[BRIEF NOTE] Paris 1919

[rfmcdonald]

I rather like Margaret MacMillan's 2003 Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, as a piece of literature and as a useful presentation of the conferences that ended up producing the Treaty of Versailles. Just yesterday, it occurred to me that the effect of the book might lie in its format, a structure repeated by MacMillan in chapter after chapter: She starts a chapter by providing an overview of a cause, examines how the backers of this cause (say, for an independent Czechoslovakia) managed to acquire the support of the allies, shows the opposition to this cause by the people with things to lose (in this example, Sudeten Germans, Austria, and Hungary), and ends by describing just how the Versailles settlement failed catastrophically and at such cost come the Second World War. This might or might not be an accurate portrayal of the emergent global order that followed the First World War, but it makes for wonderful reading.