paris 1919 6 months that changed the world

Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams.

Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize īetween January and July 1919, after “the war to end all wars,” men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace.

It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created-Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel-whose troubles haunt us still. Paris 1919 (originally published as Peacemakers) offers a prismatic view of the moment when much of the modern world was first sketched out.A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. They tried to be evenhanded, but their goals - to make defeated countries pay without destroying them, to satisfy impossible nationalist dreams, to prevent the spread of Bolshevism and to establish a world order based on democracy and reason - could not be achieved by diplomacy. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally failed above all to prevent another war. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China and dismissed the Arabs, struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. There had never been anything like it before, and there never has been since.įor six extraordinary months the city was effectively the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. Lawrence, Queen Marie of Romania, Maynard Keynes, Ho Chi Minh. Everyone had business in Paris that year - T.E.

Kings, prime ministers and foreign ministers with their crowds of advisers rubbed shoulders with journalists and lobbyists for a hundred causes - from Armenian independence to women's rights.

At its heart were the leaders of the three great powers - Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Between January and July 1919, after the war to end all wars, men and women from all over the world converged on Paris for the Peace Conference.

Paris 1919 6 months that changed the world