Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [119]
Keynes did not create the picture on his own, of course, but he painted it most persuasively and most persistently. A very clever, rather ugly young man, he had sailed through Eton and Cambridge, collecting prizes and attention. His membership in the Bloomsbury circle only enhanced his propensity to moral superiority. He was a terrifying subordinate because he never bothered to hide his contempt for virtually all his superiors. Keynes went to the Peace Conference as chief Treasury adviser. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written immediately after the German treaty was signed, he spoke, therefore, with his usual authority.
Wilson, said Keynes, was the victim of the Europeans’ grisly blindman’s buff. “He allowed himself to be drugged by their atmosphere, to discuss on the basis of their plans and of their data, and to be led along their paths.” Wilson betrayed his own principles, his country and the hopes of all those who wanted a better world. Lloyd George was the chief enchanter who had come out of the mists of the Welsh mountains to entice the good and the gullible into the swamps. “One catches in his company,” said Keynes in a piece he left out of the book, “that flavour of final purposelessness, inner irresponsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good and evil, mixed with cunning, remorselessness, love of power, that lend fascination, enthralment, and terror to the fair-seeming magicians of North European folklore.”4
Clemenceau, dried up, old and bitter, cared only for France and its security. Keynes had come to loathe the French and what he saw as their inordinate greed. He fought with their representatives over relief for Germany and over the loans France needed from Britain. The German representatives whom he met on the armistice commission were quite a different matter. In a memoir he wrote for his Bloomsbury friends he described the prominent Hamburg banker Carl Melchior as “exquisitely clean, very well and neatly dressed, with a high stiff collar . . . his eyes gleaming straight at us, with extraordinary sorrow in them, yet like an honest animal at bay.” Keynes’s declaration that he felt a sort of love for Melchior need not be taken too seriously. It was a rhetorical flourish for old friends who knew his complicated sexual past.5
The peacemakers appalled Keynes. They fretted about revenge while European civilization tottered on the brink of collapse.
In Paris where those connected with the Supreme Economic Council received almost hourly the reports of the misery, disorder, and decaying organisation of all Central and Eastern Europe, allied and enemy alike, and learnt from the lips of the financial representatives of Germany and Austria unanswerable evidence of the terrible exhaustion of their countries, an occasional visit to the hot, dry room in the President’s house, where the Four fulfilled their destinies in empty and arid intrigue, only added to the sense of nightmare. 6
What did they achieve in their gilded rooms? According to Keynes, a peace that completed the economic destruction done to Europe by the war. They were drawing new lines on the map when they should have been setting up a free trade area; they were haggling about the debts they owed one another when they should have canceled them all; and, the criticism that reverberated most in Germany, they imposed crippling reparations. Quoting extensively from his own memoranda written for the Peace Conference, Keynes argued that Germany could pay at the most £2 billion ($10 billion). Anything more would drive it to despair, and probably revolution, with dangerous consequences for Europe.7
While he was in Paris, Keynes produced a scheme to solve Europe’s economic problems and the problem of reparations in one neat, clever package. The European Allies needed to raise money, to repair war damage and to pay back their debts to each other and to the United States. The defeated nations would issue bonds