Treaty of Versailles
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Treaty of Versailles
Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany
Signed
Location 28 June 1919
Versailles, France
Effective
Condition 10 January 1920
Ratification by Germany and three Principal Allied Powers.
Signatories
German Reich
British Empire
France
Italy
Japan
United States
Unofficial Ally 
Belgium
Depositary French Government
Languages French, English
Treaty of Versailles at Wikisource
The Treaty of 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. 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 October 21, 1920, but was not printed in League of Nations Treaty Series.
Of the many provisions in the treaty, one of the most important and controversial required Germany to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and, under the terms of articles 231–248 (later known as the War Guilt clauses), to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. The total cost of these reparations was assessed at 132 billion Marks (then $31.4 billion, £6.6 billion) in 1921 which is roughly equivalent to $400 Billion US Dollars as of 2010, a sum that many economists at the time deemed to be excessive. This was a sum that many economists deemed to be excessive because it would have taken Germany until 1988 to pay. The Treaty was undermined by subsequent events starting as early as 1932 and was widely flouted by the mid-1930s.
The result of these competing and sometimes conflicting goals among the victors was compromise that left none contented: Germany was not pacified or conciliated, nor permanently weakened. This would prove to be a factor leading to later conflicts, notably and directly the Second World War.
Negotiations
Negotiations between the Allied powers started on 18 January in the Salle de l'Horloge at the French Foreign Ministry, on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. Initially, 70 delegates of 27 nations participated in the negotiations. Having been defeated, Germany, Austria, and Hungary were excluded from the negotiations. Russia was also excluded because it had negotiated a separate peace with Germany in 1918, in which Germany gained a large fraction of Russia's land and resources. The treaty's terms were extremely harsh, as the negotiators at Versailles later pointed out.
Until March 1919, the most important role for negotiating the extremely complex and difficult terms of the peace fell to the regular meetings of the "Council of Ten," which comprised the heads of government and foreign ministers of the five major victors (the United States, France, Great Britain, Italy, and Japan). As this unusual body proved too unwieldy and formal for effective decision-making, Japan and—for most of the remaining conference—the foreign ministers left the main meetings, so that only the "Big Four" remained. After his territorial claims to Fiume (today Rijeka) were rejected, Italian Prime Minister, Vittorio Orlando left the negotiations (only to return to sign in June), and the final conditions were determined by the leaders of the "Big Three" nations: British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and American President Woodrow Wilson.
At Versailles, it was difficult to decide on a common position because their aims conflicted with one another. The result has been called the "unhappy compromise".
France's aims
France's chief interest was security. France had lost some 1.5 million military personnel and an estimated 400,000 civilians (See World War I casualties) and had suffered great devastation during the war. Like Belgium, which had been similarly affected, France needed reparations to restore its prosperity and reparations also tended to be seen as a means of weakening any future German threat. Clemenceau particularly wished to regain the rich and industrial land of Alsace-Lorraine, which had been stripped from France by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.