The victors opened the Paris Peace Conference on January 18, 1919, the anniversary of the German Empire’s proclamation in the Hall of Mirrors in 1871. Delegates from 32 nations formed 52 commissions and held over 1,600 sessions, but Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria and revolutionary Russia were shut out, and the real decisions came from Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Orlando in 145 closed meetings. Article 231 forced Germany to accept sole responsibility for the war, while Clemenceau mocked Wilson’s Fourteen Points by noting that God Almighty had only ten. To square self-determination with imperial ambition, Lloyd George proposed mandates under the League of Nations.
Japan’s racial equality clause won 11 of 17 votes in commission, but Wilson, pressed by Britain and Australia’s Billy Hughes, ruled it needed unanimity and killed it. China lost Shandong to Japan, refused to sign and saw the May Fourth Movement erupt. Ukrainian, Irish, Kurdish and Pan-African petitioners led by W.E.B. Du Bois were ignored, and a young kitchen worker named Nguyen Ai Quoc, later Ho Chi Minh, could not get his petition through the door. Orlando, who spoke no English, walked out, feeding Italy’s myth of a mutilated victory, and the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty. The Inter-Allied Women’s Conference, led by Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger, did secure Article 7 opening all League posts to women.
- When Wilson noted Hughes spoke for only five million people, Hughes replied that he represented 60,000 dead.
- France secretly sent an envoy to Berlin to propose a Franco-German economic partnership against Britain and the United States.
- The humiliation over the racial equality clause strengthened nationalist and militarist factions in Tokyo.
- Journalist Ray Stannard Baker remarked that Paris cannot be understood without Moscow.
- Fear of Bolshevism shaped a cordon sanitaire of states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
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