Product Description

Between January and July 1919, after the war to end all wars, men and women from all over the world converged on Paris for the Peace Conference. At its heart were the leaders of the three great powers - Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Kings, prime ministers and foreign ministers with their crowds of advisers rubbed shoulders with journalists and lobbyists for a hundred causes - from Armenian independence to women's rights. Everyone had business in Paris that year - T.E. Lawrence, Queen Marie of Romania, Maynard Keynes, Ho Chi Minh. There had never been anything like it before, and there never has been since.;For six extraordinary months the city was effectively the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China and dismissed the Arabs, struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; failed above all to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. They tried to be evenhanded, but their goals - to make defeated countries pay without destroying them, to satisfy impossible nationalist dreams, to prevent the spread of Bolshevism and to establish a world order based on democracy and reason - could not be achieved by diplomacy.;This book offers a prismatic view of the moment when much of the modern world was first sketched out. (20030603)

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45082 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In the very first words of her prize-winning book, Peacemakers, Margaret Macmillan says, "In 1919 Paris was the capital of the world." In the aftermath of the First World War, the great and good of all nations were there to reshape the world. New nations sprang into existence during lunches in expensive Parisian hotels; borders that had lasted centuries were altered with the stroke of a pen; empires that had outlived their sell-by date were unceremoniously dismantled. Presiding over this wholesale remaking of the globe were Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau.

Margaret Macmillan's pen portraits of the Big Three, and of many of the other extraordinary delegates to the Peace Conference--from Lawrence of Arabia to the Polish pianist and politician Ignace Paderewski--are superb. Her own writing is engagingly witty and she has a knack for finding apposite and funny quotes to enhance it. This is one of the very few books on diplomacy and international relations that can make a reader laugh out loud. The liveliness and vigour of her writing rests on the solid foundation of her wide-ranging knowledge. The delegates presumed not only to solve the problems of war-ravaged Europe but were happy to turn their attentions to Africa, the Middle East and China. Margaret Macmillan seems equally comfortable discussing the intricacies of Balkan boundaries, the creation of new states like Czechoslovakia, war between Greece and Turkey, Zionist settlement in Palestine, Japanese ambitions in the Pacific and a host of other subjects. Above all she works hard to be fair to the participants in the conference.

We know that an even more terrible war was only 20 years in the future. They didn't and they were all working sincerely to create a world in which war would be impossible. Macmillan is rightly dismissive of the notion that the peace devised at Paris was so flawed that another war was inevitable. Her book not only does justice to the Paris Peace Conference but it's also massively readable. That's quite an achievement. --Nick Rennison

Choice
"Lively, fascinating and provocative."

Review
"Lively, fascinating and provocative." (Choice 20030412)

"Engagingly written and well-researched" (Stand To Magazine 20030412)

“ Margaret MacMillian deservedly won the 2002 Samuel Johnson Prize for this book that has been reprinted in timely fashion” (Belgravia 20030412)

“Deserving winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, this pacey and racy account of the statesmen who reshaped the world at the Paris conference of 1919 puts the dash back into diplomatic history” (THE INDEPENDENT Magazine 20030412)

"Every peacemaker sent to determine the future of Iraq should regard it as an essential piece of luggage" (THE GUARDIAN 20030412)

"Enthralling ... detailed, fair, unfailingly lively ... full of brilliant pen-portraits." Allan Massie. (Daily Telegraph 20060414)

"Exactly the sort of book I like: written with pace and flavoured with impudence based on solid scholarship." (Sunday Times 20060414)

"A fascinating piece of history." Tony Blair. (Guardian )

"Magnificent ... she gives a full, colourful and erudite description of the participants and their motives." Simon Heffer. (Literary Review )

'This is how to write history...so readable that it appeals as much to laymen who have never read a word of history as it does to specialists in the field' - Dan Snow ('My Six Best Books' column).

(Daily Express )

‘A terrific piece of writing … full of wonderful insights and portraits of the statesmen and women of the day’ (listed among ‘My Six Best Books’ by Chris Patten)

 

(Chris Patten, Daily Express )

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Customer Reviews

An enjoyable read
This book reads well and flows nicely, with plenty of lively quotations from Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Wilson and others, as well as some entertaining anecdotes, such as that concerning the Hungarian aristocrat hired by the Albanians whose main interest turned out to be in the tooth structure of dinosaurs. Very interesting, too, to read about the sheer insensitivity and arrogance of the German delegation after it arrived in Versailles to receive the peace terms. Inevitably, perhaps, it is stronger on some topics (Franco-German borders, Bolshevism, Poland) than others (the Balkans). But it does an excellent job in conveying the sense of a small group of statesmen battling against the odds not to let their instinctive mistrust of each other derail their task of reconstructing the world order. Measured against Wilson's 14 points, much of what they did was illogical or unjust. And there were serious miscalculations, such as the encouragement of Greek ambitions in Turkey. But could anyone have done it better?

caution
An excellent and fascinating description of real politic in the days of big power hegemony. But buyers of the paperback edition should be aware that it does not contain the chapter notes , apparently by agreement between author and publisher. The result is a maddening frustration for the reader.

engrossing history
An impossibly broad canvas is engrossingly covered in this book. There are some excellent sketches of the key figures such as Wilson, Lloyd George and particularily the vengeful French President Clemenceau - and some equally vivid cameos of peripheral figures such as the eccentric Queen Marie of Rumania and the enigmatic TE Lawrence. Macmillan organises her wealth of information with great skill and makes the events at Versailles and the tragedy of the subsequent years truly comprehensible.

History on the grand scale from one of the best historians currently writing.