by Ray Peters

Created on: November 30, 2009

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918, the guns finally fell silent as a ceasefire went into effect ending the fighting of what for years after would be known variously as the Great War, the World War, or the War to End All Wars.

In January of 1919, the victorious Allied powers met in Paris to hammer out the peace treaty formally ending the War. Each member of the defeated Central Powers coalition was dealt with by a separate treaty. The treaty between the Allies and Imperial Germany was known as the Treaty of Versailles, it came into effect on June 28, 1919.

Was this important treaty, which officially ended the fighting and was suppose to prevent another disastrous war against Germany in the future, fair?

To examine this aspect of the Treaty, one should look over each of its major provisions as they related to the German state, starting with the participants.

As the defeated state; German representatives were not invited to participate in the Paris Peace Conference which would eventually produce the Treaty of Versailles. The initial participants were the heads of state and foreign ministers of Great Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and Japan. The Russians, although allied with these nations, had excluded themselves by signing a separate peace treaty with Germany in 1918.

Over the course of the Conference, Japan and the foreign ministers left - followed by Italy's head of State; Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando (who returned only to sign the Treaty in June). So the actual final treaty was the responsibility of three men; French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and US President Woodrow Wilson.

Germany was thus at the mercy of its former enemies as the final treaty would be presented to the German delegation as a "sign it or else" proposition - failure to sign would have likely started up the fighting again, and with Germany in the terrible military state it was in at the time, it would probably cease to exist as a sovereign entity.

The three principle players in creating the treaty had very different ideas and no one got entirely what they wanted. France was out for revenge; pure and simple. They wanted to create a postwar Germany incapable of ever threatening France again, as well as recovering territory they'd lost in the 1871 Franco-Prussian War.

Britain, meanwhile, wanted more equitable reparations as a way of using Germany as a counter to a renewed French Empire.

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