From Fourteen Points to Versailles

Three men and a peace

On 8 January 1918, with the war still to be won, President Woodrow Wilson set out to Congress fourteen points on which peace should be made: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade, disarmament, colonial claims settled with regard to the people concerned, self-determination for the peoples of Europe, and, as the fourteenth, a league of nations to keep the peace. In October 1918 the German government asked for an armistice on the basis of those points, and got one on 11 November. Germany surrendered believing it knew the terms. The conference that opened in Paris on 18 January 1919 had 32 delegations and excluded Germany and Russia, and its decisions were made by three men. Georges Clemenceau, 77, had seen Germany invade France in 1870 and 1914; his country had lost around 1.4 million dead and 4 million wounded and had its northern departments wrecked, and he wanted Germany made unable to do it again. David Lloyd George had won the election of December 1918 with slogans about hanging the Kaiser and making Germany pay, wanted the German fleet and colonies, and privately feared that a Germany treated unjustly would seek revenge, which he said in a memorandum from Fontainebleau in March. Wilson wanted his League and his principles, and had a Senate at home that wanted neither. The treaty they signed on 28 June 1919 satisfied none of them fully and outlived all three in office within a year. AQA asks what each man aimed at and how far each got it, and expects the three to be judged separately with dates and evidence, not as the peacemakers in a bloc. This module gives you the aims, the bargaining and the score, and the source and judgement shapes.

Five words the examiners use

Each definition ends with the moment it mattered, because a bare definition earns nothing in a source answer.

From the Points to the signature, in order

Put these six events in the order they happened.

• Wilson sets out the Fourteen Points to Congress
• Germany asks for peace on the basis of the Points and the armistice is signed
• Lloyd George wins the coupon election on the promise to make Germany pay
• The Paris conference opens with Germany and Russia excluded
• Lloyd George warns in the Fontainebleau Memorandum against a treaty Germany will want to overturn
• The treaty is signed in the Hall of Mirrors

Why could the three not agree?

The Big Three had fought the same enemy for four years and spent six months arguing about the peace. Which explanation best accounts for the disagreement?

• They had suffered differently, France with around 1.4 million dead and its industrial north wrecked, Britain with its navy and empire intact, America with 116,000 dead and no damage at all; they answered to different voters, Clemenceau to a Chamber that wanted security, Lloyd George to an electorate that had just voted to squeeze Germany, Wilson to a Senate that was already hostile; they wanted different things from Germany, Clemenceau its weakness, Lloyd George its trade, Wilson its reform; and the Fourteen Points, which Germany thought were the terms, were never accepted as the basis by Britain or France.
• They could not understand each other because they spoke different languages.
• Germany played the three off against each other at the table.
• They spent the conference arguing about Russia.

What each wanted, and what each got

The grade-9 habit AQA rewards on this key element: score each man separately, aims against achievements with the clause that proves it, and never write "the peacemakers" as if they were one.

Question 1: how do you know?

Source A: a description of a cartoon by Will Dyson published in the Daily Herald on 13 May 1919, six days after the terms were handed to Germany. The four peacemakers, Clemenceau in front, Wilson, Lloyd George and Orlando behind him, walk away from the conference building; Clemenceau, labelled The Tiger, turns his head and says: Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping! Behind a pillar a naked small child sits crying, and above it is written 1940 Class. The title is Peace and Future Cannon Fodder. AQA Question 1 says: Source A is critical of the peacemakers. How do you know? Tap the TWO details that show the criticism most directly.

• The weeping child is labelled 1940 Class, meaning the boys who would be old enough to be conscripted in 1940, which presents the treaty as the cause of a future war.
• Four men are shown leaving the building.
• Clemenceau hears the child and finds it merely curious, walking on, which presents the peacemakers as indifferent to the consequences of what they have just done.
• Clemenceau is labelled The Tiger.
• The cartoon appeared in a London newspaper.

The armistice and the Points

Select the THREE statements that are true of the armistice and of what the Fourteen Points did and did not become.

• Germany asked Wilson for an armistice in October 1918 on the basis of the Fourteen Points, and Britain and France accepted the request only with reservations on freedom of the seas and on compensation for damage, so that the Points were the German expectation and never the Allied promise.
• The armistice of 11 November 1918 required Germany to withdraw behind the Rhine, surrender its fleet, submarines, heavy guns and rolling stock, and accept Allied occupation of the Rhineland while the blockade continued, which left it unable to fight again when the treaty arrived.
• Of the Fourteen Points, the League, an independent Poland with access to the sea, Alsace-Lorraine to France and self-determination for the peoples of Austria-Hungary went into the settlement, while freedom of the seas, free trade, general disarmament and open diplomacy did not.
• Britain and France signed the Fourteen Points in January 1918 as the agreed war aims of the Allies.
• The armistice allowed Germany to keep its army in the field ready to resume the war.
• All fourteen points were written into the Treaty of Versailles.

The map after Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles redrew the map of Germany, and almost every crisis of the 1930s happened on that new map. In the west, Alsace-Lorraine went back to France, the Rhineland was demilitarised, and the coal-rich Saar was run by the League of Nations for fifteen years. In the east, the Polish Corridor gave Poland a route to the sea and cut East Prussia off from the rest of Germany, with Danzig made a free city. The Sudetenland, the German-speaking rim of Czechoslovakia, was never German before 1938, but Hitler claimed it all the same. Austria, to the south, was forbidden to unite with Germany.

Question 2: how useful are two sources?

AQA Question 2 gives you two sources and asks how useful they are to a historian studying one thing, for 12 marks. The two below are described for this module; the exam prints the real text. Enquiry: the aims of the peacemakers in 1919. Source B. From the speech of President Wilson to Congress on 8 January 1918 setting out the Fourteen Points, in which he called for open covenants openly arrived at, the removal of economic barriers, the reduction of armaments to the lowest point consistent with safety, the adjustment of colonial claims with the interests of the populations concerned, and a general association of nations to guarantee the independence of great and small states alike. Source C. From the memorandum Lloyd George wrote at Fontainebleau on 25 March 1919, in which he argued that Germany must be treated so that it could not say it had been unjustly dealt with, that handing more Germans than necessary to Polish rule would sow the seeds of a future war, and that the greatest danger was that a humiliated Germany would throw in its lot with Bolshevism. The method is the same for both: content (what it says about the enquiry), provenance (who, when, why, and what that does to its value), and own knowledge to test it. Source B is useful for the aims of Wilson in his own words, and its date is its value and its limit: a year before the conference, before the armistice, addressed to Congress and the world rather than to Clemenceau, so it shows what he hoped for and nothing of what he would trade away in Paris. Source C is useful because it is private, written for the other two peacemakers rather than for voters, and so shows the gap between what Lloyd George had promised in December 1918 and what he believed; its limit is that it was a paper he lost the argument over, so it shows his aims and not his achievements. This meant that B is useful for the ideal and C for the calculation, and a top-level answer says what each shows about a different peacemaker rather than which is better.

In the shoes of the Big Three

Four decisions between October 1918 and June 1919. Choose what was actually done, and notice what each choice cost the man who made it.

• October 1918. You are Wilson. Germany has asked you, not the Allies, for an armistice on the basis of your Fourteen Points. Britain and France have not agreed to the Points. What do you do?
• December 1918. You are Lloyd George. An election is due, the country wants Germany punished, and your own view is that a ruined Germany means a ruined Europe. What do you campaign on?
• March 1919. You are Clemenceau. You want the Rhineland separated from Germany as a buffer. Wilson and Lloyd George refuse, and offer instead a treaty by which Britain and America will come to the aid of France if Germany attacks. What do you do?
• September 1919. You are Wilson, home with the treaty. The Senate will ratify only with reservations that weaken Article 10 of the Covenant. What do you do?

From cause to consequence

Because Germany asked for peace in October 1918 on the basis of the Fourteen Points, which Britain and France had never accepted, it expected a treaty it did not get and called what it got a _____. Because France had lost around _____ million dead and had its northern departments wrecked, Clemenceau wanted Germany made unable to attack again. Because Lloyd George had won the election of December 1918 on making Germany pay, he argued in public for terms he warned against in private at _____. Because Wilson wanted the League above everything, he accepted a treaty he thought punitive to get it written into the first 26 articles. And because the _____ rejected that treaty in November 1919, the man who had wanted the League most was the only one whose country never _____ it.

What France had lost

France lost around 1,400,000 soldiers killed and around 4,000,000 wounded in the First World War. How many French soldiers were killed or wounded in total?

Name the places on the map

Tap a place name, then tap the pin on the region it names.

Question 1: how do you know, marked

AQA Question 1 asks: Source A (the Dyson cartoon Peace and Future Cannon Fodder) is critical of the peacemakers. How do you know? It is marked for 4 on identifying the message and supporting it from the source with own knowledge. Which answer scores all four?

• I know because Dyson shows the four leaders walking away from a weeping child labelled 1940 Class, the boys who would be conscripted in 1940, while Clemenceau merely finds the sound curious, which presents the treaty as the cause of the next war and its makers as indifferent to it. That fits the moment: the cartoon appeared on 13 May 1919, six days after the terms had been handed to Germany, in a Labour newspaper that opposed a punitive peace, and Lloyd George himself had warned in March that an unjust treaty would breed revenge.
• The cartoon shows four men leaving a building and a child crying.
• The Daily Herald was a socialist paper that always attacked the government.
• The cartoon praises the peacemakers for ending the war so that children could be safe.

Back to France

Tap the region Germany had to return to France in 1919.

Question 3: an account, marked

Question 3: Write an account of how the peacemakers reached agreement on the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The conference opened in Paris on 18 January 1919 with 32 delegations, but the decisions were made from March by the Council of Four and, after Orlando walked out over Fiume in April, by three men who wanted different things. Because France had lost around 1.4 million dead and had been invaded twice in fifty years, Clemenceau demanded the Rhineland as a separate state, the Saar, a tiny German army and heavy reparations, while Wilson insisted on the Fourteen Points and the League and Lloyd George, bound by the election of December 1918, argued for reparations in public and warned against harshness in the Fontainebleau Memorandum of 25 March. This led to a series of trades rather than a single agreement: Clemenceau gave up the separate Rhineland in exchange for its demilitarisation, a fifteen-year occupation, the Saar for fifteen years and an Anglo-American guarantee of France; Wilson gave up his objection to a punitive treaty in exchange for the League as its first 26 articles; and Lloyd George took the fleet and the colonies as mandates and left the reparations sum to a commission so that no figure had to be agreed. As a result the terms were handed to Germany on 7 May with fifteen days to reply in writing, almost nothing was conceded to the German notes, and after an ultimatum the treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919. The account shows an agreement reached by each man surrendering the aim he could not win to keep the one he could, which is why each went home to be attacked for what he had given away. What earned the marks: a sequence of events with dates and figures; each linked to the next by because, this led to and as a result, so that the account explains how agreement was reached rather than listing the terms; and a closing sentence that says what the pattern shows. That structure, sustained, is what reaches the top level of the 8-mark account.

Question 4: the 16-mark judgement

"Clemenceau achieved his aims at Versailles more fully than either Wilson or Lloyd George." How far do you agree with this statement? Explain your answer.

• One paragraph on each of the three men, stating what he aimed at and what the treaty gave him, with the clause or the date that proves each point
• Judge each separately, as the grade-9 note requires: never write about "the peacemakers" as one group

Question 4: the judgement, tested

A student has argued that Clemenceau was the most successful of the three because he got Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar, reparations and a German army of 100,000. Which is the strongest point to set AGAINST that judgement, in the way the top level of Question 4 requires?

• Clemenceau got the longest list and missed the one item that mattered: he had wanted the Rhineland separated from Germany as a permanent barrier and settled for a fifteen-year occupation and an Anglo-American guarantee, and the guarantee died with the Senate vote of November 1919, so that France was left facing a Germany of 60 million with nothing but a treaty, which is why the French Chamber called his peace a surrender and removed him in January 1920; measured by security, which was his aim, he failed, while Lloyd George, who wanted the fleet, the colonies and a Germany able to trade, got every one of those, and a judgement should measure each man against his own aims rather than against the length of his list.
• Wilson was the most successful because he got the League.
• Nobody achieved anything because the treaty caused the Second World War.
• Clemenceau got reparations, so he must have been the most successful.