of the peace. Whether it was cruel or kind, what struck Bainville most about the Versailles settlement was that it extended the principle of national sovereignty across all of Europe, including to Germany. Despite the disaster unleashed by Bismarck’s creation of 1871, an integral and sovereign German nation state was taken for granted as a basic element in the new order. For Bainville this assumption was the hallmark of sentimental nineteenth-century liberalism.5 The bizarre mixture of cruelty and kindness that characterized the peace was the direct result of Clemenceau’s effort to reconcile the security needs of France with his romantic attachment to the principle of nationality.