January 18

1919 : Post-World War I peace conference begins in
Paris

On this day in Paris, France, some of the most
powerful people in the world meet to begin the long,
complicated negotiations that would officially mark
the end of the First World War.

Leaders of the victorious Allied powers--France, Great Britain,
the United States and Italy--would make most
of the crucial decisions in Paris over the next six
months. For most of the conference, U.S. President
Woodrow Wilson struggled to support his idea of a
"peace without victory" and make sure that Germany,
the leader of the Central Powers and the major loser
of the war, was not treated too harshly. On the other
hand, Prime Ministers Georges Clemenceau of France and
David Lloyd George of Britain argued that punishing
Germany adequately and ensuring its weakness was the
only way to justify the immense costs of the war. In
the end, Wilson compromised on the treatment of
Germany in order to push through the creation of his
pet project, an international peacekeeping
organization called the League of Nations.

Representatives from Germany were excluded from the
peace conference until May, when they arrived in Paris
and were presented with a draft of the Versailles
Treaty. Having put great faith in Wilson's promises,
the Germans were deeply frustrated and disillusioned
by the treaty, which required them to forfeit a great
deal of territory and pay reparations. Even worse, the
infamous Article 231 forced Germany to accept sole
blame for the war. This was a bitter pill many Germans
could not swallow.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919,
five years to the day after a Serbian nationalist's
bullet ended the life of Austrian Archduke Franz
Ferdinand and sparked the beginning of World War I. In
the decades to come, anger and resentment of the
treaty and its authors festered in Germany. Extremists
like Adolf Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Party
capitalized on these emotions to gain power, a process
that led almost directly to the exact thing Wilson and
the other negotiators in Paris in 1919 had wanted to
prevent--a second, equally devastating global war.

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