Treaty of Versailles 1919: Clemenceau, Wilson and the War Guilt Clause

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On June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the Allies signed the peace with Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the room where the German Empire was proclaimed in 1871. The armistice had not ended Germany's suffering: the Allied naval blockade ran for eight more months, and between 424,000 and 763,000 German civilians died of hunger and disease. Germany refused to hand over its merchant fleet until March 1919, when 270,000 tons of food were finally let in. In Paris, Georges Clemenceau sought security after France lost 1.3 million soldiers, David Lloyd George wanted a solvent Germany and naval supremacy, and Woodrow Wilson pressed his Fourteen Points.

Italy's Vittorio Orlando walked out when self-determination clashed with the territory promised in a secret 1915 treaty. The final text was a patchwork: League of Nations mandates in place of outright annexation, and an occupied, demilitarized Rhineland in exchange for an Anglo-American guarantee that collapsed when the US Senate refused ratification. Marshal Ferdinand Foch called it an armistice for 20 years, and John Maynard Keynes resigned, calling it a Carthaginian peace. Historian Detlev Peukert argues that the perception of the treaty, shaped by wartime censorship and the stab-in-the-back myth, did more harm than its terms.

• Article 231, the war guilt clause, made Germany accept responsibility for all loss and damage of the war to ground reparations.
• Article 227 called for trying Kaiser Wilhelm II, but the Netherlands refused extradition and he died in exile in 1941.
• Lloyd George had campaigned on the slogan hang the Kaiser, while Wilson's advisers opposed a retroactive criminal charge.
• Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa won the right to sign the treaty separately.
• At Brest-Litovsk in 1918 Germany had stripped Russia of a third of its population, half its industry and nine-tenths of its coal mines.