Lloyd · 1919
Lloyd George at Versailles
From the eighteenth of January 1919 to the twenty-eighth of June 1919, the Paris Peace Conference settled the formal end of the First World War. The decisive body was the Council of Four: Georges Clemenceau for France, Vittorio Orlando for Italy, Woodrow Wilson for the United States, and David Lloyd George for the British Empire. Lloyd George, fifty-six years old, born in Manchester to Welsh parents and raised by his shoemaker uncle Richard Lloyd at Llanystumdwy, occupied the central seat in the Council and the most consequential single role in shaping the European settlement, between the French demand for security through dismemberment of Germany and the American insistence on the Fourteen Points. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in the Hall of Mirrors on the twenty-eighth of June 1919, was, in its principal compromises (war guilt, reparations, the Rhineland occupation, the Polish corridor), a Lloyd George document. Keynes called it Carthaginian. Lloyd George himself called it, in private, the best he could do between the two other men in the room.
It is a quarter past three on the afternoon of the third of April 1919, in the upstairs drawing-room at 23 Rue Nitot, Paris, in pale spring light, with the Sèvres clock on the mantelpiece running. He is fifty-six years old. He is David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, born at Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, raised at Highgate, Llanystumdwy, on a smallholding by his uncle Richard Lloyd the shoemaker and Calvinistic Methodist lay preacher, called to the Welsh bar in 1884, member of Parliament for Carnarvon Boroughs since 1890, Prime Minister since December 1916. He is in a black frock coat over a white shirt with a cravat, with the white moustaches and the unbrushable lock of grey hair on the forehead that the political cartoons of the world have settled on as his permanent property.
On the round table in the centre of the room are three documents. One is a French Foreign Ministry memorandum on the Saar coal-basin in Marshal Foch's hand, which Clemenceau wants annexed outright to France. The second is a State Department brief from Colonel House, on the Saar, which the Americans want as a League of Nations mandate for fifteen years and a plebiscite. The third is the British Cabinet position, drafted by him and Maurice Hankey his Cabinet Secretary, which is to take the coal output of the Saar for fifteen years on French account, leave the territory under League administration, and hold a plebiscite at the end. He has, in his head, the third position as a kind of bridge between the first two, on the calculation that Wilson will sign anything that has the words plebiscite and League mandate in it and Clemenceau will sign anything that has the words fifteen years and coal in it.
Clemenceau is at the window. He is seventy-seven years old. He is wearing the grey gloves that he wears at all the meetings since the assassination attempt on the nineteenth of February. He has not yet sat down because he has not decided whether to sit down. Wilson is at the chair on the right, in his American black, six feet tall, his hands folded over his stick.
Lloyd George thinks: Wilson is more rigid this morning than he has been all month. Wilson has just had a temperature of a hundred and three for two days. Wilson is in pain.
Lloyd George thinks: Clemenceau is at the window because Clemenceau is sixty-seven days from leaving office. Clemenceau is on the floor of his career. Clemenceau cannot lose the Saar to a plebiscite. Clemenceau will not sign a treaty that loses the Saar to a plebiscite.
Lloyd George thinks: I have to talk Wilson into the fifteen-year economic clause and Clemenceau into the plebiscite clause. The order of the conversation has to be Wilson first, because if I go to Clemenceau first he will have the time to harden.
Lloyd George thinks: the Saar is a thing. The Rhineland is a big thing. The reparations are a big thing. The Polish corridor is a big thing. If I get the Saar today I have a path to the rest. If I do not get the Saar today the Council collapses by Easter.
He goes over to Wilson. He sits in the chair beside him, not opposite. He speaks to him for forty minutes in a low voice. He does not show him the State Department memorandum that Wilson has himself written. He shows him a sketch of the territorial line on a sheet of foolscap, with the coal-fields on one side and the proposed plebiscite area on the other, and the words fifteen years and League of Nations and plebiscite of the people themselves in the same sentence. He gives Wilson, by Wilson's own diary entry that night, the line: Mr President, your principle is in the document. The shape is what we will have to live with. Wilson nods.
He goes over to Clemenceau at the window. He speaks to him in his careful French. He shows him the same sheet. He says, by Hankey's note made within the hour: the coal is yours for fifteen years. The territory will not be transferred to Germany during that time without the people of the Saar voting for it. Foch will not be asked to evacuate. The plebiscite is the price of the coal. Clemenceau, by Hankey, takes the sheet, reads it twice, says: very well, Mr Lloyd George. I will accept this. He folds the sheet. He puts it in his coat. He sits down.
The Saar clauses, almost word for word as drafted on Lloyd George's foolscap that afternoon, became Articles 45 to 50 of the Treaty of Versailles, signed at the Hall of Mirrors on the twenty-eighth of June 1919. The fifteen-year mandate and the plebiscite ran their course. The plebiscite of the thirteenth of January 1935 returned the Saar to Germany by a majority of ninety per cent and was, by that point, a Nazi referendum, but the principle of the plebiscite held: a population voted, and the territory passed by their vote. The Saar plebiscite is the only territorial transfer of the post-1919 European settlement that ran by the form Lloyd George wrote in pencil on a sheet of foolscap on a spring afternoon in Rue Nitot.
The wider Treaty of Versailles, by every careful judgment, did not hold. Keynes published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in December 1919, attacking the reparations clauses with such force that the book became the canonical critique of the Versailles settlement for the next century. Hitler tore up the Treaty by stages between 1933 and 1939. Lloyd George himself, in private letters to Frances Stevenson and his sister, said in 1922 that the Treaty was the best he could get out of two larger countries with rigidly held positions and a smaller one which was, by then, hardly in the room. He held the premiership for three years and seven months after the signing; he lost it in October 1922 when his coalition broke. He lived another twenty-three years, was made Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor on his deathbed, and is buried on the bank of the Dwyfor River at Llanystumdwy, on the family ground his uncle Richard Lloyd had bought for the shoemaker's family in the 1860s, the ground from which the Welsh-speaking Calvinistic Methodist boy had walked into the Council of Four. The grave has no headstone, by his own instruction; only a low boulder of local Caernarfonshire granite, on the river bank, with the dates and his name, and the Dwyfor running past it.