Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [106]
Almost everyone in Paris in 1919 believed that Germany had started the war. (Only later did doubts begin to arise.) Germany had invaded neutral Belgium, and German troops, to the horror of Allied and American opinion, had behaved badly. (Not all the atrocity stories were wartime propaganda.) Germany had also done itself great damage in Allied eyes by two punitive treaties, often forgotten today, which it imposed in 1918. The Treaty of Bucharest turned Rumania into a German dependency. And with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the new Bolshevik government of Russia gave Germany control of a huge swath of Russian territory stretching from the Baltic down to the Caucasus mountains and agreed to pay over a million gold rubles in reparations. Two decades later, Hitler set his sights on the same goal. Russia lost 55 million people, almost a third of its agricultural land and the greater part of its heavy industry and iron and coal. The Bolsheviks were also obliged to pay over millions of gold rubles. Germans might talk of peace, said Wilson in April 1918, but their actions showed their real intentions. “They nowhere set up justice, but everywhere impose their power and exploit everything for their own use and aggrandisement.” Lloyd George and Wilson, both from religious backgrounds, both good liberals, believed firmly in chastising the wicked. They also believed in redemption; one day Germany would be redeemed. 10
Punishment, payment, prevention—on these broad objectives there was agreement. It was everything else that was the problem. Should the kaiser and his top advisers be tried as war criminals? What items should be on the bill presented to Germany? War damages (whatever those were)? Civilian losses? Pensions to the widows and orphans of Allied soldiers? And there was also the related question of how much Germany could pay. What sort of armed forces should it have? How much territory should it lose? Were the Allies dealing with the old Germany or a new one that had emerged since the end of the war? Was it fair to punish a struggling democracy for the sins of its predecessors?
Punishment, payment, prevention—all were interconnected. A smaller Germany, and a poorer Germany, would be less of a threat to its neighbors. But if Germany was losing a lot of land, was it also fair to expect it to pay out huge sums? Striking a balance between the different sets of terms was not easy, especially since Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George did not agree among themselves, or, frequently, with their own colleagues.
What made these questions even more complicated was that there were no clear principles to go on. It had been more straightforward in the past. The spoils of war, whether works of art, cannon or horses, went to the victor while the defeated nation paid an indemnity to cover the costs of the war and normally lost territory as well. At the Congress of Vienna, France had lost most of Napoleon’s conquests and been liable for 700 million francs as well as the costs of its occupation. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which many in Paris still remembered vividly, France had paid 5 billion gold francs and lost its provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. But 1919 was supposed to mark a new sort of diplomacy. “No annexations and no punitive peace” had been the cry from liberals and the left; and statesmen from Washington to Moscow had taken it up. Self-determination, not power politics, was supposed to settle borders.
Public opinion, that new and troubling element, was no help. There was a widespread feeling that someone must pay for such a dreadful war; but there was an equally strong longing for peace. The Allied publics spoke with loud and contradictory voices.