introduction

This chapter centers on the negotiating position that the French government of Georges Clemenceau disclosed to its allies between December 1918 and February 1919. Because it was a negotiating position, one should not take it at face value or assume that all its elements were advanced with equal conviction. Its fate in the crucial sessions of the peace conference is discussed elsewhere in this book. The purpose here is to explain the position, the reason it came into being, the concerns that shaped it, and the historiographical controversies that have revolved around it since the French archives were opened. Perhaps the best place to begin is with a survey of the historiography.

French policy at the peace conference was contentious from the outset and was denounced by interwar British and American memoirists ranging from John Maynard Keynes and Ray Stannard Baker to Harold Nicolson and David Lloyd George. It was defended by its authors, including Clemenceau himself, and most persuasively by Andre Tardieu. It then suffered a generation of neglect, although in the 1940s there was a riposte to Keynes from Etienne Mantoux, and Philip Mason Burnett and Etienne Weill-Raynal made major contributions to historical understanding of the dispute over reparations.