Video:
Audio:
Recommended Reading:
- Powerpoint presentation
- Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points
- The Treaty of Versailles
- The Covenant of the League of Nations
- Margaret Macmillan’s Paris 1919 provides many sordid details of the backroom horse-trading at the peace conference. The Versailles Settlement by Alan Sharp is highly regarded.
- Ludwig von Mises’s Nation, State, and Economy was published in 1919 with recommendations for the postwar order.
Paris Peace Conference – Quiz
- Identify the “Big Four” at the Paris Peace Conference.
- Identify at least three of the principles embodied in the Fourteen Points.
- Explain why Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles was so important and controversial.
- Summarize German losses under the Treaty of Versailles.
- Explain the fates of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires following World War I.
- Identify at least two new states created in eastern Europe by the treaties resulting from the peace conference.
- Explain the purpose and function of the League of Nations.
- Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, Vittorio Orlando
- ending secret diplomacy; freedom of the seas; self-determination of nationalities; creation of a League of Nations; creation of Poland; restoration of Belgian neutrality
- It assigned sole blame for the war to Germany, implying that Germany was financially responsible for all damages to life and property resulting from the war. It was controversial because much evidence existed for the culpability in varying degrees of all the Great Powers for the war.
- It surrendered all the territory gained from Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as well as some of its prewar eastern territory for the creation of Poland; it surrendered Alsace and Lorraine to France in the west and agreed to demilitarize the Rhineland; it signed a blank check on reparations; its military was limited to a 100, 000-man domestic police force and was forbidden “offensive weapons” such as tanks, airplanes, and submarines.
- They were broken up in order to create new states controlled by various ethnic groups that had been under the rule of Germans and Turks, respectively. The German Austrians were left with a rump Austria, and the Turks were left with a rump Turkey.
- Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia; Hungary, Yugoslavia
- It was a collective security organization designed to preserve the territorial settlements resulting from the Paris Peace Conference and to prevent future wars through the mobilizing of collective actions against any state deemed an agressor.