Versailles#34: On The Big Four
When Diplomacy Fails Podcast
Zack Twamley
4.8 • 773 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2019
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The latest episode of the project hones in on three specific days – the 8, 9 and 10 of February 1919, as we build up to the moment when David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson returned home for various reasons. Both figures had a lot on their mind even before they had left, but before the American President could return home, he would at least have to face the full brunt of the paranoid French in action. At least, they seemed paranoid enough to him. The French demands, and the insistence that the Germans intended at any moment to avenge themselves upon allied divisions or weaknesses, struck Wilson as extremely far-fetched. Not for the first or for the last time, the American President was rubbed the wrong way by French severity towards Germany. Wilson didn’t understand this extreme angle of Clemenceau, but then, how could he, since America had not been invaded by its neighbour two times in as many generations.
If this episode’s purpose could be summarised in four words, then it would read ‘Clemenceau’s battle with Germany.’ It was impossible, Clemenceau insisted, to leave Germany to her own devices. He was not interested in anything – not the League of Nations, not mandates, not Russia – so long as Germany remained unresolved as a problem. Clemenceau imagined that as soon as the final peace treaty was concluded, the British and Americans would leave the French to face their adversary alone. To guard against this, Clemenceau planned to drive a hard bargain in four key areas with respect to Germany – in the case of the Rhineland, the industrial Saarland, Germany’s eastern border and on the question of reparations. To Clemenceau it was vital that these matters were worked out in France’s favour, but he came up constantly against the resistance of the American President. The honeymoon period between Premier and President certainly appeared to be over, yet there was much work still to be done…
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, my name is Zach Twomley. You're listening to When Diplomacy Fails, and maybe you're thinking right now, for crying out loud, how many episodes a week are you going to release? |
| 0:08.5 | And I would ask myself the same question. What exactly is life if you're not recording and then editing and then researching and then lecturing and then doing the delegation game? |
| 0:17.6 | I don't know. Maybe I fit a little bit of total war in there somewhere, but otherwise, |
| 0:21.6 | I am your humble host and podcaster Zach Twomley, and I'm coming to you not at all live, |
| 0:26.8 | but pre-recorded from an undiscused location, that being my apartment and the back room, |
| 0:32.4 | and with all the curtains pulled, because I can't afford the studio, but what I can afford |
| 0:36.7 | is to spend an awful lot of time with you guys every single week. |
| 0:40.2 | And I really love it. |
| 0:41.1 | I really do love doing this. |
| 0:43.1 | And if you love it too, then make sure you tell people because that makes me extra super happy. |
| 0:47.9 | It is a great time to be a listener of this podcast because we've never been so active. |
| 0:52.0 | We're diving so deep into the Versailles Anniversary |
| 0:54.6 | Project and it's great to see you guys react and respond to what we're doing here. I really love |
| 0:59.5 | it. I really do love to see it. Events that happened a century ago, who knew they could be so |
| 1:03.7 | fascinating, so relevant to what's going on today and so incredibly more to them than what's |
| 1:09.9 | normally said in a textbook, that being the Paris Peace Conference happened, it made the Treaty of Versailles, then World War II. |
| 1:16.6 | Well, guess what textbook? We're able to squeeze all these hours out of it, so something obviously went down. |
| 1:22.4 | As we go along at this project, you're going to see more and more primary sources being used. |
| 1:27.2 | The foreign relations |
| 1:28.6 | of the United States papers are absolutely wonderful and they're all available online for free. So |
| 1:34.4 | thanks to the US government for doing that because it means that I can read the minutes of all |
| 1:39.3 | of these meetings, whether it's the Supreme Court Council meeting, the Supreme Council |
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