Even a century after a French translation of Consequences was published in 1920 by France’s foremost editor, the Nouvelle Revue française, there remains a myth that Keynes’s international bestseller was not only barely read in France but met with a homogeneously hostile reception. Recent historical discourse tends to overlook, however, how French reactions to Consequences mirrored France’s own internal political dissensions on the merits of the Treaty. Keynes, it turns out, was well in tune with predating and intellectually relevant French condemnations of the Versailles Peace.

At the Paris peace conference in 1919, Keynes served as a member of the British delegation. He often represented the Treasury although himself only a temporary civil servant aged thirty-six. But there were equally youthful members of the US delegation with whom he worked closely, initially in support of the position adopted by President Woodrow Wilson in seeking a negotiated peace with Germany. Hence Keynes’s close contact with both Norman Davis and also John Foster Dulles, then a young lawyer. Their task was to define the ‘reparations’ due from Germany under the Armistice agreement – often called the ‘Lansing Note’ after the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who was Dulles’s uncle.