Abstract
At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson and Premier Georges Clemenceau approached the German problem from fundamentally different perspectives. The French premier recognized that despite its recent defeat, Germany possessed the potential capacity to reemerge as a dominant European power. Although Germany did not immediately threaten French security, Clemenceau wanted to draft a peace treaty designed to protect France in the future and to provide for its enforcement. Wilson, seeing a defeated Germany, failed to appreciate Clemenceau’s concern for the future security of France. Confusing ends and means, he considered the French emphasis on the necessity for adequate methods of enforcing the peace settlement as evidence of punitive aims. What Clemenceau saw as a requirement for future security, Wilson viewed as an act of revenge and a violation of the liberal world order he hoped to establish under the League of Nations. The president failed to recognize that he and Clemenceau disagreed more fundamentally over the methods for achieving their shared goals than over the goals themselves. They both hoped to achieve a permanent peace with Germany but advocated different means to accomplish that end.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilson, Clemenceau, and the German Problem at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919,” The Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal 12 (April 1975): 69–79. Reprinted by permission of the Western Social Science Association.
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Notes
William E. Dodd, Woodrow Wilson and His Work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1920), 302, 331.
Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 3 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1922), 1: 1–421, and 2: 1–123.
George Bernard Noble, Policies and Opinions at Paris, 1919: Wilsonian Diplomacy, the Versailles Peace and French Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 181, 420, 422.
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Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 324.
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Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 34;
Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 168, 462, 563.
N. Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: Americas Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 2–3, 123, 129, 137, 146, 151.
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See also Ernst Fraenkel, “Das deutsche Wilsonbild,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 5 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter-Universitatsverlag, 1960): 66–120;
and Peter Berg, “Deutschland und Amerika, 1918–1929: Über das deutsche Amerikabild der zwanziger Jahre,” Historische Studien 385 (Lübeck and Hamburg: Matthiesen Verlag, 1963): 9–47.
Hans W. Gatzke, Germany’s Drive to the West: A Study of Germany’s Western War Aims during the First World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1950);
Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1961), trans. Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967).
Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “The Debate on German War Aims,” and Klaus Epstein, “Gerhard Ritter and the First World War,” in 1914: The Coming of the First World War, ed. Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 45–70, 186–203.
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Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd, eds., The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 6 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925–7), 5: 330.
U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, 13 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942–7), 3: 212–13.
U.S. Senate, Congressional Record, 66 Congress, 1 Session, 58: 4014 (Aug. 20, 1919).
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilson’s League of Nations,” Maryland Historical Magazine 65 (Winter 1970): 369–93.
André Tardieu, The Truth About the Treaty (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1921), 147–67;
Great Britain, House of Commons Sessional Papers, vol. 26 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1924), “Papers Respecting Negotiations for an Anglo-French Pact,” Cmd. 2169, 25–57; Rhineland Question, [Feb. 26, 1919], Wilson Papers.
Diary of Edward M. House, March 12, 1919; David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939), 1: 265–6; Tardieu, Truth, 176–8;
David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 2: 296–7;
David Hunter Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris, 21 vols. (New York: Appeal Printing Co., 1924), 1: 293–4; newspaper interview, July 10, 1919, Wilson Papers.
Clemenceau to Wilson, March 17, 1919, Wilson Papers; “Negotiations for an Anglo-French Pact,” 69–76; Tardieu, Truth, 177–82; Georges Clemenceau, Grandeur and Misery of Victory (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930), 232–7.
Paul Mantoux, Les Délibérations du Conseil des Quatre: 24 mars-28 juin 1919, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1953), 1: 39–51.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilson, the Republicans, and French Security after World War 1,” Journal of American History 59 (Sept. 1972): 341–52.
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Ambrosius, L.E. (2002). Wilson, Clemenceau, and the German Problem at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. In: Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403970046_5
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