Conan Fischer. A Vision of Europe

With the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles (June 28, 1919), historians have lined up to have their say on what went wrong in post–World War I Europe. Two rather entrenched narratives usually parse the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. On the one hand, the conference is lauded for creating a world system in the League of Nations, which was ultimately betrayed and hobbled by the depredations of the dictators in the 1930s. The second interpretation is more specifically related to the Treaty of Versailles, which brought a formal end to World War I between Germany and the Entente Powers. In A Vision of Europe: Franco-German Relations during the Great Depression, 1929–1932, Conan Fischer calls it “a treaty too benign to guarantee French security and too severe to secure German goodwill” (14); Versailles is linked in the popular and scholarly minds with the advent...

Ancient history · Archaeology · Declaration · Economic history · Economics · First world war · German · Goodwill · Great Depression · Interpretation (philosophy) · League · Peace treaty · Political science · Politics · Treaty · World War II · European Political History Analysis · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy