On February 17, 1871, a twenty-nine-year-old newly elected Radical member of the Assemblée Nationale watched in horror as Prussian troops staged a victory parade through the streets of his beloved Paris. He voted against the peace treaty with the newly formed German Empire whose ruler, Wilhelm I, had just been crowned emperor in a ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palais de Versailles. He was horrified by the terms of the peace, appalled that five billion francs' worth of French money would be paid as tribute -- "reparations" to the German government whose forces would remain on French soil for five years or until the tribute was paid -- two and a half years early, as it would turn out. France also lost its provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Now it was a half-century later and the young parliamentarian, Georges Clemenceau, was prime minister of the same nation that this time had wound up victorious over its German foes. Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor who had sent his Prussian forces into battle then, was long dead.
Clemenceau was determined that this time the Germans would pay to rebuild his nation -- the one its troops had destroyed. And he needed to make certain that France would never again be vulnerable across its eastern borders. This quest for security would motivate his policy in Central Europe and the Balkans, the cordon sanitaire quaranteening Bolshevism within Russia. And it would motivate his attitude toward the Reich -- its boundaries, its military and especially its economic muscle. An old man by now, he sought recompense, in all its forms. He was one of the few who would sit down at the conference tables of Paris in January 1919 with an active and vivid memory of the previous war and the last peace. David Lloyd George, prime minister of Britain, was barely eight years old when the Prussians had marched into Paris. Woodrow Wilson had just turned fourteen, son of a Presbyterian minister in Columbia, South Carolina, an ocean away from those violent, remote events. Other men and a few women, younger still, were converging on Paris, this time with a determination that the mistakes of their elders would not be repeated. Vengeance would not be exacted at this peace table, they vowed. And money -- tribute -- would not be exacted for the sake of retribution. How wrong they turned out to be.
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