Paris Peace Conference (1919 - 1920)
1919 CE to 1920 CE
The Paris Peace Conference is the meetings in 1919 and 1920 of the victorious Allies after the end of the first World War to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers.
The conference involves diplomats from thirty-two countries and nationalities, and its major decisions are the creation of the League of Nations and the five peace treaties with the defeated states; the awarding of German and Ottoman overseas possessions as "mandates," chiefly to Britain and France, the imposition of reparations upon Germany, and the drawing of new national boundaries, sometimes with plebiscites, to reflect ethnic boundaries more closely.
The main result is the Treaty of Versailles with Germany; Article 231 of the treaty places the whole guilt for the war on "the aggression of Germany and her allies."
That provision proves to be very humiliating for Germany and sets the stage for the expensive reparations that Germany is intended to pay (it pays only a small portion before its last payment in 1931).
The five great powers (France, Britain, Italy, Japan and the United States) control the Conference.
The "Big Four" are French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, US President Woodrow Wilson, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. They meet informally one hundred and forty-five times and make all major decisions before they were ratified.
The conference began on 18 January 1919. With respect to its end, Professor Michael Neiberg noted, "Although the senior statesmen stopped working personally on the conference in June 1919, the formal peace process did not really end until July 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed."[2]
It is often referred to as the "Versailles Conference," but only the signing of the first treaty took place there, in the historic palace, and the negotiations occurred at the Quai d'Orsay, in Paris.
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The Allied Powers meet in Paris to negotiate peace treaties with the Central Powers between January 1919 and January 1920.
At the conference, Amir Faisal (representing the Arabs) and Chaim Weizmann (representing the Zionists) set forth their cases.
Weizmann and Faisal reach a separate agreement on January 3, 1919, pledging the two parties to cordial cooperation; however, Faisal writes a proviso on the document in Arabic that his signature depends upon Allied war pledges regarding Arab independence.
Since these pledges will not be fulfilled to Arab satisfaction after the war, most Arab leaders and spokesmen will not consider the Faisal-Weizmann agreement as binding.
The First Palestinian National Congress, meeting in Jerusalem from January 27 to February 10, sends two memoranda to Versailles rejecting the Balfour Declaration and demanding independence.
President Woodrow Wilson appoints an American panel, the King-Crane Commission, to investigate the disposition of Ottoman territories and the assigning of mandates.
After extensive surveys in Palestine and Syria, the commission reports intense opposition to the Balfour Declaration among the Arab majority in Palestine and advises against permitting unlimited Jewish immigration or the creation of a separate Jewish state.
The commission's report in August 1919 will not be officially considered by the conference, however, and will not be made public until 1922.
Oberlin College president Henry C. King and Chicago executive Charles R. Crane head an International Commission of Inquiry, formed after attempts at creating an Anglo-French group fail.
The commission tours Syria and Palestine between June 10 and July 21, 1919, and, in soliciting petitions from local inhabitants, finds that a vast majority of Arabs favor an independent Syria, ...
...free of any French mandate, and that ...
...seventy-two percent of about eighteen hundred and seventy-five petitions received are hostile to the Zionist plan for a Jewish national home in Palestine.
Members of the General Syrian Congress present to the King-Crane Commission a memorandum opposing Jewish migration to Palestine, one of the first such Arab statements recorded, on July 2, 1919.
Bedouin attacks in northern Palestine force the French at a fort near Metulla to retreat on January 4, 1920.
The one hundred and twenty members of the settlement here are forced to flee to Sidon, where they will board a ship to Haifa.