A landmark work of narrative history, (this) is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later.
The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally above all they failed to prevent another war. They struggled with the problem of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. Ho Chi Minh, kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes.
Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all further conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. "Between January and July 1991, after 'the war to end all wars', men and women around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace.
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