Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World—Margaret MacMillan, AZW3 EPUB MOBI

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World—Margaret MacMillan.Formats AZW3 EPUB MOBI; Published 2002

Also published as:
Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (2001)
Peacemakers: Six Months That Changed the World.

Non-fiction. Tags: History, Military, Treaty of Versailles, World War I
isbn:9780375760525 Hash: E8325B76F7B1E4BC0F605072A9ED71984160C990

This is a historical narrative about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, after World War I. It describes the six months of negotiations focusing on the "Big Three", photographed together on its cover (left to right): Prime Minister David Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, and President Woodrow Wilson of the United States. It is a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities — Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them — born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.

The book argues that the conditions imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles did not lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

It was written by the Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan with a foreword by American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. It has won a number of awards that you have probably never have heard of, but top of the list is making it into KAT.

From Publishers Weekly

A joke circulating in Paris early in 1919 held that the peacemaking Council of Four, representing Britain, France, the U.S. and Italy, was busy preparing a "just and lasting war."

Six months of parleying concluded on June 28 with Germany's coerced agreement to a treaty no Allied statesman had fully read, according to MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto, in this vivid account.

Although President Wilson had insisted on a League of Nations, even his own Senate would vote the league down and refuse the treaty. As a rush to make expedient settlements replaced initial negotiating inertia, appeals by many nationalities for Wilsonian self-determination would be overwhelmed by rhetoric justifying national avarice.

The Italians, who hadn't won a battle, and the French, who'd been saved from catastrophe, were the greediest, says MacMillan; the Japanese plucked Pacific islands that had been German and a colony in China known for German beer.

The austere and unlikable Wilson got nothing; returning home, he suffered a debilitating stroke.

The council's other members horse-traded for spoils, as did Greece, Poland and the new Yugoslavia. There was, Wilson declared, "disgust with the old order of things," but in most decisions the old order in fact prevailed, and corrosive problems, like Bolshevism, were shelved.

Hitler would blame Versailles for more ills than it created, but the signatories often could not enforce their writ.

MacMillan's lucid prose brings her participants to colorful and quotable life, and the grand sweep of her narrative encompasses all the continents the peacemakers vainly carved up. 16 pages of photos, maps.


From Library Journal

In an ambitious narrative, MacMillan (history, University of Toronto) seeks to recover the original intent, constraints, and goals of the diplomats who sat down to hammer out a peace treaty in the aftermath of the Great War. In particular, she focuses on the "Big Three" Wilson (United States), Lloyd George (Great Britain), and Clemenceau (France) who dominated the critical first six months of the Paris Peace Conference.

Viewing events through such a narrow lens can reduce diplomacy to the parochial concerns of individuals. But instead of falling into this trap, MacMillan uses the Big Three as a starting point for analyzing the agendas of the multitude of individuals who came to Versailles to achieve their largely nationalist aspirations.

Following her analysis of the forces at work in Europe, MacMillan takes the reader on a tour de force of the postwar battlefields of Asia and the Middle East. Of particular interest is her sympathy for those who tried to make the postwar world more peaceful. Although their lofty ambitions fell prey to the passions of nationalism, this should not detract from their efforts.

This book will help rehabilitate the peacemakers of 1919 and is recommended for all libraries.