A Clatter of Clashing Claims
WEBER, EUGEN
A Clatter of Clashing Claims Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World By Margaret MacMillan Random. 560 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Eugen Weber Professor emeritus of history, UCLA;...
...His hopes were misplaced...
...She depicts the fault lines that ran across allies: the British judging the French to be full of intrigue and chicanery, the French finding Americans priggish and arrogant, the Italians getting on everybody's nerves, the Poles ditto...
...But that delusive lodestar turned out controversial and opaque...
...The most staggering losses were sustained by the Germans (1,800,000), Russians (1,700,000), French (1,400,000), Austro-Hungarians (1,300,000), and the British Empire (nearly 1,000,000...
...in 1919, the British delegation numbered nearly 400 souls...
...To Jews and their supporters, Arab Palestine looked empty...
...Great causes clamored for consideration: disarmament, votes for women, rights for labor, for blacks, for different minority groups, a homeland for Jews, freedom for Ireland, independence for Poles, Armenians, Ukrainians, Kurds, Slovaks, Czechs, and other Ruritanians...
...Then the guns on the Western Front fell silent...
...Everyone appealed to history, a generous source of arguments that only the dead could effectively contradict...
...Throughout MacMillan spins a vivid tale of suspense-full of shifts, hesitations, swings, thrills, and unexpected turns...
...The means to deal with these predicaments were mostly missing...
...In a city whose bathrooms never rose to the level of its restaurants, novel phenomena revealed themselves: cocktails and the cakewalk...
...Poles or Lithuanians...
...Clemenceau referred to Wilson's "candor" in believing human nature to be good...
...For six months starting in January 1919, Paris, as Margaret MacMillan says in her splendid book, was the capital of the world...
...They came from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, Japan, Brazil, and the United States, not to mention the Chinese laborers in the trenches of the Western Front...
...The peacemakers had tried to build a better order...
...Just-sounding claims had to be weighed and balanced against those that sounded equally just...
...John Maynard Keynes, who had resigned from the Treasury and left Paris in disgust before the signing, began to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which would be published before Christmas...
...Millions more were mangled, crippled, gassed, disfigured, widowed, orphaned...
...Guns boomed throughout France and German flags drooped at half mast...
...Italians or Austrians...
...The searing memory of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and of the costs the Germans had exacted, also colored not only French public attitudes but the politics of the delegation headed by Clemenceau...
...business interests and the hot air they generated...
...Du Bois, and a kitchen aide at the Ritz called Ho Chi Minh all get walk-on parts in MacMillan's brimming pages, with the leading roles filled by Georges Clemenceau, Lloyd George and that disappointing hero, Woodrow Wilson...
...it was time for the haggling to begin...
...Little was left to heal and to rebuild...
...bureaucracy and expertocracy...
...Worse, it was all in the lap of men...
...Everybody who was anybody, or who aspired to be somebody, made at least an appearance there...
...For 51 months treasure, even credit, had been squandered to destroy and slaughter...
...In 1815, the British Foreign Secretary took 14 staff members to the Congress of Vienna...
...Now they resonated to the clatter of clashing claims, rasped with the crunching of abandoned compacts, vibrated with venerable dreams, rackety rivalries, vigorous bickerings...
...A distinguished French scholar, Sylvain Levy, disagreed...
...Who was to have precedence in the self-determining stakes...
...National self-determination was the watchword...
...In fact, he was not even speaking for most Americans, drunk as some of them might be with newfound hubris and old dreams...
...They were meeting in a nation that had suffered bitterly...
...It would be dangerous," he explained, "to create a precedent whereby certain people who already possessed the rights of citizenship in one country would be called upon to govern and to exercise the rights of citizenship in a new country.' As far as the Arabs were concerned, the Jewish homeland reflected still more broken promises...
...The longer they haggled the faster their forces slipped away, their troops melted, their treasuries deflated and, with them, their resolve...
...Half or more of the people living in East and Central Europe could be counted in one national minority or another...
...MacMillan details all this in a narrative that is thorough, lucid and eminently readable...
...Fields stretched unfilled, scarred, poisoned...
...As one British Zionist put it, a "land without people for the people without land...
...The peacemakers, MacMillan writes, reached out "hundreds of miles from Paris to impose order on a protean world of shifting allegiances, civil wars, refugees, and bandit gangs, where the collapse of old empires had left law and order, trade and communications in shreds...
...Faced with prestidigitating pleaders who juggled dubious figures and wishful thoughts, were they to divide what loot was left, or seek to civilize lumps of the world in the interest of humanity...
...The prospect of reparations ground military and financial considerations against each other...
...once-thriving societies lacked seeds, fertilizer, milk, medicine, bandages...
...Romanians or Hungarians...
...Wilson thought he spoke for humanity...
...While the British and the French, the French and Italians, squabbled about faraway places as if these were theirs to quarrel about, the German issue loomed over discussions like Banquo's ghost...
...The peacemakers who sat in judgment on the world had only the interests of the nations they served to guide them...
...Disease-typhus, typhoid, cholera, and the dread Spanish flu-threatened casualties to rival those of war...
...France lost 10.5 per cent of its male population-more proportionately than any combatant except Serbia...
...What made a nation-ethnicity, language, religion, culture, habit, choice...
...Hunger reigned while people ate sand, leaves, acorns, coal dust, wood shavings...
...Coal mines had been flooded, factories razed or carted to Germany, and thousands of square miles of land were ruined that once produced 90 per cent of France's iron ore, 65 per cent of its steel and 20 per cent of its crops...
...author, "The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s" FOR OVER FOUR years beginning in August 1914, soldiers, sailors and airmen from all quarters fueled a world conflict, especially the fires that blazed in Europe...
...But isn't that a professional failing...
...The gilded, paneled, mirrored salons and various sanctuaries where committees, delegations and experts bid, bargained and set the world to rights echoed with deals struck in haste when the fortunes of war looked dark and promises were cheap...
...Millions died in action...
...And men, as any woman could predict, were going to make a bloody mess of it...
...Like Palestine, 16 states and peoples get chapters of their own...
...But he did speak for many who heard what they wanted to hear: Polish nationalists, Chinese students, Greek dreamers, Arab intellectuals, Koreans trying to shake off the Japanese, wistful blacks from Africa and America...
...pressing needs had to be prioritized over others that seemed no less urgent...
...Woodrow Wilson, for his part, left Paris at once, remarking to his wife: 'As no one is satisfied, it makes me hope we have made a just peace...
...Lawrence of Arabia and the Emir Faisal, the Polish pianist and political figure Ignace Paderewski, the greedy Greek champion Eleutherios Venizelos, Winston Churchill, Elinor Glyn, Elsa Maxwell, Eleanor Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, W.E.B...
...One thinks rather of his vanity in hoping to affect it...
...Then there was the question of enforcement...
...but it is all in the lap of the gods...
...And matters were further complicated by yet another menace: the Bolshevik Revolution...
...Large sectors of the country lay devastated, partly by the fighting, partly by deliberate German looting and destruction...
...Albanians or Greeks...
...When the treaty with Germany was signed on June 28, 1919 (anniversary of the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo), it marked the first time the signing of a major treaty was filmed live...
...They could not foresee that the consequences of their work would fester for decades...
...So does Wilson and what Lloyd George called the President's sermonettes...
...In the case of the peacemakers, meanwhile, "an issue that was going to cause increasing trouble over the years was scarcely considered at all...
...a newly-massified public opinion speaking in loud, contradictory voices...
...She cites Franco-British skirmishes over the black sludge called oil in what would become Iraq, and sharper disagreements caused by Britain's determination to have two peoples of different creed and historical experience occupy one piece of land called Palestine...
...She also delivers a string of cameos studded with telling quotations and brilliant thumbnail sketches...
...bridges, roads, railroads had been destroyed...
...The others matched its scale...
Vol. 85 • September 2002 • No. 5
