The Paris Peace Conference, held from January 1919 to January 1920 and attended by the victorious Allied powers, debated and agreed the terms of the peace settlement that formally ended the First World War (1914 to 18). As four empires were broken up, various treaties were signed with the losing Central Powers, notably the Treaty of Versailles with Germany and the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary.

The losers of WWI had to pay reparations to the victors, lost various slices of their territory, and were obliged to restrict the size of their armed forces. The redrawing of the map of Europe created several new countries, notably Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The decisions made at the Paris Peace Conference and the consequent reshuffling of borders and populations led to simmering discontent, which would contribute to the outbreak of the Second World War 20 years later.

The victors in WWI, the Allies, were led by four dominant countries: France, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States. The Allies signed armistice agreements with Turkey on 30 October, Austria-Hungary on 3 November, and Germany on 11 November 1918. There was still fighting going on in some places, notably in the ongoing Russian Civil War, which had theatres in Eastern Europe and East Asia, but it was time to agree on the exact terms the conflict's losers would have to endure.

The Allies met near Paris at the Palace of Versailles to discuss the peace terms. Leaders of the governments of many nations met there, but the proceedings in Paris were dominated by the 'Council of Four': President of the United States Woodrow Wilson (1856 to 1924), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Lloyd George (1863 to 1945), Prime Minister of France Georges Clemenceau (1841 to 1929), and Prime Minister of Italy Vittorio Orlando (1860 to 1952). Other nations represented in Paris – there were 32 in all – included Canada, China, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, and Serbia.

The USSR, then seen as a rogue revolutionary state that had unlawfully deposed its ruler, Tsar Nicholas II, in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and had prematurely pulled out of the war, was not invited to Paris. A German delegation was only invited to attend the final days of the conference to sign a done deal. Representatives of the governments of Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, the successors to the losing powers, were not invited to Paris.

Each nation's delegation consisted of several hundred people. 500 journalists also attended the conference. The historian M. Macmillan notes in her book Paris 1919: "Between January and June, Paris was at once the world's government, its court of appeal and its parliament, the focus of its fears and hopes" (quoted in Winter, 175).

At the conference, anything the national leaders could not agree upon was deferred to meetings attended by foreign ministers and then to a Council of Ambassadors. 52 separate commissions of diplomats thrashed out the details. Ensuring a lasting peace was the overall aim. As four empires were broken up – the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian – there was much to debate.

The talks in Paris were influenced by Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, although the spirit of self-determination they embodied would not be applied to the war's losers. The Allied leaders clashed on various issues, notably on how harsh Germany's peace terms would be. France wanted harsher terms, but the United States' softer position was undermined by its own domestic politics, where isolationism was becoming the dominant sentiment regarding foreign policy. Lloyd George was against being too harsh on Germany, but public opinion back home was very much the opposite. The French public likewise called for Germany to suffer, although Clemenceau fully realised the dangers of this policy. Economists, including John Maynard Keynes, also warned that if the financial punishments on the losers were too heavy, then future world trade would suffer and the victors themselves would lose out. The compromise was the Treaty of Versailles.

The terms of peace for Germany were set out in the Treaty of Versailles, signed between all parties in June 1919. The terms of the treaty included the following points (amongst others):

Germany signed the treaty on 28 June under protest. Conversely, the United States Senate refused to ratify the treaty, principally because of obligations the League of Nations (see below) would impose and fears these would infringe on national sovereignty. This was despite Wilson embarking on a gruelling tour to promote the treaty amongst the American public.

The Paris Peace Conference, following Point 14 on Wilson's list, also formed the assembly of nations in January 1920, called the League of Nations. The question remained, though, of just how it would operate. This, for Wilson, was the most essential talking point of the conference. This body was a grand idea and designed to foster peaceful negotiations and avoid conflicts, but in practice, when faced with acts of aggression by one or more members, the League's responses were often weak and ineffective. The most significant weakness was the United States government's decision not to join the League as it pursued a policy of isolationism. Nevertheless, the League's lasting legacy was its success in promoting welfare issues and inspiring the formation of the more enduring United Nations in October 1945.

There remained serious areas of disagreement. Both China and Italy left the Paris Peace Conference severely disappointed. Shandong (then called Shantung), the port in northeast China, had been under German rule but was now given to Japan, causing lasting resentment by the Chinese government, which wanted it, too. The Japanese delegation, although content over Shandong, was not happy with US policy in the Pacific and described Wilson as "an angel in rhetoric and devil in deed" (Winter, 505). This resentment would have lasting consequences as Japan pursued its own isolationist foreign policy and its later expansion into China.

Orlando had ambitions to increase Italy's territory, but most of these claims were blocked by Wilson. Italy wanted to control the port of Fiume (Rijeka, Croatia), but the idea was rejected in Paris, again causing lasting resentment. The Italian delegation walked out of the conference over this issue. Fiume became such a point of national honour that the fascist leader Benito Mussolini used it to further his grip on power in 1922.

Another significant failure was to reach a consensus over the Balkan states. This highly fractured region contained many competing groups, and the situation was further complicated by the fact that some of these had already seized territories they considered their own. The region that had seen the first act of the war, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, remained a political hot potato none of the great powers' leaders wanted to burn their fingers on.

Yet another unsuccessful point of discussion in Paris was how to deal with Arabia. The Arabian Commission, attended the peace conference to promote its dream of a unified but independent Arabia. The commission received the support of such figures as T. E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia'), but in the end, such states as Britain and France were reluctant to give up their influence in the region. This went against point 5 of Wilson's list, which stated that there should be an impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, with the interests of the subject populations being equal to the claims of governments.

The people of Arabia were not the only ones to be disappointed by the lack of will for change amongst the imperial powers; nationalist groups in Southeast Asia, India, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, and the Caribbean were similarly ignored. Racist attitudes of the period and a flat refusal to ratify equality between the races meant that some degree of self-determination (but not full independence) was to be awarded only to White-dominated states such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Despite the contributions to the war made by colonial populations, "imperial rule was actually expanded at the Paris Peace Conference" (McDonough, 53).

While the Treaty of Versailles has grabbed most attention in history books, the Paris Peace Conference did result in several other major treaties being signed, which dealt with other states on the losing side of WWI. As Germany, Austria-Hungary and other states were reduced in size, the map of Central and Eastern Europe was redrawn, enlarging other states and creating new countries such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Perhaps as many as 10 million people were displaced because of this reordering of borders.

The Treaty of St. Germain

The Treaty of St. Germain was signed on 10 September 1919 between the Allies and the new Republic of Austria. The latter was deprived of all its non-German-speaking areas and was obliged to give up several other slices of territory containing a majority of German-speakers to Italy, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Austria was forbidden from ever joining with Germany (the Anschluss) and had to pay reparations to the Allies. The Austrian army could henceforth never be larger than 30,000 members.

The Treaty of Neuilly

The Treaty of Neuilly was signed on 27 November 1919 between the Allies and Bulgaria. The latter lost slices of territory to Greece (including Thrace and so access to the sea) and Romania. Bulgaria was obliged to pay the victors reparations, and, unlike in the other treaties, the figure was fixed at a precise figure, in this case, £90 million (but later reduced). A limit was put on its army of 20,000 members.

The Treaty of Trianon

The Treaty of Trianon was signed on 4 June 1920 between the Allies and Hungary. The latter state was made significantly smaller by giving territory to Romania, the Austrian Republic, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. This shrinking of Hungary's frontiers reduced the country by 66%, and the population to around 8 million (when previously it had been around 21 million). As with the other losing states, reparations were to be paid to the victors, and Hungary's army could henceforth not exceed 35,000 members.

The Treaty of Sèvres

The Treaty of Sèvres was to be signed on 10 August 1920 between the Allies and Turkey, formerly the Ottoman Empire. Under the terms of this treaty, which was never formally ratified, Turkey's pre-war and war-acquired territory was to be greatly reduced. The regions of Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Syria would gain their independence. Other slices of the Ottoman Empire were to be removed and given to Italy (the Dodecanese and Rhodes) and to Greece (Thrace and the Turkish Aegean Islands). The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus were to be administered by the League of Nations. The Turkish government, headed by future president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881 to 1938), deemed these terms far too harsh and refused to sign the treaty. After a series of negotiations and military success in the Greco-Turkish War (1919 to 22), Turkey managed to gain a more advantageous treatment under the Treaty of Lausanne, which was signed with the Allies on 24 July 1923.

Although designed to guarantee a lasting peace, in many countries, there was a widespread response from officials and the public that the terms dished out by the Paris Peace Conference were too harsh and too ignorant of practical realities. This was particularly so in Germany, where there was much talk of a 'dictated peace', not a negotiated one.

In actual fact, Germany had wished to impose far harsher terms on the USSR in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk after that state's withdrawal from WWI in 1917 to 8. Under the peace terms, Germany, although a losing country, was still "geographically and economically largely intact and preserved her political unity and her potential strength as a great nation" (Shirer, 58). Nevertheless, resentment was high, and there was a persistent, if entirely inaccurate, feeling that the German people had been 'stabbed in the back' by their own 'cowardly' military leaders. The German chancellor and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889 to 1945) stoked up this long-smouldering anger over how WWI ended during the 1930s for the purposes of promoting national socialism. Hitler formally repudiated the Treaty of Versailles in March 1935 and then set about reversing many of its terms. Historians, therefore, have identified the ill-feeling towards the treaty as one of several causes of WWII (1939 to 45).

Other leaders also used promises to reverse the dictates of the Paris Peace Conference as a means to gain popularity. In the end, a lasting peace was not achieved, but perhaps this has more to do with factors beyond the control of the delegates in Paris in 1919 to 20, such as the US withdrawal from the world's political stage and the global economic turmoil immediately after the war and again from 1929. WWI had destroyed the delicate balance of power in Europe and elsewhere, and this proved an elusive equilibrium to regain in the post-war years.