2 - What Really Happened at Paris? The War Guilt Clause

Summary

It was the departure from the pre-Armistice ‘contract’ with Germany that became the crucial issue – famously blamed on Lloyd George and Wilson alike in Keynes’s tract The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). In particular there was a crucial ‘breach of contract’ when the two leaders included war pensions as so-called ‘reparations’; and these were now demanded under a specifically drafted War Guilt Clause of the Treaty. Dulles subsequently admitted his own role in what he came to regard as the Treaty’s greatest failing. What Chapter 2 demonstrates, through a close reading of the published documentation, is that Dulles’s collaborator at each crucial stage was none other than Keynes himself.