Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General introduction
- Editorial note
- Preface
- Longer draft preface
- English text of French preface
- Preface to the Roumanian edition
- Introduction to the Roumanian edition
- 1 INTRODUCTORY
- 2 EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR
- 3 THE CONFERENCE
- 4 THE TREATY
- 5 REPARATION
- 6 EUROPE AFTER THE TREATY
- 7 REMEDIES
- Index
3 - THE CONFERENCE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General introduction
- Editorial note
- Preface
- Longer draft preface
- English text of French preface
- Preface to the Roumanian edition
- Introduction to the Roumanian edition
- 1 INTRODUCTORY
- 2 EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR
- 3 THE CONFERENCE
- 4 THE TREATY
- 5 REPARATION
- 6 EUROPE AFTER THE TREATY
- 7 REMEDIES
- Index
Summary
In chapters 4 and 5 I shall study in some detail the economic and financial provisions of the treaty of peace with Germany. But it will be easier to appreciate the true origin of many of these terms if we examine here some of the personal factors which influenced their preparation. In attempting this task I touch, inevitably, questions of motive, on which spectators are liable to error and are not entitled to take on themselves the responsibilities of final judgment. Yet, if I seem in this chapter to assume sometimes the liberties which are habitual to historians, but which, in spite of the greater knowledge with which we speak, we generally hesitate to assume towards contemporaries, let the reader excuse me when he remembers how greatly, if it is to understand its destiny, the world needs light, even if it is partial and uncertain, on the complex struggle of human will and purpose, not yet finished, which, concentrated in the persons of four individuals in a manner never paralleled, made them in the first months of 1919 the microcosm of mankind.
In those parts of the treaty with which I am here concerned, the lead was taken by the French, in the sense that it was generally they who made in the first instance the most definite and the most extreme proposals. This was partly a matter of tactics.
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- Information
- The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes , pp. 17 - 34Publisher: Royal Economic SocietyPrint publication year: 1978