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said that he would always regret that he did not know French better (he scarcely knew it at all), but it seemed absurd that English, spoken by more than 170 million people, should not have equal status with French. The Italians said, in that case, why not Italian as well? “Otherwise,” said Sonnino, “it would look as if Italy was being treated as an inferior by being excluded.” In that case, said Lloyd George, why not Japanese as well? The Japanese delegates, who tended to have trouble following the debates whether they were in French or English, remained silent. Clemenceau backed down, to the consternation of many of his own officials.5

In December the French Foreign Ministry had sent out invitations to every country, from Liberia to Siam, that could claim, however improbably, to be on the Allied side. By January there were twenty-nine countries represented in Paris, all expecting to take part. How would their role be defined? Would they all sit together, with the British empire having the same vote as Panama? None of the Great Powers wanted that, but where Clemenceau was willing to start the delegates from the lesser powers on relatively harmless questions such as international waterways, Wilson preferred as little structure as possible. “We ought to have,” he said, “no formal Conferences but only conversations.” Clemenceau found this exasperating: if the Allies waited until they had agreed on all the main issues, it would be months before the Peace Conference proper could begin, and public opinion would be very disappointed. Anyway, he added, they had to give all the other powers, who were assembling in Paris, something to do. Lloyd George proposed a compromise, as he was to do on many occasions: there would be a plenary session at the end of the week; in the meantime, the Supreme Council would get on with other matters.6

The members of the Supreme Council, even Wilson, had no intention of relinquishing control of the conference agenda, which promised to be huge. The rejected French list included the League of Nations, Polish affairs, Russian affairs, Baltic nationalities, states formed from the late Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Balkans; the Far East and the Pacific, Jewish affairs, international river navigation, international railways, legislation to guarantee people’s self-determination; protection for ethnic and religious minorities, international legislation on patents and trademarks, penalties for crimes committed during the war, reparations for war damages and economic and financial questions. The list was prescient.7

The Supreme Council also faced intense scrutiny from the public. In the weeks leading up to the start of the proceedings, hundreds of journalists had arrived in Paris. The French government created a lavish press club, in a millionaire’s house. The press, men mainly but also including a handful of women, such as the great American muckraker Ida Tarbell, were ungrateful. They sneered at the vulgarity of the décor, and the Americans nicknamed it “The House of a Thousand Teats.” More important, the press complained about the secrecy of the proceedings. Wilson had talked in his Fourteen Points about “open covenants openly arrived at.” As with many of his catchphrases, its meaning was not clear, perhaps not even to Wilson himself, but it caught the public imagination.8

Wilson certainly meant there should be no more secret treaties, such as those that he and many others saw as one of the causes of the Great War, but did he mean that all the negotiations would be open for public scrutiny? That is what many of the journalists and their readers expected. Press representatives demanded the right to attend the meetings of the Supreme Council, or at least get daily summaries of their discussions. He had always fought for the freedom of the press, Clemenceau told his aide General Mordacq, but there were limits. It would be “a veritable suicide” to let the press report on the day-to-day discussions of the Supreme Council. If that were to happen, Lloyd George commented, the Peace Conference would go on forever.