Paris Peace Conference (1919 - 1920)
Years: 1919 - 1920
The Paris Peace Conference is the meetings in 1919 and 1920 of the victorious Allies after the end of the first World War to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers.
The conference involves diplomats from thirty-two countries and nationalities, and its major decisions are the creation of the League of Nations and the five peace treaties with the defeated states; the awarding of German and Ottoman overseas possessions as "mandates," chiefly to Britain and France, the imposition of reparations upon Germany, and the drawing of new national boundaries, sometimes with plebiscites, to reflect ethnic boundaries more closely.
The main result is the Treaty of Versailles with Germany; Article 231 of the treaty places the whole guilt for the war on "the aggression of Germany and her allies."
That provision proves to be very humiliating for Germany and sets the stage for the expensive reparations that Germany is intended to pay (it pays only a small portion before its last payment in 1931).
The five great powers (France, Britain, Italy, Japan and the United States) control the Conference.
The "Big Four" are French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, US President Woodrow Wilson, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. They meet informally one hundred and forty-five times and make all major decisions before they were ratified.
The conference began on 18 January 1919. With respect to its end, Professor Michael Neiberg noted, "Although the senior statesmen stopped working personally on the conference in June 1919, the formal peace process did not really end until July 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed."[2]
It is often referred to as the "Versailles Conference," but only the signing of the first treaty took place there, in the historic palace, and the negotiations occurred at the Quai d'Orsay, in Paris.