Behind the Scenes at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919

Abstract

In January 1919 thousands of delegates, diplomats, and academic experts poured into Paris to redraw the map of the world and to settle its problems, supposedly forevermore. While the confusion attendant upon the negotiations was evident to contemporary observers, who also complained of the delay before the conference began, few considered the magnitude of the job of organizing so vast an assembly and of providing the larger delegations with the facilities for the many tasks facing them. In retrospect, it is indeed remarkable that Paris, after four and a half years of war, so well absorbed so many people and that anonymous officials laboring unobserved behind the scenes were able to provide the essential services necessary to the reasonably efficient functioning of the luminaries in the limelight.The burden of arrangements for the conference itself fell upon the French, but so far as their own delegation was concerned, they had the inestimable advantage of operating upon home ground and of requiring few special arrangements. For the Americans, who sent the largest delegation, the problem of distance was so great that while an entire boatload of delegates and documents was shipped across the Atlantic, the personnel of the delegation remained stable and facilities for them were obtained largely from the French and from the American army because the oceanic barrier eliminated other alternatives. The Japanese, faced with the difficulty of even greater distance and the added complication of a language barrier, rested upon the French for their facilities and sent a small delegation composed of a few dignitaries from Tokyo and a number of senior officials from their European embassies.