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British Historians and the Treaty of Versailles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Catherine Ann Cline
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Extract

Students of inter-war foreign relations have long recognized the role played by the British public's disapproval of the Treaty of Versailles in the burgeoning of the appeasement policy of the 1930's. The peace settlement, once generally viewed as “stern but just,” came to be perceived by all political parties and by the public at large as unduly harsh and punitive in its treatment of Germany. Hitler's rearmament of the Fatherland, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, and the occupation of the Sudetenland were all significant attacks on the Versailles system which most groups in Britain had come to consider unworthy of defense.

The influences which brought the Treaty into disrepute were various. For one thing, the deterioration of Anglo-French relations tended to foster an increasingly sympathetic attitude towards Germany. Then, too, the problems of the British economy led to an awareness that the stability of Britain's former trading partner in Central Europe was essential to her own prosperity and to a corresponding desire to soften those features of the peace settlement which might be impeding German recovery. In addition, John Maynard Keynes' brilliant polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), not only made the case that the reparation clauses were unfair and impossible of fulfillment, but, with its withering portraits of the peacemakers, also tended to undermine respect for the Treaty as a whole. Finally, criticisms of various aspects of the peace settlement by elite groups ranging from bankers to bishops of the Church of England contributed heavily to the public's increasingly negative perception of the entire Treaty.

Type
Presidential Address North American Conference on British Studies 1987
Information
Albion , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Spring 1988 , pp. 43 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1988

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References

1 See e.g. Kennedy, Paul, The Realities Behind Diplomacy (London, 1981), pp. 224, 284Google Scholar, and Gilbert, Martin and Gott, Richard, The Appeasers (Boston, 1963), pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

2 The phrase is Lloyd George's. Only five votes were cast against the Treaty in the House of Commons. The ease with which it was accepted is indicated by the fact that the second reading occupied only one day each in Lords and Commons as compared with several weeks' discussion in the French Chambers. Northedge, F. S., The Troubled Giant (London, 1955), pp. 121–22Google Scholar.

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6 The second and third editions, also issued in the autumn of 1914, added material from the Russian Orange Book and the Belgian Gray Book.

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9 Headlam-Morley found a “carefully planned conspiracy against the peace and security of Europe” and expressed the view that Britain would not have entered the war—at least at first—had it not been for the attack on Belgium. Headlam-Morley, J. W., History of Twelve Days (London, 1915), pp. xviii, 340Google Scholar. See also idem, The German Chancellor and Outbreak of the War (London, 1917).

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