Fighting in the First World War ended on 11 November 1918 with the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne, but it wasn’t until January that representatives of the victorious powers began formal peace negotiations. The delay was primarily due to the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, who called a general election prior to the negotiations. Consequently the conference began on the 48th anniversary of the proclamation of the German Empire. This was not lost on President Poincaré of France, who welcomed the delegates with a bitter verbal assault at Germany’s expense.
While 27 nations were officially involved in the peace negotiations, the conference was dominated by the Big Four of Britain, France, the USA and Italy. However, each came with sometimes dramatically different demands, meaning the negotiators were regularly forced to compromise in order to agree the final terms. The hundreds of diplomats in Paris were divided into 52 commissions, and altogether held 1,646 sessions to discuss the terms of the peace treaties. Meanwhile the defeated nations were excluded from the conference until the draft treaties had been prepared.
The Paris Peace Conference is perhaps best known for producing the Treaty of Versailles that dealt with Germany, but the delegates created a total of five separate treaties that affected all the defeated nations. After the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 came the treaties of Saint-Germain with Austria and Neuilly with Bulgaria. Trianon with Hungary, and Sèvres with Turkey were not completed until 1920, by which time the inauguration of the League of Nations had brought the conference to an end.
