A Peace Based on Fairness or Revenge?
The Fourteen Points had been very popular with people on both sides of the war, and Wilson represented perhaps the greatest hope for world peace. However, his ideas were looked upon differently by representatives of some of the 27 countries that gathered at the Paris Peace Conference, which met just two months after the armistice was signed.
Wilson came to Paris to build a better world. Perhaps he had different motives than some of the European leaders in attendance.
Watch this video, in which President Wilson arrives in Paris to negotiate a peace treaty. As you watch and read the video transcript, consider why Wilson favored fairness and reconciliation with Germany but other statesmen held different views. Then answer the question in the notes box below.
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NARRATOR: On the 14th of December 1918, just one month after the Armistice, Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris to negotiate a peace treaty and end the Great War.
A. SCOTT BERG, Writer: Paris then had a population of about a million people. Over two million people lined the parade route, just the few miles that Woodrow Wilson traveled as he wove through the streets. Just by the sheer numbers it was quite simply the greatest march of triumph in the history of man. I’m not forgetting Caesar. I’m not forgetting Alexander the Great. This was the arrival of the Messiah, this was the Second Coming. What kind of peace was he bringing? The whole world wanted to see.
MARGARET MACMILLAN, Historian: He was carrying a burden of expectations which no human being can have carried. There was this feeling that he’s going to set it all right. But what setting it all right meant was very different things for different people.
NARRATOR: The Armistice was just a truce; a treaty was needed to satisfy the competing claims of the victors, on terms that the Germans could accept. For the first time, Wilson met French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, along with delegates from more than thirty countries. These were the nameless statesmen whom Wilson had denounced in his speeches. Some of them were less enamored of the American president than the crowds that mobbed his processions. And many of them held ambitions that clashed sharply with Wilson’s.
A. SCOTT BERG: Wilson was the only one there fighting for a principle. He was fighting for mankind; that was basically his constituency here. And what he came up against were especially Lloyd George of Great Britain and Clemenceau of France who genuinely wanted revenge on Germany.
MARGARET MACMILLAN: Wilson makes it very clear that the United States is not coming in to gain anything for itself at the peace conference. They are coming in to build a better world. Well, he can say that because the United States hasn’t lost territory, it hasn’t lost huge numbers of men, it hasn’t spent huge amounts of money. Britain and France have spent themselves almost to bankruptcy and lost men in the hundreds of thousands.
Take Notes
Wilson considered the Fourteen Points the basis for “a just and lasting peace.” How did the experiences of the French and British during the war inform their ideas of what would make for a just and lasting peace?
