Versailles after Sixty Years

Abstract

The historiography of the Paris Peace Conference has always been highly political. One of the first works to appear on the subject was a little book that Ray Stannard Baker published in 1919, What Wilson Did at Paris. Baker, who had headed the Press Bureau of the American delegation at the peace conference, said the book had been 'written chiefly to help along the League of Nations'.' President Wilson himself encouraged Baker to write a more wideranging history of the conference; the 'little book', the President said, should be its 'nucleus'.2 The result, Baker's Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, appeared in 1922. Given Baker's ties with Wilson, it is not surprising that his book was a strong and even strident defence of Wilsonianism or in Baker's words of 'the principle of international cooperation for which he [Wilson] stood, and in which I believe to the bottom of my boots'.3 His goal, as he wrote to the editor of the New Republic (with the aim of influencing that magazine's review of the book) was to 'build up that new public opinion which we need' in order to get 'a juster view of our international relations and responsibilities'.4 The book's thesis conformed to these purposes. To Baker, the conference was essentially a struggle between proponents of a peace of reconciliation, led by Wilson, and reactionary partisans of a 'Carthaginian' peace, led by the French Prime Minister Clemenceau. Many other historians and publicists, not just in America but in Europe as well, were to take the same general line; and often the political overtones of the argument are obvious. Paul