WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY MAX HASTINGS WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2001 WINNER OF THE PEN
HESSELL TILTMAN PRIZE 2002 WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2003 'A ground-breaking book
. . . The story of Europe's diplomatic meltdown has never been better told' Spectator
'Enjoyable and illuminating . . . MacMillan is that wonderful combination - an academic and
scholar who writes well with a marvellous clarity of thought' ANTONY BEEVOR The Times
Between January and July 1919 after the war to end all wars men and women from all over the
world converged on Paris for the Peace Conference. At its heart were the leaders of the three
great powers - Woodrow Wilson Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Kings prime ministers and foreign
ministers with their crowds of advisers rubbed shoulders with journalists and lobbyists for a
hundred causes - from Armenian independence to women's rights. Everyone had business in Paris
that year - T.E. Lawrence Queen Marie of Romania Maynard Keynes Ho Chi Minh. There had never
been anything like it before and there never has been since. For six extraordinary months the
city was effectively the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt
empires and created new countries. They pushed Russia to the sidelines alienated China and
dismissed the Arabs struggled with the problems of Kosovo of the Kurds and of a homeland for
the Jews. The peacemakers so it has been said failed dismally failed above all to prevent
another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made scapegoats for the
mistakes of those who came later. They tried to be evenhanded but their goals - to make
defeated countries pay without destroying them to satisfy impossible nationalist dreams to
prevent the spread of Bolshevism and to establish a world order based on democracy and reason -
could not be achieved by diplomacy. Peacemakers offers a prismatic view of the moment when much
of the modern world was first sketched out.
