Shout out to faintingviolet and JenK for the EXCELLENT recommendation. They recommended this one after I read The Guns of August last year.
Paris 1919 is an account of all the events that took place after the armistice that ended WWI through the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
MacMillan crafts the narrative around the three major figures and personalities at the conference: US President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and French President Georges Clemenceau and seeks to prove that the Treaty of Versailles did not lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler. She also acknowledges that PM David Lloyd George is her great-grandfather.
Every person you know from history class but can’t quite place (in time) is in this book. That list includes: Ataturk, Balfour, Benes, Curzon, Pilsudski, and Venizelos. Personally, I always forget if T.E. Lawrence was from WWI or WWII and now I should remember that it is definitely WWI. It also has early Winston Churchill after the disaster at Gallipoli. There is extensive discussion of Wilson’s Fourteen Points as well. The thing that makes Paris 1919 so engaging is how well MacMillan researched the people. For example, I knew about Wilson and the League of Nations and the Fourteen Points but I didn’t know nearly as much about his personal life and his relationship with Congress which ultimately doomed the League. I just knew that it was never ratified here but I didn’t realize that it was due in large part to Wilson himself and his personality. MacMillan’s details are relevant and enlightening, both about the people and about the policies and agreements. I have a much better understanding about Eastern Europe and how it became as convoluted as it is now, at least to me.
You should definitely read this book.
“For six months in 1919, Paris was the capital of the world. The Peace Conference was the world’s most important business, the peacemakers its most powerful people. They met day after day. They argued, debated, quarreled and made it up again. They created new countries and new organizations. They dined together and went to the theater together, and between January and June, Paris was at once the world’s government, its court of appeal and its parliament, the focus of its fears and hopes. Officially, the Peace Conference lasted into 1920, but those first six months are the ones that count, when the key decisions were taken and the crucial chains of events set in motion. The world has never seen anything quite like it and never will again.”
– Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World