Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
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Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize
Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize
Between January and July 1919, after “the war to end all wars,” men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, unyielding, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict quietly, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam.
For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and made new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews.
The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of persons who came later. She refutes received thoughts about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part reliable for the Second World War.
A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Talks in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of persons dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were made—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel—whose troubles haunt us still.
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…P>This is fashionable history seen through the prism of personalities, the `fantastic man’ approach to history. No marvel that Blair, we are told, liked this book!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Appealing to persons who wish to know the maneuvering during the six month in 1919. The College/University I graduated from had a member of President Wilson’s staff teaching there, Ms. Hampton, who I judge was in secretly in like with Wilson. DR. Hampton was particularly taken by Wilson’s 14 Points and insisted a paper be written on one of the 14 points. Each student was to choose the point to write a paper on, she nearly swooned when Point Six was chosen, i.e. Self Determination.
College/University – University of Central Oklahoma – Graduated Summer 1958. My Father was a World War I veteran, dead at 48 in 1945, Veterans Hospital in Amarrilo, Texas – Death contributed to gas during training.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Margaret MacMillan, an historian based at Ryerson University, tells the tale of the Paris talks of 1919. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires had all been overthrown, and delegates from thirty countries met for six months to agree Treaties supposed to bring peace and stability. But only the British, French, US and Italian governments took the decisions.
Did the `Huge Four’ achieve peace? After `the war to end war’, this was a peace to end peace. They irritated, but did not corral, Germany. They encouraged Greece to attack Turkey, disastrously. They opposed self-determination for the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
They backed Winston Churchill’s counter-revolutionary attack on Russia. As he boasted, “they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its breakdown.” Spurred by class hatred, Churchill was the most vicious enemy of the Russian people. MacMillan, to her bring shame on, writes, “With hindsight, Churchill and Foch were right about the Bolsheviks.”
Further, the Talks let Britain and France apportion the Middle East into occupied mandates, `telling the Moslem what he ought to reflect’, as Balfour said. MacMillan quotes Lloyd George, “Mesopotamia … yes … oil … we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine … yes … the Holy Land … Zionism … we must have Palestine; Syria … h’m … what is there in Syria? Let the French have that.”
MacMillan likens the end of the First World War to the counter-revolutions of 1989-90: “there was the same sense of a new order emerging.” But the end of the Soviet Union did not bring peace, reasonably the opposite: it finished the post-1945 peace settlement and ushered in a period of wars, from Yugoslavia to Chechnya to Iraq. Her own account shows that the 1919 Talks did not bring a new order, ending war.
This is fashionable history seen through the prism of personalities, the `fantastic man’ approach to history, yielding trite judgements favouring the capitalist powers. No marvel Blair liked this book!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I read the first 50 or so pages. when the leader ongoing gushing about her fantastic grandfather David Lloyd George, “a cheerful, rosy-faced man”, and a “natural optimist”, in contrast to the horrible Woodrow Wilson and Georges Clemenceau, something drew me to the leader bio on the back jacket. sure enough, Ms. McMillan has a rather startling bias. no thank you, I don’t need to read your valentine. everything you say is suspect. there are too many additional fantastic books to read written by authors lacking a familial lineage to promote. excellent grief.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Margaret MacMillian’s book Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World is foddler for the next Trivia Pursuit game. What is lacks in right erudition it more than makes up for in appealing trivia points worthy of a parlor game or a “gee did you know…” contest.
What this book lacks is past perspective. After nearly 90 years since the war came to an end, certainly there is enough material to trace events at Versailles through to the modern era. The material on Arabia and present-day Iraq, for example, was priceless especially agreed the current US problems in Iraq, but is really useless within the context the book gives us.
The inability of the USA to assert its role as world policeman was another perspective largely left from the book. It was American entry into the war that tipped the balance toward France and Fantastic Britain yet Wilson too regularly caved to the British and French. Imagine if he’d have been as tough as Harry Truman or John Kennedy were years later. MacMillan rarely acknowledges this fact, preferring to recite history.
Let’s face it, what she has here is a serious 10th grade history text on World War 1. What she doesn’t have is a treatse on the modern world and how we got here.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5