"18 January, 1871 had been a day of triumph for the strength and pride of Germany and 28 June, 1919 was the day of chastisement." Critically examine.

Answer:

The two dates mark the rise and humiliation of imperial Germany. The proclamation of the empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1871 was a moment of triumph; the signing of the peace treaty in the very same hall in 1919 was designed as, and felt to be, a chastisement.

The triumph of 1871

• The German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles after victory over France.
• William I became Kaiser and Bismarck the empire's first Chancellor.
• Alsace-Lorraine was annexed and a large indemnity imposed on France.
• The site was deliberately chosen to humiliate the defeated French.

The chastisement of 1919

• The treaty was signed in the same Hall of Mirrors, an equally deliberate choice.
• Article 231 assigned Germany sole guilt for the war.
• Reparations were fixed at a crushing figure and Alsace-Lorraine returned.
• The army was limited to a hundred thousand men and the Rhineland demilitarised.
• All colonies were forfeited, and Germany was excluded from the League.

Consequences

• Germans denounced it as a Diktat imposed without negotiation.
• The stab-in-the-back legend and resentment fed the rise of Nazism.
• Keynes warned in 1919 that its economic terms would prove ruinous.

A qualification

• Some historians hold the treaty was less harsh than Germany's own terms at Brest-Litovsk.
• Its severity lay as much in humiliation as in material loss.
• It was too harsh to conciliate and too weak to cripple, the worst of both.

The contrast is therefore apt and was consciously constructed by the victors of 1919. As historians emphasise, the symmetry of place and ceremony made the humiliation deliberate, and the resentment it generated in Germany contributed directly to the collapse of the peace within twenty years.