Versailles Historiography
Post-War
Revisionist: Treaty Was too Harsh to
Rehabilitate Germany and too Lenient to
Destroy Her (Really the Orthodox view today)
Revisionist: treaty was as good as possible,
but was never enforced (The Revisionist
view today)
- 1919 Treaty viewed as just
- Immediately after the war, western historians in the main
held the belief that the Treaty was just and reflected the
sacrifices that Allied men had made at the Front.
- With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 views
softened towards Germany, and there was support for the case
that the Germans had been poorly deal with
- A.J.P. Taylor, in The History of the First World War,
1963:
Though the Germans accepted the treaty in the formal
sense of agreeing to sign it, none took the signature
seriously. The treaty seemed to them to be wicked, unfair,
dictation, a slave treaty. All Germans intended to repudiate
it at some time in the future, if it did not fall to pieces of its
own absurdity.
- Sees the settlement as a brave attempt to deal with
huge, long-term problems, and argues the problem
was not with the Treaty but with the failure to enforce
its terms!
… From this perspective, the Second World War was "a
war over the settlement of Versailles; a war which had
been implicit when the First World War ended because the
peace-makers had not solved the German problem."
Fritz Fischer, in The War Aims of Imperial Germany,
1976: ...The German Empire made a bid between 1914
and 1918 to secure a position in the world which she
believed was hers by right. Moreover, this mentality did
not disappear with the fall of the monarchy in 1918; it
continued to survive and took even more grotesque forms
during the frustrating years of the Weimar Republic when
a constant aim of all German governments had been to
effect a revision of the Versailles settlement. Only against
his background is the emergence of the 'Bohemian
corporal' with his pathological lust for revenge and
aggrandizement understandable.
-E.H. Carr: self-determination and collective security as
unworkable idealistic principles, and the settlement failed
to settle the 'German problem'.
- Carr: The Treaty was not all that severe. Germany was
intact, reparations could have been paid and were less that
those imposed by Germans during the Franco-Prussian
War or at Brest-Litovsk
- James Joll, "Europe was divided by the peace conference
into those who wanted the peace revised (Germany, Italy,
- Ruth Henig: treaty as a "creditable achievement",
but one that failed because of economic and social
problems, divisions between the Allies, and reluctance
of leaders to enforce the treaty. The failure to do this
meant a stronger Germany, and further indecision in
the form of appeasement meant war.
- Paul Birdsall: US refusal to commit to upholding the
settlement undermined both the League of Nations
and the idea of a united democratic front supplying
'collective security', and thus was crucial in explaining
the failure of the treaty in the longer-term
- Paul Kennedy, 1920s: the settlement worked, like
the League of Nations; but 1930s - it was crushed by
militarism of Italy, Japan and Germany, a collapse
caused by the Great Depression and its effects.
- David Thomson, in Europe since Napoleon, 1966:
The men in Paris never had a free hand. Constricted
not only by their wartime agreements with one
another and by pledges at home, but also by the
accumulated debris of war itself, they could do no
more than try to produce some order from chaos,
determine the details of frontiers and plan projects of
compensation, and leave the achievement of greater
precision and perfection to subsequent negotiation
and good sense. They were not, as they have
sometimes been depicted, men behaving like gods and
re-shaping a new heaven on earth . . . Perhaps the
biggest mistake they made was to mention at all the
ideals of absolute justice or perpetual peace; for these,
surely, were a most impossible outcome of the
Japan and Hungary) and those who wanted it upheld
(France, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), and
those who were not that interested (the USA and Britain)".
John Terrain, in The Mighty Continent, 1976:[The War
Guilt Clause]: a stigma on an entire nation. This was a
moral judgment which an entire nation felt entitled to
resent. Schneidemann resigned, exclaiming: 'May the hand
wither that signs this Treaty'. But there was nothing for it:
Germany was powerless; sign she must.
John Sherer in World War I, 1980: Of the former
Empires shaken by the War, only the German Empire
survived...its sovereignty was secure...alone of all the
defeated nations it preserved its territorial unity. The
treaty restrictions were irksome, but made no serious
inroads on national sovereignty, and, if anything, it
provided a powerful stimulus to German nationalism. The
Treaty of Versailles may have created Hitler, and it also
preserved as a state the country in which he was to make
his mark . . . If the First World War was fought to prevent
Germany from creating hegemony in Europe, it failed.
Germany was weakened, but not so weakened that it could
not rise within a generation to threaten the balance of
world power once again. The Empires of Old Europe had
been swept away. The provisions of the victorious peacemakers failed to fill the vacuum - millions died in vain.
Douglas Newton, in Germany 1914-1945, 1990:
Whether Germany was treated justly or unjustly by the
victors at the Peace Conference is not a question of fact but
of moral judgment. Some argue that, if the Versailles
Treaty was harsh, so too would have been any framed by a
victorious Germany, as in the case of Brest-Litovsk. Others
argue that any peace which fell short of the ideals of
reconciliation was unjust because of the high ideals for
which Allied statesmen had claimed to be fighting . . . What
is beyond question is that the process of peacemaking or
rather the absence of any genuine peace negotiations . . .
made all of Germany believe that the [Weimar] Republic
had been treated shabbily.
conditions in which Europe found itself when the guns
no longer thundered and the men came marching
home.