The Paris Peace Conference Opens After WWI
On this day · 18 January 1919
On a deliberately symbolic January day in 1919, the victors of the Great War gathered in Paris to remake the world's borders.
On 18 January 1919, the Paris Peace Conference opened, bringing together the victors of the First World War to negotiate the peace treaties that would reshape Europe and the colonial world. Twenty-seven states were represented, though real power rested with the so-called “Big Four”: the United States, Britain, France, and Italy.
The date was no accident. It marked the anniversary of the 1871 proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, a pointed reversal of fortune for the host nation.
“On 18 January 1919, the Peace Conference opened in Paris, bringing together the victors of the First World War to prepare the peace treaties.”
Much of the diplomatic groundwork unfolded at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay. The conference’s most consequential product, the Treaty of Versailles, was signed that June, alongside the founding of the League of Nations, an ambitious but ultimately fragile attempt to prevent another world war.
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