The Versailles Effect

The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will reshape-or even radically redefine-our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity.

"The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space, a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires and ruptures. The splendour of the chateau and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains masks a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot hope to provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to now: From the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. This innovative collection of essays will reshape, even radically redefine our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity"--

This text scrutinizes the motives, actions, and constraints that informed decision making by the various politicians who bore the principal responsibility for drafting the Treaty of Versailles.

Signed on June 28, 1919 between Germany and the principal Allied powers, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I. Problematic from the very beginning, even its contemporaries saw the treaty as a mediocre compromise, creating a precarious order in Europe and abroad and destined to fall short of ensuring lasting peace. At the time, observers read the treaty through competing lenses: a desire for peace after five years of disastrous war, demands for vengeance against Germany, the uncertain future of colonialism, and, most alarmingly, the emerging threat of Bolshevism. A century after its signing, we can look back at how those developments evolved through the twentieth century, evaluating the treaty and its consequences with unprecedented depth of perspective. The author of several award-winning books, Michael S. Neiberg provides a lucid and authoritative account of the Treaty of Versailles, explaining the enormous challenges facing those who tried to put the world back together after the global destruction of the World War I. Rather than assessing winners and losers, this compelling book analyzes the many subtle factors that influenced the treaty and the dominant, at times ambiguous role of the "Big Four" leaders?Woodrow Wilson of the United States, David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy, and Georges Clémenceau of France. The Treaty of Versailles was not solely responsible for the catastrophic war that crippled Europe and the world just two decades later, but it played a critical role. As Neiberg reminds us, to understand decolonization, World War II, the Cold War, and even the complex world we inhabit today, there is no better place to begin than with World War I and the treaty that tried, and perhaps failed, to end it.

The peace treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain and Trianon, with their provisions on new borders, mainly affected the situation in Central Europe. At the same time, however, it was in this region that the limits of their principles and applicability became most evident. This was particularly evident in the areas of border guarantees, the settlements of territorial disputes, the regulations of minority rights and the ideal of national self-determination. The volume analyzes how these contradictions appeared and how they were treated in both an internal, Central European, and an external perspective. It focuses more on the medium-term implications of further development than on the course of peace negotiations. It is on the strategies and visions of the future arrangement during and especially after the peace negotiations. Contributors from Albania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Russia and the United States examine, on the one hand, the strategies and discourses of the actors of individual national societies, but on the other hand apply a comparative and transnational approach. They deal with both the “great” actors of history (such as diplomats, politicians, intellectual elites) and the structural conditions of the functioning of the “Versailles system”.

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On 28 June 1914, two pistol shots shattered the peace of a sunny afternoon in Sarajevo. Those shots reverberated around Europe and shattered the peace of the whole world. This was the beginning of the Great Slaughter. Could it have been avoided? Alan Woods uses the method of Marxism to answer this question. He explains that, actually, whilst individuals play an important role in history, to explain events such as wars, one must look at deeper causes. As well as dealing with the origin of the war, Woods traces the conflict through its development, looking at the role of all the major actors, and their aims. He shows how in the midst of the despair of the trenches and the home front, a new consciousness was formed. He also makes the case that it was the German Revolution that brought the war to an end, and how a revolutionary wave swept across Europe. The book also looks at the Treaty of Versailles and how the victorious powers imposed the deal, not just on Germany, but the rest of Europe and the Middle East. Given the amount of nationalistic mystification from all sides about the First World War, a history of the subject from the standpoint of the world working class is essential and it is provided by this book.