Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, and Chile and the Nazis, and the coauthor of Invisible and
Inaudible in Washington: American Policies To

Margaret MacMillan has written a classic. Paris 1919 correctly argues
that the first six months of 1919 have affected the world ever since.
The leaders of most of the world’s most powerful countries—and many
others—went to Paris, where they created a new map of Europe; threw
Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds together into a probably ungovernable
state of Iraq; wrestled with the Palestinian question; and transferred
Germany’s Shantung Peninsula in China to Japan rather than back to
China.

MacMillan’s prose is gripping. The book begins with character
sketches of the participants and notes that Woodrow Wilson “angrily”
refused to tour any battlefields lest he be prejudiced in favor of
France. Although Macmillan is a great-great-granddaughter of David Lloyd
George, then the British prime minister and chief British negotiator at
Versailles, this is no hagiography. She says that his memoirs were
“frequently inaccurate.” While the highest priority for Canadian
delegates at the conference was harmony between the United States and
the United Kingdom, they could discuss such eccentricities as exchanging
the Alaska Panhandle for British Honduras.

MacMillan researched extensively into the archives of the three most
important countries at Versailles (the United States, the United
Kingdom, and France), as well as Canada, and challenges the conventional
wisdom that mistakes at Versailles led to World War II. Hitler used the
Treaty of Versailles as propaganda, but he wanted Czechoslovak, Polish,
and Soviet territory that had never been part of Germany. Yet, one might
debate whether Hitler would have gained power in the first place without
perceived injustices in the Treaty of Versailles.

In a work this size, one would expect a few factual errors, and there
are some. MacMillan identifies Victoriano Huerta as “the man who
started the Mexican Revolution of 1911.” Surely that honor belongs to
Francisco Madero. She attributes to French Prime Minister Georges
Clemenceau a statement usually (and more appropriately) attributed to
Lloyd George: “I find myself ... between Jesus Christ [Woodrow Wilson]
on the one hand, and Napoleon Bonaparte [Clemenceau] on the other.”
Nevertheless, this is a brilliant, fascinating, provocative book—one
of the most significant to have been published in 2002.