Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [187]
4. The seating plan at the Peace Conference. Thirty-two countries, from belligerents to neutrals, were invited to send delegates to Paris. The full Peace Conference met only eight times, which led to much grumbling from the smaller powers.
5. The real work of the conference was undertaken by special commissions and committees or by these four men and their advisers. From left to right: David Lloyd George (Britain),Vittorio Orlando (Italy), Georges Clemenceau (France) and Woodrow Wilson (United States). Until March they met, along with their foreign ministers and two Japanese delegates ( Japan was included among the Great Powers as a courtesy), as the Supreme Council or Council of Ten.
6. The race between peacemaking and revolution. While some commentators, then and since, have argued that the peacemakers were moved primarily by a fear of Russian Bolshevism, this is an oversimplification.The peacemakers were concerned about the spread of anarchy and about economic collapse in the center of Europe, but they also had considerable faith in their own ability to set the world right.
7. Woodrow and Edith Wilson at the races at St. Cloud. Although the Peace Conference was hard work, there was also time for relaxation.
8. Georges Clemenceau, the radical gadfly turned Father of Victory. Aged seventy-seven, he was the oldest of the Big Four. Although he recovered from an assassination attempt partway through the Peace Conference, some felt that he was never the same again.
9. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, French commander-in-chief and Supreme Allied Commander. He attacked Clemenceau for compromising too much on the German terms and in particular for accepting an Anglo-American guarantee to come to France’s defense against a future German attack instead of holding out for French control of German territories west of the Rhine.
10. An artist’s impression of the crowds waiting outside the French Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay to catch a glimpse of the peacemakers.
11. The peacemakers’ chauffeurs.
12. When Woodrow Wilson returned in March 1919 from his brief trip to the United States, and David Lloyd George came back from London, it was decided to speed up the work of the Peace Conference by scrapping the Council of Ten in favor of a smaller and more informal group.The Council of Four, as it was known, generally met in Wilson’s study. From left to right: Orlando, Lloyd George, Clemenceau,Wilson.
13. The peacemakers were besieged by petitioners. One of the more glamorous was Queen Marie of Rumania, who arrived in Paris with a large entourage, a huge wardrobe and demands for about half of Hungary.
14. Among the many peoples who looked to the Peace Conference to redress their grievances were the Poles, whose country had been carved up by its neighbors at the end of the eighteenth century.The collapse of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary by 1918 gave Poland its chance. Ignace Paderewski, the great pianist who became the newborn country’s first prime minister, did much to win it support from the powers.
15. While Paderewski worked in Paris, General Józef PiƗsudski struggled in Warsaw to re-create the Polish state and build a Polish army. Though his territorial ambitions did not extend as far as those of some Polish patriots, he nevertheless seized parts of southern Lithuania and moved eastward into Byelorussia and Ukraine, thereby clashing with the Bolsheviks.
16. Béla Kun, the Hungarian communist whose seizure of power in Budapest in March 1919 caused alarm in Paris. General Smuts, sent by the peacemakers on a fact-finding mission, concluded that Kun was unlikely to survive in office for long. In August 1919, the Hungarian was forced to flee as his enemies plotted against him and Hungary’s neighbors Czechoslovakia and Rumania started to seize Hungarian territory.
17. The Arab delegation to the Peace Conference: Prince Feisal (front ), who hoped for an independent Arab state under his family’s rule, and, to his left,T. E. Lawrence in the Arab headdress