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The Treaty of Versailles (French: le Traité de Versailles) was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of World War I were dealt with in separate treaties.[1] Although the armistice, signed on 11 November 1918, ended the actual fighting, it took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. The treaty was registered by the Secretariat of the League of Nations on 21 October 1919, and was printed in The League of Nations Treaty Series.
Of the many provisions in the treaty, one of the most important and controversial required "Germany [to] accept the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage" during the war (the other members of the Central Powers signed treaties containing similar articles). This article, Article 231, later became known as the War Guilt clause. The treaty forced Germany to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions, and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. In 1921 the total cost of these reparations was assessed at 132 billion Marks (then $31.4 billion or £6.6 billion, roughly equivalent to US $442 billion or UK £284 billion in 2013), a sum that many economists at the time, notably John Maynard Keynes, deemed to be excessive and counterproductive. The argument by Keynes that the terms were too harsh—a "Carthaginian peace"—convinced many British and American leaders, but left the French unmoved.[2] However, historians have judged the reparations to have been lenient, designed to look imposing but were in fact not.
The result of these competing and sometimes conflicting goals among the victors was a compromise that left none contented: Germany was not pacified or conciliated, nor permanently weakened. The problems that arose from the treaty would lead to the Locarno Treaties, which improved relations between Germany and the other European Powers, and the renegotiation of the reparation system resulting in the Dawes Plan, the Young Plan, and finally the abolishment of reparations at the Lausanne Conference of 1932.
Contents [hide] 1 Negotiations 1.1 French aims
1.2 British aims
1.3 American aims
2 Content 2.1 Impositions on Germany 2.1.1 Penalties
2.1.2 Occupation of the Rhineland
2.1.3 Military restrictions
2.1.4 Territorial changes
2.1.5 Shandong problem
2.1.6 Reparations
2.2 The creation of international organizations
2.3 Other
3 Reactions 3.1 Among the allies 3.1.1 Britain
3.1.2 France
3.1.3 United States rejects Treaty
3.1.4 House's views
3.2 In Germany
4 Violations
5 Historical assessments
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
