National Bestseller
New York Times Editors’ Choice
Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize
Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations
Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end all wars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.
From the Publisher
The history of the 1919 Paris peace talks following World War I is a blueprint of the political and social upheavals bedeviling the planet now. . . . A wealth of colorful detail and a concentration on the strange characters many of these statesmen were keep [MacMillan’s] narrative lively.”
—The New York Times Book Review“MacMillan’s book reminds us of the main lesson learned at such a high cost in Paris in 1919: Peace is not something that can be imposed at the conference table. It can grow only from the hearts of people.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Beautifully written, full of judgment and wisdom, Paris 1919 is a pleasure to read and vibrates with the passions of the early twentieth century and of ours.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“MacMillan is a superb writer who can bring history to life.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“For anyone interested in knowing how historic mistakes can morph into later historic problems, this brilliant book is a must-read.”
—Chicago Tribune
The "war to end all wars" ended with a conference that helped spawn conflicts that persist to this day. The 1919 Versailles peacemakers created Iraq, Palestine, and Yugoslavia. They debated Kosovo, Kurdish independence, Islamic aspirations, women's rights, and the threat of communism. Margaret MacMillan's lively, detailed, sometimes mind-boggling narrative of the Paris Peace Conference follows the tangled negotiations to end World War I.
Publishers Weekly
A joke circulating in Paris early in 1919 held that the peacemaking Council of Four, representing Britain, France, the U.S. and Italy, was busy preparing a "just and lasting war." Six months of parleying concluded on June 28 with Germany's coerced agreement to a treaty no Allied statesman had fully read, according to MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto, in this vivid account. Although President Wilson had insisted on a League of Nations, even his own Senate would vote the league down and refuse the treaty. As a rush to make expedient settlements replaced initial negotiating inertia, appeals by many nationalities for Wilsonian self-determination would be overwhelmed by rhetoric justifying national avarice. The Italians, who hadn't won a battle, and the French, who'd been saved from catastrophe, were the greediest, says MacMillan; the Japanese plucked Pacific islands that had been German and a colony in China known for German beer. The austere and unlikable Wilson got nothing; returning home, he suffered a debilitating stroke. The council's other members horse-traded for spoils, as did Greece, Poland and the new Yugoslavia. There was, Wilson declared, "disgust with the old order of things," but in most decisions the old order in fact prevailed, and corrosive problems, like Bolshevism, were shelved. Hitler would blame Versailles for more ills than it created, but the signatories often could not enforce their writ. MacMillan's lucid prose brings her participants to colorful and quotable life, and the grand sweep of her narrative encompasses all the continents the peacemakers vainly carved up. 16 pages of photos, maps. (On sale Oct. 29) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
On his trip to China in February 1972, President Richard Nixon exclaimed in a toast to his hosts that his visit, the first such trip by an American President, was "the week that changed the world." However, Nixon, who considered the opening of China his greatest achievement, didn't bask in his glory for long because Watergate would soon put him on the defensive for the remainder of his presidency. MacMillan (history, Univ. of Toronto; Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World) presents a lively narrative of the people, diplomacy, and pomp of this memorable visit, which was orchestrated as much by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Premier Zhou En-Lai as it was by Nixon and Mao. Although the visit did not resolve the major issue for the People's Republic (reunification of Taiwan with mainland China) and for the United States (terminating the Vietnam War), Nixon's visit ended decades of Chinese diplomatic isolation from most of the world and began an important Cold War-era dialog between the two nations. The author is especially good at providing historical background on China and showing how the trip's aftermath reverberated among such American allies as Britain, Taiwan, Australia, and Japan and within its Cold War nemesis, the Soviet Union. Recommended for all public and academic collections.
Karl Helicher
Kirkus Reviews
From Canadian historian MacMillan (Women of the Raj, not reviewed), a lively and thoughtful examination of the conference that ended the war to end all wars. After more than four years of carnage on a scale the world had never before seen, WWI ended with an exhausted Germany asking the exhausted Allies for an armistice based on American President Woodrow Wilson's idealistic formula for a just peace. The resulting Paris Peace Conference of 1919 aimed at redrawing the map of a Europe in which the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires lay ruined, and rearranging a world in which new nations were struggling to emerge from those moribund colonial empires. Diverse characters came to Paris, including British Arabist T.E. Lawrence, Greek patriot Eleutherios Venizelos, Poland's Roman Dmowski, and Japan's Prince Saionji, but MacMillan (History/Univ. of Toronto) focuses on the complex relationships among the three disparate personalities who dominated the Conference: Wilson, French premier Georges Clemenceau, and British prime minister David Lloyd George (the author's great-grandfather). Bringing them vividly to life, MacMillan reviews the conference's considerable failures and accomplishments. In hindsight, the punitive disarmament and reparation terms imposed upon Germany and the accommodation of Japanese claims to Pacific territory can be seen as setting the stage for the rise of those nations' militarism. The creation of colonial mandates in the Mideast and betrayal of Arab nationalists who had fought for the Allied cause led to tensions that plague the world today. However, MacMillan disputes that the Paris arrangements led directly to WWII; decisions made afterward, sheargues, were more significant. The peacemakers made mistakes, she concedes, but "could have done much worse." Among the Conference's real achievements were the fashioning of seven European countries and Turkey out of the detritus of failed empires, the development of an International Labor Organization, and the creation of the League of Nations, which presaged the rise of the United Nations. Absorbing, balanced, and insightful narrative of a seminal event in modern history.
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