Historiography of the Treaty of Versailles

    The verdicts of historians

Note to the reader: I attached so many sources/quotes to this historiography that they overwhelmed the article itself.
Therefore I have removed them from the narrative, and you can access them if you want by clicking on the Source links in the text, which opens a pop-up window.  If you prefer, you can download a full list of all the associated sources here.

  Immediate Reactions,   The 1920s and 1930s,    AJP Taylor,   

The Role of Russia,   The 1970s and after,   Modern Scholarship

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

Signing the Treaty - newspaper quotes from the time

The Hated Treaty ... that nobody loved and isn't worth studying

In 2004, I wrote to a number of History teacher friends and colleagues asking them to send me their thoughts on the Treaty.  You can read the different wonderful Teachers' Judgements they shared.

75 pupil statements on Mr Clare's History Blog - Versailles Verdicts.

Prof. Wileman gives an historiographical outline and then uses it to comment on the Treaty (difficult).

The questions considered by historians about the Treaty of Versailles have been much the same as those considered by the politicians of the time:

•  What were Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George trying to achieve? 

•  Was The Treaty of Versailles fair?

•  Was it wise?

•  Was it a failure?

•  Was it even a peace, or was it merely, as one German diplomat suggested “the continuation of war by other means”?

• Could makers of the Peace have done better?

Plus, of course, the issues raised in the AQA GCSE syllabus (2019-)

•  To what extent did Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George achieve their aims?

•  What were the strengths and weaknesses of the settlement?

How have historians answered these questions?

1.  IMMEDIATE REACTIONS

It is not wholly true to say that everybody hated the Treaty.  Returning from Versailles, both Clemenceau in France and Lloyd George in Britain, were greeted by cheering crowds and – although most school textbooks repeat his oft-quoted statement that: 'We shall have to fight another war again in 25 years time' – at the time Lloyd George justified the Treaty's terms in Parliament.

However, he was soon in the minority!  In the rush to save their skins with their populaces after the Treaty was signed, almost everyone else seems to have distanced themselves as far from the Treaty as possible.

The Germans, of course, HATED the Treaty and very quickly the legend grew up in Germany of ‘the stab in the back’ – of a Germany tricked into peace negotiations by the Fourteen Points, then saddled with an imposed treaty which sought to destroy Germany.

The Germans were not alone. In Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, the post-war treaties created populaces aggrieved and angry at the terms of their defeat.  In Russia, Lenin (Source 1) and the Bolsheviks (Source 2) refused from the start to engage with the process, seeing it as an unfair capitalist plot to destroy Russia.  China never signed the Treaty, angry that all German colonies in the far east had gone to Japan.

Even the winners were hostile.  In the United States, Congress refused to ratify the Treaty Wilson had signed and declined to join the League of Nations.  Italy and Japan sulked that their sacrifices had received so little reward.  In France, Clemenceau was attacked for not being harsh enough; his speech in its support was hardly a glowing endorsement – he won the vote for ratification, but was forced out of politics in January 1920.

And, in Britain too, there was criticism … because the Treaty was deemed too harsh by a generation of young diplomats who supported the Wilsonian principle of collective security. 

John Maynard Keynes, a young member of the British delegation, angry that his suggestions about reparations had been ignored, published a damning account of the Conference: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Source 3).  Keynes called the Treaty a ‘Carthaginian Peace’ (referring to the total destruction of the city of Carthage by the Romans when they won the Punic Wars).  His argument was that humiliations and loss of territory, and especially the burden of reparations, would ruin Germany.  Keynes's book had a massive effect on the people of Britain.  It created the belief that Germany had been badly treated, and this in turn may have helped influence British preparedness to 'appease' Hitler in the 1930s.

IT IS REMARKABLE that Keynes’s polemic, which has been fiercely criticised by historians for more than a century, is still quoted by historians, and that school textbooks STILL carry the opinion that reparations were economically harmful and destroyed the German economy (and drove Germany into Nazism).

Another young member of the British delegation was similarly negative.  Harold Nicolson (Source 4 and Source 5) thought that: “the historian, with every justification, will come to the conclusion that we were very stupid men”, and other diplomats and politicians lined up to denounce the treaty (Source 6, Source 7, Source 8).

2.   THE 1920s AND 1930s

The first actual ‘histories’ of the Peace were written by an American journalist called Ray Stannard Baker (What Wilson did at Paris (1919) and Wilson & the World Settlement (1923)).

Baker was a friend of Wilson’s, and he wrote his book (Source 9) to counter the attacks on Wilson that he saw in the American newspapers.  He presented the peace process as a conflict of Good v. Evil, of a New Order (as seen in Wilsonianism and the League of Nations) v. Old Emnities (based on territory, concessions and frontiers).  For Baker, the key moment in the process was a “slump in idealism”, marked by a ‘February Plot’ when England and France conspired together to try to drop the League ... a plot which Wilson, the hero of the Peace, foiled.

IT IS REMARKABLE that Baker’s notion of Wilsonian idealism, standing in contrast to Clemenceau’s intransigency and Lloyd George’s politicking, STILL dominates the accounts in many school textbooks today.

Two other books from the 1920s are worthy of comment.

The first was written by Winston Churchill, whom we do not often think of as an historian.  Churchill had no time for Baker, and attacked him 'with gusto', mocking the idea of a ‘February Plot' – which he labelled, “a plot suited to the more fruity forms of popular taste.”  Then he seized on a passing comment by Baker – that the US diplomatic service was “venturing into a totally unfamiliar scene” – to launch a damning comparison with the British delegation (Source 10).

IT IS REMARKABLE that Churchill’s invective about Wilson’s naivete, standing in contrast to Clemenceau’s experience and Lloyd George’s skill, STILL influences many school textbooks today.

A second notable historian of the 1920s was the American scholar Robert Binkley, whose article: The “Guilt” Clause in the Versailles Treaty (1929) came to academic notice when he realised that the word ‘responsibility’ in Clause 231 (used by the Big Three simply to justify asking Germany to pay reparations) was being translated by the Germans with the word ‘Schuld’ – a word with connotations of ‘moral guilt’.

IT IS REMARKABLE that we are STILL teaching that Clause 231 was 'the War Guilt clause' when we have known since 1929 that this was a German invention and nothing of the sort!

As the 1930s progressed, it became increasingly difficult for anyone to believe that the Peace Treaty of Versailles was not utterly failing to keep the peace, and all those writers who had attacked it simply said that their concerns had been proven correct.  Even Lloyd George (Source 11) had to admit as much, though he refused to accept that it was any failing of the Treaty which was responsible for the imminent Second World War, blaming instead the diplomats and politicians who had failed to uphold it.

In a similar vein HAL Fisher (Source 12), whilst observing that a great opportunity had been missed, and blaming “statesmen not equal to the grandeur of events”, nevertheless pointed out that peace treaties can only keep the peace if people are prepared to keep them … no peace treaty on earth can keep the peace if people are determined upon war.

By the 1960s when I was at school, therefore, we were being taught what Donald Wileman has called ‘the classic version’ of the history of the Treaty.  This included the notions that the Germans had been promised a peace based on the 14 Points; that self-determination was naive and unworkable; that Wilson was obsessed with a League of Nations and soft on Germany; that the Treaty was imposed and punitive; and that Clemenceau wanted to destroy Germany and was largely to blame for “deliberately seeking to keep Germany down with a crushing burden of payments, or at least for being so blind as not to see that Germany couldn’t pay”.

Typical of this approach is Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (1967), where those who wanted strict terms are condemned as 'imperialistic and selfish', 'vindictive and intransigent'; where the French are 'predatory and punitive'; Wilsonian ideals are 'healthy'; and Lloyd George is 'an appeaser by temperament and outlook'.

3.   AJP TAYLOR

All this was upended in 1961 by the British historian AJP Taylor (Source 13).  Reviewing German international diplomacy from the 19th century, Taylor decided that Germany was not just the strongest state in Europe, but that it wanted – believed it had the right – to dominate and conquer Europe.  The problem with the Treaty of Versailles, therefore, he said, was not that it was too harsh, but that it was not harsh enough.  The Treaty had left Germany intact … and therefore the ‘German problem’ unsolved … to be solved only by a second World War.

Taylor had a massive effect on future historians of the Treaty, who – like Norman Lowe in 1982 – pointed out that the Treaty damaged Germany enough to anger the Germans, but not enough to dent their ambitions (Source 14).

Similar views were echoed by Corrrelli Barnett (1986), who agreed that the Allies should have “divided and permanently weakened Germany”, and who argued that – compared to the terms that Germany had imposed on Russia in 1918 – Versailles was “hardly a slap on the wrist”, suggesting that by surrounding Germany with weak nation-states, the Treaty actually increased Germany’s power in Central Europe.

Likewise, Richard Evans (1989) agreed that the Germans were committed to a program of expansion and would have hated any Treaty which tried to prevent it; he also denied that the Treaty had a significant effect on the rise of the Nazis, which he attributed to the Great Depression.

4.   THE ROLE OF RUSSIA

In 1960, George Kennan opened another line of thinking regarding the peace when he described how the Versailles Conference had made a number of attempts to draw Russia into the peace; he saw their failure as the result of lack of coordination, and a fundamental misunderstanding of Bolshevism.

The Russian Revolution and the danger of Communist Revolution deeply worried the peacemakers from the start – as he sailed to France, Wilson had commented that: “The poison of Bolshevism was accepted because ‘it is a protest against the way in which the world has worked.’  It was to be our purpose at the Peace conference to fight for ‘a new order’ ...”

In 1967, John Thompson in his book Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace showed that Western policy towards defeated Germany in 1919 was partly influenced by fear of Bolshevism, but that the Conference could not decide whether that was an argument for treating Germany lightly, or for treating her harshly.

Historians have disagreed about how big an influence fear of Russia was – in 1979, Tony Howarth’s textbook (Source 15) listed it as a major worry of Lloyd George, but in 1989 Hugh Seton-Watson suggested (Source 16) that the Big Three's fears subsided as the horrors of the Russian Revolution turned the peoples of Europe away from thoughts of a Communist revolution.

5.   THE 1970s AND AFTER

Towards the end of the century, the countries of Europe began releasing their confidential documents relating to the peace.  The result was that historians studying the treaties turned from general comments to intense national studies.  And they found out some facts which did not fit the established ideas.

For example, in Germany, historians found that all German politicians, not just the Nazis, were violently against the Treaty, and that the German government consciously ran a propaganda campaign to discredit the peace treaty both legally and morally.

By contrast, French historians found that the French delegation was prepared to discuss solutions to the German problem other than totally destroying Germany, as long as France was kept safe; and that Clemenceau – far from intractably demanding unapyable reparations – was the only one of the Big Three who discussed with the German delegation whether they could actually pay.

Meanwhile, historians realised that Wilson – again contrary to common belief – wanted ‘justice’ not reconciliation, and was strong on punishing Germany severely, as an example to other states in the future.

Thus it was, when Marc Trachtenberg marked the 60th anniversary of the peace (Source 17), he started by acknowledging that these new domestic studies had undermined the traditional interpretation of the Treaty.

To mark the 75th anniversary, The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years was published – a huge two-volume collection of studies by different scholars, with a third volume wholly of sources.  It did not offer an overview judgement of the Treaty, and most of the articles focussed on individual countries.

6.   MODERN SCHOLARSHIP

Serious modern scholarship rejects a traditional 'Good-but-naive Wilsonianism/ Bad-and-duplicitous Old Imperialism/ Poor Germany' view of the Treaty.

No modern historians present the Peace as all good, but they find much to praise.

William Keylor (Source 18), for instance, praised the principle of self-determination, seeing in it a 'genuine' (though 'imperfect' and 'ineffective') attempt at 'multiculturalism'.

Other historians, while acknowledging the Treaty’s failures, are prepared to praise the Treaty in the circumstances (Source 19 and Source 20).

In 2003 Margaret Macmillan (Source 21) – great granddaughter of Lloyd George and Professor of History at the University of Toronto, Canada – published her 500-page book on the Treaty: Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (2001).  It won the BBC4 Samuel Johnson prize and has been described as 'magnificent', 'enthralling', and 'detailed, fair, unfailingly lively', as well as 'splendidly revisionist'.  In 2004 she was interviewed on PBS about the Treaty; that same year she was kind enough to write to summarise for me her views on the Treaty (Source 22).

In 2013 the American historian Sally Marks came to much the same conclusion (Source 23).  She did find things to criticise in the peacemaking: the Big Four were disorganised and “hopped from topic to topic”; they never debated the ‘German problem’ in full; they never considered the shape of the new Europe they were creating; and they never discussed how they might enforce the Treaty – “they did not see that imposing a victor’s peace without the will to enforce it presaged problems”.

Nevertheless she dissed the traditional myths of the peace: the Treaty HAD to be a compromise; Keynes book was full of “distortions and omissions”; the Germans COULD pay reparations; most of the lands that Germany ‘lost’ had been newly acquired and/or were non-German; and the French were not vindictive, they were just scared of their aggressive, more-powerful neighbour.

Most recently, in 2017, the German-turned-Australian writer Jurgen Tampke (Source 24) has said the same things more bluntly: Germany deliberately misinterpreted the Fourteen Points; Article 231 did not assign guilt to Germany; the estimation of German losses are based on phony statistics; Keynes was wrong … and if the Treaty failed to stop war “that was not the fault of the peacemakers”.

So why is it, asked Sally Marks, that not just popular opinion, but many professional historians, still condemn the Treaty and “rehearse traditional complaints largely on the basis of old – often very old – studies”?  In Mistakes and Myths, she finds the answer: “it was thanks to one of the world’s most successful and longest-lasting propaganda efforts … that ‘the treaty was unfair’”.