At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand had sat with Castlereagh of England, Metternich of Austria, Alexander I of Russia, and Frederick William III of Prussia, the coalition that had destroyed Napoleon’s empire, to create a new structure of peace. At Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Germans and Russians had negotiated the terms. But though Germany’s fate was to be decided, no German had been invited, for the Allies had come to Paris to punish them as the guilty nation responsible for destroying the peace.
