What I Am Reading: "Paris 1919" by Margaret MacMillan

               I have figured out over the last decade or so that the interwar period is my favorite segment of history. This era, an intermission in tragedy, was shaped by the Paris peace conference in 1919; which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations. According to some, the treaty’s harshness towards a defeated Germany and its blithe drawing of states’ borders led to World War 2 and to other nationalist conflicts in Europe. Margaret MacMillan takes time in this account to rebut this, noting that there were many policy decisions in the inter-war period that ultimately affected the reignition of hostilities.

               Besides my interest in the timespan subsequent to the peace conference, I have also recently approached it from the other direction, with books on the Ottoman Empire and Germany’s colonies in Africa, both of which were partitioned by the peace agreement. I am also interested in the League of Nations, as the failed Articles of Confederation to the UN’s more successful Constitution. I once again found Woodrow Wilson to be a tragic figure, inspiring many with his idealism but ultimately undone politically by his lack of flexibility (reinforcement to my conclusions from John Milton Cooper’s biography that I read a few years ago). I find Georges Clemenceau to be amusing.

               The book is formatted well: compartmentalized by issue that the conference took up, with a background and postscript to each. Among other discoveries, I was able to come out with a reasonable ability to differentiate the states of the Balkans, more so than I was able to after my Ottoman readings. As the negotiations themselves were not nearly this neat, arranging the issues in this manner leads to cameos from personalities who have not been fully explored yet; or who are fondly (or, more likely, unfondly) remembered from previous segments. This helped make the whole thing seem like a grand drama, with a cast of well-explained characters.

               Ultimately, I would say that this was a good supplemental history: it would complement a book (or general education) on World War 1, and on the inter-war period and the road to World War 2. Be sure to keep a map handy.