Nor did the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in May 1919 lighten his mood. Although France had recovered the territories of Alsace-Lorraine, lost in 1871, the more ambitious demands of French conservatives, such as detaching the Rhineland from Germany and creating a buffer state on France’s eastern border, had not been achieved. France got no more than the demilitarization of the Rhineland and its occupation by Allied troops for fifteen years.
