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Portrait of The Treaty of Versailles

History · The 20th century

The Treaty of Versailles

signed 28 June 1919; in force 10 January 1920

Peace settlement — the Paris Peace Conference and the German treaty

The peace imposed on Germany at the end of the First World War, signed in the Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination at Sarajevo, and in the room where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871. Negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference by the Big Four — Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Vittorio Orlando — with no German participation, it required Germany to accept responsibility for causing the war, to pay reparations later fixed at 132 billion gold marks, to give up Alsace-Lorraine, all its colonies and about 13 per cent of its territory, to cut its army to 100,000 men with no air force, submarines or tanks, and to demilitarise the Rhineland. Its first part was the Covenant of the League of Nations. The United States Senate refused to ratify it.

How to spot them

  • ▸Signed in the Hall of Mirrors, in the room where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871
  • ▸Signed on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after Sarajevo
  • ▸The Big Four: an American president, a British and a French prime minister, and an Italian
  • ▸Its Part I was the Covenant of the League of Nations
  • ▸The country it bound was not allowed to negotiate, and called it the Diktat

What happened

Article 231, the war guilt clause (1919)

Germany accepted responsibility for all the loss and damage caused by the aggression of the Central Powers

A reparations bill fixed in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks (1921)

The London Schedule of Payments; the last instalment of associated debt was paid in 2010

An army capped at 100,000 men, with no tanks, submarines or air force (1919)

Conscription was banned and the Rhineland permanently demilitarised

The verdict that this was not peace but an armistice for twenty years (1919)

Attributed to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who thought the terms too lenient on Germany's frontiers

Keynes's furious resignation pamphlet of 1919 (1919)

The Economic Consequences of the Peace argued the reparations were unpayable and would poison Europe

A Senate that twice refused to ratify, leaving its own president's League without America (1919–20)

Henry Cabot Lodge led the opposition; the US made a separate peace with Germany in 1921

Quick-fire facts

  • •Signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles; it came into force on 10 January 1920
  • •The Big Four were Woodrow Wilson (US), David Lloyd George (Britain), Georges Clemenceau (France, nicknamed the Tiger) and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando (Italy)
  • •Wilson's Fourteen Points of January 1918 had framed the expectations the settlement largely disappointed
  • •Alsace-Lorraine returned to France; the Saar went under League administration with its coal to France for fifteen years
  • •The Polish Corridor gave Poland access to the sea and separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany; Danzig became a Free City
  • •Germany lost all its overseas colonies, redistributed as League of Nations mandates
  • •Union with Austria, the Anschluss, was forbidden
  • •The German signatories were Foreign Minister Hermann Müller and Transport Minister Johannes Bell
  • •Companion treaties settled with the other defeated powers: Saint-Germain (Austria), Neuilly (Bulgaria), Trianon (Hungary) and Sèvres (Ottoman Empire), the last replaced by Lausanne in 1923
  • •Margaret MacMillan's Peacemakers, published in the United States as Paris 1919, is the standard modern account of the conference

Drill it — 10 cards

1 / 10new card

Sources