Spotlight: The ironic fallout from the Treaty of Versailles

France alone had lost 1.3 million soldiers, a quarter of French men between the ages of 18 and 30, more than 400,000 civilians, and its industrial heartland had been devastated.

The guns had been quiet since November the previous year, on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when an armistice was signed aboard a railway carriage deep in the Forest of Compiègne, in Picardy, north of Paris.

It was the exact same spot, in another carriage, that Hitler, aware of the symbolism, would sign an armistice – the effective defeat of France – in June 1940.

The signing of the Versailles treaty took place five years to the day when the gates to war were opened with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie who were shot to death in Sarajevo by a young Serb nationalist. But the symbolism stretches back almost 50 years before, to 1871 in the same grand room of the palace, where the German Empire was proclaimed at the end of the Franco-Prussian War and in the defeat and destruction of the Second French Empire. In 1919, French prime minister Georges Clemenceau’s choice of location for the signing was a conscious, deliberate, reordering of exactly who was in charge.

The terms of surrender had been decided months before by the Big Four – France, Britain, the United States and Italy – and although Germany had lobbied to soften them there was no give by the allies. They imposed harsh conditions, reparations, the ceding of captured territory, but, in practice, few of them were carried through in the inter-war years.

The population and territory of Germany was reduced by about 10% by the treaty. The war guilt clause deemed Germany the aggressor in the war and consequently made it responsible for making reparations to the Allied nations in payment for the losses and damage they had sustained A later commission in 1921 set an amount of more than £20 billion.

The Big Four – Lloyd George, President Woodrow Wilson, Vittorio Orlando of Italy and Clemenceau, but especially Clemenceau – wanted to make sure that Germany would never again pose a military threat to the rest of Europe. The German army was restricted to 100,000 men, the manufacture of armoured cars, tanks, submarines, airplanes and poison gas was forbidden, and only a small number of specified factories could make weapons or munitions.

What was to become the League of Nations was part of the blueprint for future peace and, in 1919, Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize as the leading architect in the formation of the league. However, Wilson was unable to get it through the US Senate and, for the first time in it history, it rejected a treaty, the one signed in Versailles.

Democrats mostly supported the treaty, but Republicans were divided into the “reservationists” and the “irreconcilables”. When it went to the floor the vote was lost by 39 to 55. The United States never ratified the Treaty of Versailles, nor did it join the League of Nations.

The French military leader Ferdinand Foch refused to attend the signing ceremony, as he thought the treaty didn’t do enough to secure against a future German threat. He said, as the ink was drying on the treaty, in a remarkably prophetic speech: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”

The economist John Maynard Keynes had been a British Treasury delegate at the earlier Paris Peace Conference which framed the allies’ demands on Germany. In his bestselling 1919 book, The Economic Consequences Of The Peace, he brutally castigated the men he thought were imbeciles who forged the plan. “A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene,” he wrote, “the futility and smallness of man before the great events confronting him, the mingled significance and unreality of the decisions – levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from without. All the elements of ancient tragedy were there.”

The war artist William Orpen was equally withering in his portrayal of the treaty signatories, dwarfed as he pictured them in the grandeur of the Hall of Mirrors, with Woodrow Wilson barely glancing up from his newspaper. Orpen had spent much of the war painting piles of dead bodies at the front. For his last Versailles canvas he spent nine months minutely capturing senior politicians and soldiers in the palace’s Hall of Peace, before painting over them in disgust and covering their images with a depiction of a union flag-draped coffin, guarded by two emaciated, shell-shocked, semi-nude British soldiers.

He later painted out the soldiers. The Imperial War Museum, which had commissioned him, refused to accept the painting. “I couldn’t go on,” he said. “It seemed so unimportant somehow beside the reality as I had seen it and felt it when I was working with the armies.”

The treaty was, 20 years later, used by Hitler as one of the justifications for launching the Second World War. However, despite its stringent requirements, it had no enforcement mechanism. Most contemporary historians conclude that while it was a bad treaty it did not inevitably put the world on the highway to war and that there were a multiplicity of factors involved, including the Great Depression. But, most importantly, what you might call the Fuhrer’s social Darwinism, a belief war was the great test of a nation.

When he came to power in 1934, his government began to violate many of the terms of the toothless treaty, not only announcing a moratorium on all debt payments but ending reparations, together with starting to build up the German armed forces once more. The world looked the other way.

The First World War had been set in train on June 28, with two shots that changed the world, the 19-year-old Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip killing both Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austria-Hungary throne, and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, in the Bosnian province which had been annexed by the Austrian empire.

Events quickly spiralled out of control. A month later, to the day, Austria-Hungary, with its ally Germany, declared war on Serbia and, within days, Russia. Germany, intent on expanding its empire, invaded France through Belgium, with whom Britain had a treaty, propelling the UK into the war. The Balkan imbroglio, of course, was to continue until almost to the end of the 20th century.

Of the Big Four, Woodrow Wilson suffered ill-health and was repulsed in his ambition to seek a third term in office. He was criticised posthumously for segregating his office staff and there have also been moves to pull down his statues.

Unlike Clemenceau and Orlando, Lloyd George did not want to destroy the German economy and political system —as Clemenceau demanded — with massive reparations. Orlando flirted with fascism under Mussolini and was linked with the mafia. In 1925, in the Italian senate, he said that he was proud of being mafioso, apparently intending this to mean a “man of honour”.

The final stage call belongs to Clemenceau, a man of remarkable indefatigability and deadpan humour. At the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919, which framed the German deal, he had been shot between the ribs, just missing his vital organs. He told his assistant, barely conscious: “They shot me in the back. They didn’t even dare to attack me from the front.”

Of his assassin’s marksmanship, he said: “We have just won the most terrible war in history, yet here is a Frenchman who misses his target six out of seven times at point-blank range. Of course this fellow must be punished for the careless use of a dangerous weapon and for poor marksmanship. I suggest that he be locked up for eight years, with intensive training in a shooting gallery.”