Paris Peace Conference

The Paris Peace Conference was the gathering of the victorious powers and their allies which, after the Armistice of Compiègne, settled the terms of peace with the defeated. It opened on 18 January 1919 and formally closed on 21 January 1920. Its sessions were held mainly in the building of the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay. The conference drew up five peace treaties and the Covenant of the League of Nations.

How it worked

Delegates from 27 states came to Paris, among them separate delegations of the British dominions, demanded by the Prime Ministers of Canada, Robert Borden, and of Australia, William Hughes. Representatives of nations without a state of their own also sought a hearing, usually in vain. The defeated were not invited, and neither was Soviet Russia.

The French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau chaired the proceedings, and the plenary sessions decided nothing. From mid-January decisions lay with the Council of Ten, made up of two delegates each from the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan. In mid-March the most important matters passed to the Council of Four, the “Big Four”: President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Ministers Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. Lesser questions were left to the foreign ministers, and the details were worked out by 52 commissions.

Wartime promises

During the war the future conference was the reference point for every claim. The Allies’ secret agreements, such as the Treaty of London of 1915 or the promises to Japan, as well as the programmes of national movements, were all to be settled there. The United States, however, did not consider itself bound by agreements it had not signed. When the Italians also demanded Fiume, Wilson appealed directly to the Italian people on 23 April 1919, and the Italian delegation left the conference, returning on 7 May without any concessions. Germany’s rights in Shantung were awarded to Japan, and for that reason China was the only victorious state present in Paris that did not sign the treaty with Germany.

Poland in Paris

The Polish delegation was led by Roman Dmowski. On 16 January Ignacy Jan Paderewski became Prime Minister and Foreign Minister; Józef Piłsudski saw in him a guarantee of Allied recognition. On 29 January Dmowski spent some five hours presenting Poland’s demands to the Council of Ten. The commission of the French diplomat Jules Cambon, in its report of 19 March, gave Poland generous western borders, but Lloyd George pushed through a free city in Danzig and plebiscites. Poland also had to accept a minority protection treaty, which it signed on the same day as the peace with Germany.

The conference’s Supreme Council also settled disputes in the east. On 25 June 1919 it authorised Poland to occupy Eastern Galicia up to the Zbruch, and on 26 July it adopted a demarcation line between the Polish and Lithuanian forces. Poland’s eastern borders were not drawn in Paris, and Poland was already fighting a war with Soviet Russia that lasted until the autumn of 1920.

The treaties

The most important was the Treaty of Versailles, signed with Germany on 28 June 1919. Its first part was the Covenant of the League of Nations. The peace with Austria, concluded at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 10 September 1919, limited its army to 30,000 men. In the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine, signed on 27 November 1919, Bulgaria ceded Western Thrace to Greece, and with it its access to the Aegean Sea. The Treaty of Trianon of 4 June 1920 left Hungary 93,000 km² out of 325,000. The treaty with the Ottoman Empire, signed at Sèvres on 10 August 1920, never came into force, and in 1923 it was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne.

In March 1920 the United States Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, and with it membership of the League of Nations. The order established in Paris was contested from the start: the defeated spoke of a dictated peace, and historians still argue over whether it was just and lasting.