PARIS 1919 by Margaret MacMillan Page B

victors: France to get its lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, or Germany to make good the damage it had caused Belgium. The French wanted more, though: land from Germany possibly, guarantees of security against attack certainly. The British wanted certain German colonies. The Italians demanded part of the Balkans, and the Japanese part of China. Could that be justified in terms of the new diplomacy? Then there were all the nations, some already formed but some still embryonic, in the center of Europe, who demanded to be heard. And the colonial peoples, the campaigners for women’s rights, the labor representatives, the American blacks, the religious leaders, the humanitarians. The Congress of Vienna had been simple by comparison.
    In their first discussions with Wilson, both Clemenceau and Lloyd George pointed out the need for the Allies to sort out their own position on the peace, in a preliminary conference. Wilson was unhelpful. If they settled all the peace terms in advance, then the general peace conference would be a sham. On the other hand, he was prepared to have informal conversations to work out a common Allied position. “It really came to the same thing,” Lloyd George reported to his colleagues, “but the President insisted definitely on his point of view.” It was agreed that they would meet in Paris, have their preliminary discussions—a few weeks at the most—and then sit down with the enemy. Wilson, or so he thought, would probably go back to the United States at that point. 12
    After these first encounters with the men who were going to become his closest colleagues in Paris, Wilson continued on to Italy, to more ecstatic welcomes. But the cheers, the state receptions, the private audiences, could not conceal that time was passing. He began to wonder whether this was not deliberate. The people, he thought, wanted peace; their rulers seemed to be dragging their feet, for who knew what sinister motives. The French government tried to arrange a tour of the battlefields for him. He refused angrily. “They were trying to force him to go to see the devastated regions,” he told his small circle of intimates, “so that he might see red and play into the hands of the governments of England, France and Italy.” He would not be manipulated like this; the peace must be made calmly and without emotion. “Even if France had been entirely made a shell hole it would not change the final settlement.” 13 The French resented his refusal bitterly and were not appeased when he finally paid a fleeting visit in March.
    Wilson was coming to the conclusion that he and the French were not as close in their views as House had encouraged him to believe. The French government had drawn up an elaborate agenda which placed the League of Nations well down the list of important issues to be decided. Paul Cambon, the immensely experienced French ambassador in London, told a British diplomat, “The business of the Peace Conference was to bring to a close the war with Germany.” The League was something that could easily be postponed. Many in the French official establishment thought of a league that would be a continuation of the wartime alliance and whose main role would be to enforce the peace terms. No matter, said an internal memorandum, that much of the French public thought in more idealistic terms: “that can help us.” Clemenceau was publicly skeptical. The day after Wilson had made a speech in London reiterating his faith that a League of Nations was the best way to provide security for its members, Clemenceau had spoken in the Chamber of Deputies. To loud cheers he asserted: “There is an old system of alliances called the Balance of Power—this system of alliances, which I do not renounce, will be my guiding thought at the Peace Conference.” Wickedly, he had referred to Wilson’s noble
candeur,
a word that can mean either candor or pathetic