Steve's Reviews > Paris, 1919: Six Months that Changed the World

Margaret MacMillan has written a masterful, exceptionally-researched volume on one of history's critical fulcrums, for which she has earned much deserved praise. A few personal reactions are in order, I feel. For some, perhaps undeserved reason, I found myself slogging through this work, about two-thirds of the way in; maybe it was the amount of attention devoted to what seem satellite issues, like the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, the Arab states, Japan, China, and did I mention Turkey? Yes, I understand there are important historical consequences that merit the attention, yet I felt tired. I read this work because of an interest in the after-effects of the peace to subsequent German history. Ms. MacMillan addressed my interest in her conclusion, specifically raising the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth, and the accounting for war reparations, which, she argues, were relatively insubstantial, despite the popular narrative to the contrary. She writes (p.480):

The final figure was set in London in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks (about £6.6 billion or $33 billion). In reality, through an ingenious system of bonds and complex clauses, Germany was committed to pay less than half that amount. It would pay the remainder only when circumstances permitted, such as an improvement in Germany's export figures. Germany also got generous credit for payments in cash or in kind it had already made, such as replacing books in the Louvain library in Belgium that German troops had burned at the beginning of the war, or for German railways in the territory transferred to Poland. (It tried unsuccessfully to claim the ships scuttled at Scapa Flow.) Even when the payment schedules were revised downward several times, however, the Germans continued to argue that reparations were intolerable. With a unanimity rare in Weimar politics, Germans felt they were paying too much. Germany regularly defaulted on its payments-for the last time and for good in 1932. Orlando had warned of this in 1919, when he said that the capacity to pay was related to the will of the debtor. "It would be dangerous," he added, "to adopt a formula which would, as it were, reward bad faith and a refusal to work."

In the final reckoning, Germany may have paid about 22 billion gold marks (£1.1 billion, $4.5 billion) in the whole period between 1918 and 1932. That is probably slightly less than what France, with a much smaller economy, paid Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. In one way the figures matter; in another they are completely irrelevant. The Germans were convinced that reparations were ruining them. If Germany was not prepared to pay reparations, the Allies were not prepared to enforce their will. While the Treaty of Versailles provided for sanctions-specifically, prolonging the occupation of the Rhineland-the Allies had to want to use them. By the 1930s neither the British nor the French government was prepared to do so over reparations or anything else.

A few paragraphs later, she writes (p.482), "The Treaty of Versailles is not to blame" for what ensued in Germany. It's a testament to the power of the German nationalist propaganda machine that followed Versailles, that the punishment narrative lives so strongly today.

I feel a congress of third graders could have concluded a more amicable and lasting peace than the notable politicians dispatched for that purpose. President Wilson, for one, proved himself politically unskilled in his handling of the US Senate; oh, for the days of Lyndon Johnson. I'm left to wonder how things would have turned out in Paris were he not so singularly focused on the League of Nations, a concept which revealed an ivory tower naïveté.