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Introduction by Michael Cox

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Abstract

In 1919 John Maynard Keynes authored a short volume of only 60,000 words which defined the ways later generations viewed the Versailles Peace Treaty. Described by critics as being both inaccurate and unfair, but by supporters as being one of the most compelling pieces of writing of the 20th century, The Economic Consequences of the Peace remains one of the most fought over books of our time. A best seller in the 1920s it remains today a powerful warning to all those who would sacrifice the stability of Europe on the alter of political self-interest and narrow-minded nationalism.

This chapter, ‘Introduction from Michael Cox’, is © Michael Cox, 2019

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Quote from Zara Steiner, ‘The Treaty of Versailles Revisited’, in Michael Dockrill and John Fisher eds., The Paris Peace Conference, 1919: Peace Without Victory, Houndmills, Palgrave, 2001, p. 13.

  2. 2.

    In the same, very revealing letter written to Vanessa Bell, Keynes said of his experience in Paris: ‘I wish I could tell you every evening of the twists and turns of the day for you’d really be amused by the amazing complications of psychology and personality and intrigue which make such magnificent sport of the impending catastrophe of Europe’. Quoted in Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist, London, Tauris Parke, 2016, p. 183.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., p. 102.

  4. 4.

    Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946, Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, London, Pan Books, 2004, p. 200.

  5. 5.

    The once intimate, but thereafter very close, relationship between Keynes and the artist Duncan Grant is explored in Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography, London, Pimlico, 1997.

  6. 6.

    The letter to Grant was sent on 14 May 1919 and is quoted in Richard Davenport-Hine’s engaging Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes, London, William Collins, 2015, p. 105.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., p. 106.

  8. 8.

    Keynes had been involved in the economic planning for the peace long before the end of WW1. Thus as early as January 1916 he had authored a ‘Memorandum on the Effect of an Indemnity’. More than two years later he was then involved in further discussions about how to deal with Germany, and warned that Germany would not be able to pay the high reparation figure then being mooted. But it was not just the issue of reparations that concerned Keynes (and many others besides). There was the linked problem of inter-allied debt. Here he made it quite clear that the ‘existence of great war debts’ was a menace to financial stability everywhere’, and that unless the United States was prepared to write off the debt owed it by the allies, the whole financial order would be thrown into chaos. Keynes thus called for a debt cancellation in March and April 1919. However, his proposal on debt was met with ‘violent opposition on the part of Washington’. His detailed views on both these issues, as well as his much broader, and equally unacceptable (to the Americans) ‘Scheme for the Rehabilitation of European Credit and for Financing Relief and Reconstruction’ written in April 1919, can be traced in great detail in Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVI, Activities 1914–1919: The Treasury and Versailles, London and Basingstoke, St. Martin’s Press, 1972, pp. 311–474.

  9. 9.

    For a detailed discussion of this crucial period see D.E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes, An Economist’s Biography, London and New York, Routledge, 1992, pp. 308–313.

  10. 10.

    Keynes to Grant, 14 May 1919.

  11. 11.

    Quotes to be found in W.K. Hancock and Jean Van Der Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers, Volume IV, November 1918–August 1919, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 222, 252. On 28 June 1919, Smuts did in fact sign the Peace Treaty, but made it clear that he had done so not because it was a ‘satisfactory document, but because it is imperatively necessary to close the war’ (p. 256).

  12. 12.

    Moggridge, op. cit., pp. 312–313.

  13. 13.

    Keynes’s letter to Lloyd George can be found in Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVI, Activities 1914–1919: The Treasury and Versailles, Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1971, p. 469.

  14. 14.

    Cited in Anne Olivier Bell, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One 1915–1919, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, p. 288. Part of the entry to Woolf’s diary of 8 July 1919 can also be found in Skidelsky, op. cit., pp. 233–234.

  15. 15.

    Churchill was of course a very great admirer of Keynes. In 1929 he wrote of The Economic Consequences of the Peace and Keynes. “Mr Keynes a man of clairvoyant intelligence and no undue patriotic bias [was] saturated in the Treasury knowledge the real facts and revolted against the absurd objectives which had been proclaimed, and still more against the execrable methods by which they were achieved. [Keynes] showed in successive chapters of unanswerable good sense the monstrous character of the financial and economic clauses. On all these matters his opinion is good”. See Winston Churchill, The Aftermath, London, Portfolio Society, 2007, p. 115.

  16. 16.

    Quote from A. Lentin, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and the Guilt of Germany, Leicester University Press, 1984, p. 140.

  17. 17.

    Quoted in Schumpeter’s obituary to Keynes, ‘John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946’, The American Economic Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, September 1946, pp. 495–518.

  18. 18.

    Charles Maier, ‘Economic Consequences of the Peace, Social Consequences of the War’, Contemporanea, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2009, pp. 157–163.

  19. 19.

    The editor of the Keynes’s collected works writes: ‘Economic Consequences brought Keynes fame, a brief affluence, much correspondence, public involvement and, and new opportunities’. Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVII, Activities, 1920–1922: Treaty Revision and Reconstruction, Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, p. 113.

  20. 20.

    ‘Keynes’s relationship with the firm’ [Macmillan] changed significantly with the publication in 1919 of the work that made him a household name, The Economic Consequences of the Peace’. D.E. Moggridge, ‘A Risk-Bearing Author: Maynard Keynes and His Publishers’, in Elizabeth James ed., Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 220.

  21. 21.

    Quote from Austin Robinson, ‘A Personal View’, in Milo Keynes ed., Essays on John Maynard Keynes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 15.

  22. 22.

    The German admirer was Carl Melchior? Keynes first met Melchior in early 1919 during the early discussions between the Allies and Germany. Keynes kept up his relationship with Melchior and went on to write ‘Dr Melchior; a Defeated Enemy’ to be found in his Two Memoirs, London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949, pp. 11–74.

  23. 23.

    Quote from R.B. McCallum, Public Opinion and the Last Peace, London, Oxford University Press, 1944, p. 7.

  24. 24.

    See for example, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991, London, Abacus Books, p. 31.

  25. 25.

    Anthony P. Adamthwaite, The Making of the Second World War, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1977, pp. 28–29.

  26. 26.

    Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, London, Bloomsbury, 2009, p. 2.

  27. 27.

    Roy Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, London, Macmillan, 1951, p. 298.

  28. 28.

    Margaret Macmillan, ‘Keynes and the Cost of Peace’, New Statesman, 31 October 2018.

  29. 29.

    Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and the Attempt to End the War, London, John Murray, 2003, p. 192.

  30. 30.

    See Leonard Gomes, German Reparations 1919–1932, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

  31. 31.

    See Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011.

  32. 32.

    The quote is from Martin Gilbert cited in Robert J. Caputi, Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement, Susquehanna University Press, 2000, p. 117.

  33. 33.

    Quoted in David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2013, p. 136.

  34. 34.

    See Robert Lekachman’s introduction to The Economic Consequences of the Peace, New York, Penguin Books, 1971, pp. ix–xxxvii; and David Felix’s who wrote his for Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London, 2003, pp. vii–xxiii. See also Robert Lekachman, The Age of Keynes, London, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1967; and David Felix, Keynes: A Critical Life, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1999. Both these books are extremely well written and well researched. Both authors view Keynes as being one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century; and both view The Economic Consequences of the Peace as having been more or less right.

  35. 35.

    See Paul Volcker, Introduction to The Economic Consequences of the Peace, New York, Skyhorse Publishing, 2007, pp. xi–xiii. Volcker, who at one stage attended the LSE in early 1950s, later became Chair of the US Federal Reserve between 1978 and 1987 on the decidedly anti-Keynesian agenda of raising interest rates in order to bring inflation down. Volcker could thus hardly claim to be a Keynesian, let alone a Keynes scholar. He was also not uncritical of The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The book was, in his view, something of an ‘overdrawn… polemic’ whose estimates and calculations had subsequently been contested by ‘economic analysts’. Nonetheless, the book did, in his view, make US policy-makers after WWII act a good deal more wisely than they had after WWI.

  36. 36.

    The ‘hostile audience’ remark is to be found in Peter Clarke’s fluent and very positive book on Keynes, Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, op. cit., p. 3.

  37. 37.

    Quoted in Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, London and New York, Routledge, 2000, pp. 67–68.

  38. 38.

    See his essay ‘Robert Malthus: The First of the Cambridge Economist’, in J.M. Keynes, Essays in Biography London, Macmillan, 1933, pp. 81–124.

  39. 39.

    See his remarkable ‘Memorandum on the Probable Consequences of Abandoning the Gold Standard’ written on the 17 January 1917. In Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVI, Activities 1914–1919: The Treasury and Versailles, Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1971, pp. 215–222.

  40. 40.

    Quote from Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘From Clapham to Bloomsbury: A Geneaology of Morals’, Quadrant, Vol. 30, No. 1–2, January–February 1985, pp. 19–28.

  41. 41.

    See Amy Licence, Living in Squares: Loving in Triangles: The Lives and Loves of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, Stroud, Amberley Publishing, 2015.

  42. 42.

    ‘The porosity between the Bloomsbury set and the Apostles was total’ argues Michael Hone in his The Bloomsbury Set: Homosexual Renaissance, Amazon Books, 2017, p. 31.

  43. 43.

    There is an extensive literature on the Bloomsbury group but for an almost inside account written by the son of two of its key members—Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell—see Quentin Bell’s Bloomsbury, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.

  44. 44.

    Quote from a letter sent by Beatrice Webb to a friend on 18th September 1911. Beatrice Webb was not so much worried about the influence which the ‘metaphysical’ Moore might be having on Keynes, but rather on her friend Bertrand Russell who had lectured on German Social Democracy at the LSE in 1895–1896. She was ‘sorry’ now that ‘Bertie’ had ever gone to ‘Cambridge’ where there existed, in her view, ‘a pernicious set presided over by Lowes Dickinson which makes a sort of ideal of anarchic ways in sexual questions’ of which Beatrice, and presumably her husband, Sidney, did not approve. See Norman Mackenzie ed., The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb: Volume II, Partnership 1892–1912, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 600.

  45. 45.

    Quotes from ‘My Early Beliefs’ a paper read by Keynes to his friends in 1938. Reprinted in Robert Skidelsky ed., John Maynard Keynes: The Essential Keynes, London, Penguin Books, 2015, pp. 13–25.

  46. 46.

    A Treatise on Probability, London, Macmillan, 1921.

  47. 47.

    http://www.hetwebsite.net/het/texts/keynes/keynes1909india.pdf.

  48. 48.

    Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes, op. cit., p. 50.

  49. 49.

    R.F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, op. cit., pp. 242–244.

  50. 50.

    Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes, op. cit., pp. 88–89.

  51. 51.

    In a letter to his mother on the 14 April 1918 cited in R.F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, op. cit., p. 265.

  52. 52.

    Skidelsky, p. 215.

  53. 53.

    Keynes wrote in October 1916 that: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in a few months time the American executive and the American public will be in a position to dictate to this country’ (Great Britain) ‘on matters that effect us more nearly than them’. See Keynes’s alarming memorandum quoted in full in Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVI, Activities 1914–1919: The Treasury and Versailles, Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1971, pp. 197–198.

  54. 54.

    Quoted in Robert Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 34.

  55. 55.

    Quoted in G.C. Peden, Keynes, the Treasury and British Economic Policy, London, Macmillan, 1988, p. 12.

  56. 56.

    Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946, op. cit., p. 216.

  57. 57.

    See George Lichtheim, Europe in the Twentieth Century, London, Cardinal, Sphere Books, 1974, p. 181.

  58. 58.

    Keynes finally published his full portrait of Lloyd George fourteen years later. See his ‘Mr Lloyd George: A Fragment’, in J.M. Keynes, Essays in Biography, London, Mercury Books, 1961.

  59. 59.

    In February 1916 Strachey passed a note to Keynes asking him: ‘Dear Maynard, Why are you still at the Treasury? Yours Lytton’. Keynes, we are told by Strachey’s biographer, ‘agreed with Lytton that the war was futile and should be ended as “peace without victory” rather than pursued as a fight to the finish’. See Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography, New York, W. W. Norton, 1994, p. 343.

  60. 60.

    This telling remark was made by another one of Keynes’s circle, David or ‘Bunny’ Garnett. Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, ibid., p. 428.

  61. 61.

    Quote from John Sutherland, ‘Introduction’ to Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. xiii.

  62. 62.

    See Larry Lepper, ‘What Literary Criticism Tells Us About Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace’, in Jens Holscher and Matthias Klaes eds., Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2014, pp. 35–62.

  63. 63.

    An observation made by Gilles Dostaler in his useful Keynes and His Battles, Cheltenham, Edwards Elgar, 2007, p. 147.

  64. 64.

    There has been a long tradition in many American accounts of the Versailles Peace Treaty going right back to the 1920s to treat Wilson as the liberal idealist whose brand of liberalism simply ‘gained little support from European elites’ who were intent on imposing a hard peace on Germany. This for example would seem to be the view advanced by John Ikenberry in his Liberal Order & Imperial Ambitions, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2006, p. 64. However, this rather benign view of Wilson is frontally challenged by Mark Trachtenberg in his ‘Versailles After Sixty Years’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 17, No. 3, July 1982, pp. 487–506. Trachtenberg argues that ‘reading the documents one is struck by the punitive undercurrent to Wilsons’ policy (p. 491).

  65. 65.

    As David Reynolds has observed, ‘The impact of The Economic Consequences of the Peace was a compound of the book’s brevity (some 60,000 words), its polemical urgency and above all, its devastating character sketches’. Quoted in his The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 135.

  66. 66.

    This observation about The Economic Consequences of the Peace was made by Dennis Robertson in 1920. Cited in Charles Robert McCann, John Maynard Keynes, Critical Responses Volume 1, London, Taylor and Francis, 1998, pp. 140–146.

  67. 67.

    Keynes’s use of the term ‘civil war’ to describe a conflict which the allies blamed on Germany was not accidental. By so doing he shifted the question of war guilt away from Germany towards a more general failing in the European order as a whole. In this he may well have been influenced by another Apostle, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, whose book, The European Anarchy published in 1916, insisted that the deeper cause of the war had to be sought in the anarchic character of the international system and not in ‘the peculiar wickedness of the enemy’. Keynes later returns to this question of guilt, arguing that while Germany deliberately provoked the war’ in 1914, the ‘seeds’ of the conflict lay ‘deep’ in the late ‘history of Europe’. See his important ‘The Peace of Versailles’ written September 1920 to be found in Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVII, Activities, 1920–1922: Treaty Revision and Reconstruction, London, Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, pp. 51–80.

  68. 68.

    Keynes used the term ‘Carthaginian Peace’ very sparingly in the book—once as a rhetorical device with which to attack Clemenceau, and the other time to make clear that such a ‘peace’ was neither ‘practically right’ or even ‘possible’, given the huge changes which had taken place in the European economy since 1870.

  69. 69.

    ‘A Private View by a Cabinet Minister, 1919’, Earl of Crawford and Balcarres. Quoted in Milo Keynes, op. cit., pp 24–25.

  70. 70.

    Lord Sumner to E.H. Morley, 19 June 1920. On Sumner see the sympathetic picture painted by Anthony Lentin in his The Last Political Law Lord, Lord Sumner (1859–1934), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

  71. 71.

    James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference, New York, Macmillan, 1937, p. 26.

  72. 72.

    Quoted in Larry Lepper, ‘The Rhetorical Consequences of Mr. Keynes: Intellectuals and the Communication of Economic Ideas’, Unpublished Ph.D., Victoria University of Wellington, 2010, pp. 17–18.

  73. 73.

    In his very useful collection on Keynes, Charles Robert McCann, lists no less than 32 early reviews of The Economic Consequences of the Peace in English alone. See his John Maynard Keynes, Critical Responses Volume 1, op. cit., pp. 41–256.

  74. 74.

    See Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.

  75. 75.

    On British views on self-determination see Kenneth J. Calder, Britain and the Origins of the New Europe 1914–1918, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976.

  76. 76.

    John Maynard Keynes, Revision of the Treaty: Being a Sequel to the Economic Consequences of the Peace, London, Macmillan, 1922, p. 11.

  77. 77.

    Keynes wrote in 1922 that he did ‘not admit of error’ in having written his original book which had after all been ‘a literal interpretation of The Treaty of Versailles’ whose main thesis (accepted by ‘Inside opinion’) was that much of the Treaty was quite simply ‘impossible’ to implement. Keynes even went on to confess that many of the ‘perils’ he had written about in 1919 ‘are now passed safely’ because ‘no parts of the Peace Treaties have been carried out except those relating to frontiers and disarmament’. See John Maynard Keynes, Revision of the Treaty: Being a Sequel to the Economic Consequences of the Peace, ibid., pp. 3, 268.

  78. 78.

    Quote from Keynes to be found in Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVII, Activities, 1920–1922: Treaty Revision and Reconstruction, op. cit., p. 39.

  79. 79.

    Keynes described himself as suffering from ‘intolerable anguish and fury’ when he left Paris before setting out to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace in June 1919. Cited in Austin Robinson, ‘John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946’, The Economic Journal, Vol. 57, No. 225, March 1947, p. 20.

  80. 80.

    Quoted in Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, Penguin Books, 2015, p. 295.

  81. 81.

    Some of the individual reactions to the publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace are very helpfully pulled together in Larry Lepper, Ph.D., op. cit., esp. pp. 25–50.

  82. 82.

    See Donald Winch, ‘Keynes and the British Academy’, The British Academy Review, No. 22, Summer 2013.

  83. 83.

    Keynes quote in Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVII, Activities, 1920–1922: Treaty Revision and Reconstruction, London, Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, p. 40.

  84. 84.

    As he was about to resign from his duties in Paris in the spring of 1919 Keynes was asked whether he wished to be ‘a candidate for the Directorship of the London School of Economics – at £1500 or perhaps more’. In a letter to ‘Mrs Keynes’ (his mother) he wrote that he would ‘ask a few questions about it’, but that he had no ‘intention of accepting it’. In Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVI, Activities 1914–1919: The Treasury and Versailles, Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1971, p. 458.

  85. 85.

    Cited in Larry Lepper, Ph.D., op. cit., pp. 34–35.

  86. 86.

    Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, op. cit., pp. 464–465.

  87. 87.

    See Anthony Lentin, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and the Guilt of Germany, Leicester University Press, 1984, p. 139.

  88. 88.

    Harold Nicholson, Peacemaking 1919, London, Constable, 1934, p. 7.

  89. 89.

    Sir James Headlam-Morley, A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference 1919, London, Methuen, 1972, pp. 103, 104, xxxii.

  90. 90.

    See Lepper, Ph.D., op. cit., pp. 25–27.

  91. 91.

    Keynes felt impelled to reply to a number of his American critics in detail. Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVII, Activities, 1920–1922: Treaty Revision and Reconstruction, London, Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, pp. 24–124.

  92. 92.

    Keynes was not impervious to the various attacks launched against him by Wilson’s American supporters, and tried later to explain his position in an article written for an American magazine intended for an American audience. Wilson he wrote in September 1920 was at heart ‘a pitiful and tragic figure…a fallen hero’ motivated by ‘fine’ ideals who always tried to ‘do right’. According to Keynes, he ‘alone amongst all the statesmen of Paris sought ideal aims and sincerely pursued throughout the conference the future peace of the world as his supreme and governing principle’. Cited in Elizabeth Johnson ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume XVII, Activities, 1920–1922: Treaty Revision and Reconstruction, London, Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, pp. 56–58.

  93. 93.

    This analysis is based up an excellent talk given by Mark Jones, ‘Wither the Hand: Germany and the Versailles Treaty in 1919’ presented at the conference ‘Peace Making After the First World War, 1919–1923’, National Archives and Lancaster House, 27–28 June 2019.

  94. 94.

    Following the signing of the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye between Austria and the victorious allies there followed ‘three days of mourning’ in Austria. According to one leading Austrian at the time the treaty made us ‘very sad, bitter and depressed when we realized that Austria had received harsher terms than Germany’. Cited in Robert Gerwath, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923, London, Penguin Books, 2017, p. 206.

  95. 95.

    Quote from Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, New York, W. W. Norton, 2012, p. 10.

  96. 96.

    For a comprehensive overview of the French response to Keynes’s book see Francois Crouzet, ‘Reflections francaises devant “Les Consequences economiques de la Paix” de Keynes’, Revue d’histoire modern et contemporaine, Tome 19, No. 1, Janvier–Mars 1972, pp. 6–26. See also Pierre Miquel, Les paix de Versailles et l’opinion publique francaises. Paris, Flammarion, 1972.

  97. 97.

    Andre Tardieu, The Truth About the Treaty, Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers, 1921.

  98. 98.

    Jacques Bainville, Les consequences politiques de la Paix (1920). Bainville not only attacked Keynes for his materialism and assuming there could be an economic answer to the strategic challenges facing Europe after the war: he was equally critical of the French negotiators for endorsing a final peace settlement which in David Stevenson’s words ‘fell between the stools of repression and conciliation’ which on the one hand only ‘inflamed German nationalism’ but ‘then failed to protect Europe from the consequences’. The treaty to use Bainville’s words was thus ‘trop douce pour ce qu’il y a de dur’. See David Stevenson, ‘French War Aims and Peace Planning’, in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 108.

  99. 99.

    This section draws from several sources Including Scott Newton, Profits of Peace: The Political Economy of Anglo-German Appeasement, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996; and Neil Forbes, Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain’s Economic and Financial Relations with Germany, 1931–1939, London, Frank Cass, 2000.

  100. 100.

    Lenin certainly read Keynes but the question remains as to whether or not Keynes ever read Lenin even though he cited him in 1919. See Frank Whitson Fetter, ‘Lenin, Keynes and Inflation’, Economica, Vol. 44, No. 173, February 1997, pp. 77–80.

  101. 101.

    Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes, London, Oxford University Press, 1946, p. 203.

  102. 102.

    In a letter written to J.C. Smuts on 12 August 1919, Keynes made the telling point that ‘we shall have to get to work very quickly with action to make the Treaty, or much of it, a dead letter’. See W.K. Hancock and Jean Van Der Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers, Volume IV, November 1918–August 1919, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 279–280.

  103. 103.

    For a useful brief guide to the so-called Keynes–Ohlin debate see Leonard Gomes, ‘Appendix: Keynes, the Transfer Problem and German Reparations’, in his German Reparations: An Historical Survey, 1919–1932, op. cit., pp. 228–233.

  104. 104.

    This is explored by Niall Ferguson, no great fan of Keynes of course. Ferguson does admit that Keynes was right to suggest in 1919 that ‘the economic burden’ being imposed on Germany was ‘too high’. However, having conceded that much, he then goes on to take Keynes to task for either having helped cause German hyper-inflation by providing Germany with bad advice, or of being manipulated by the Germans who were constantly playing up the Bolshevik threat in order to increase their leverage with the allies. See Niall Ferguson, ‘Keynes and the German Inflation’, English Historical Review, Vol. 110, No. 433, April 1995, pp. 368–391.

  105. 105.

    Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman and who knew Keynes well, insists that Keynes not only supported [appeasement] ‘even after Munich’ in order to ‘end the injustices of Versailles’, but that his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, ‘which had delighted us all when we were young, was used as the intellectual basis of appeasement’ itself. See Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Volume of Autobiography 1931–1945, London, Hutchinson, 1968, pp. 241, 242.

  106. 106.

    Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw, London, Collins, 1968, p. 53.

  107. 107.

    After Keynes had died in 1946, Kingsley Martin reflected on appeasement and Keynes’s role in making the case for it to him as Editor of the New Statesman. Keynes he claimed was to blame for pushing the appeasement line on him. As Martin put it: ‘On the occasion which I made my worst editorial mistake’ [in suggesting there should be frontier changes in Czechoslovakia in 1938] ‘I had followed his’ [Keynes’s] advice. We were in the same quagmire. Almost any solution of the German problem seemed better than war’ He continued that Keynes ‘found it almost impossible, as I did, to “start a war” in defence of Eastern Europe’. See C.H. Rolph, Kingsley: The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin, London, Victor Gollancz, 1973, p. 249.

  108. 108.

    See Martin Ceadal, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement, and International Relations, 1854–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 293–375.

  109. 109.

    Quotes from Kingsley Martin, Editor, op. cit., pp. 241–260.

  110. 110.

    On the Anglo-American struggle at Bretton Woods and the role played by Keynes, see Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of the New World Order, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2013.

  111. 111.

    T.E. Jessop, The Treaty of Versailles; Was It Just? London, Thomas Nelson and Son, 1942.

  112. 112.

    R.B. McCallum, Public Opinion and the Last Peace, London, Oxford University Press, 1944, pp. 20, 70.

  113. 113.

    Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace or the Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes, London, Oxford University Press, 1946.

  114. 114.

    Etienne Mantoux, ‘La Theorie Generale de M. Keynes’, Revue d’economie politique, Vol. 51, No. 6, Novembre–Decembre 1937, pp. 1559–1590.

  115. 115.

    Here Mantoux is quoting from another appeaser, E.H. Carr and his influential book, The Twenty Years Crisis, Macmillan, 1940, p. 281.

  116. 116.

    The material cited here can be found at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/resources/images/ergen1182.pdf.

  117. 117.

    Joel Blatt, Review, H-France Review, Vol. 1, 2001, p. 44 and H-France Review, Vol. 1, No. 10, April 2001.

  118. 118.

    Roy Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, op. cit., 1951, op. cit., 1972, pp. 323–326.

  119. 119.

    See Sally Marks, ‘Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder’, Central European History, Vol. 2, No. 4, December 1969, pp. 356–365.

  120. 120.

    David Felix, ‘Reparations Reconsidered with a Vengeance’, Central European History, Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1971, pp. 171–179.

  121. 121.

    Sally Marks, Innocent Abroad: Belgium at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1981, p. 180, fn. 24.

  122. 122.

    See Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1976 where Keynes’s ‘tract’ on Versailles is described as being ‘tendentious’, p. 7, fn. 6.

  123. 123.

    All quotes from Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Reparations at the Paris Peace Conference’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 51, No. 1, March 1979, pp. 24–55. See also his Reparations in World Politics, France and European Economic Diplomacy 1916–1923, New York, Columbia University Press, 1980.

  124. 124.

    The list of Keynes’s academic foes from within the wider history profession is by now legend. See for example Sally Marks; ‘The Myths of Reparations’, Central European History, Vol. 11, No. 3, September 1978, pp. 231–255; and her later ‘Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany and the Versailles Treaty, 1918–1921’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 85, No. 3, September 2013, pp. 632–659. In addition, consult William Keylor ed., The Legacy of the Great War: Peacemaking 1919, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1998; Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and the Attempt to End the War, London, John Murray, 2003; Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005; Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power; France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013; and Alan Sharpe, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking After the First World War, 1919–1923, London, Macmillan, 3rd edition, 2018.

  125. 125.

    See Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 223–224, 485–488.

  126. 126.

    Margaret Macmillan, ‘Keynes and the Cost Of Peace’, The New Statesman, 31 October 2018.

  127. 127.

    Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946, p. 237.

  128. 128.

    Bruce Kent for one defends Keynes’s critique of reparations as being economically impossible without however endorsing the idea that Versailles was a harsh ‘Carthaginian Peace’. See The Spoils of War: The Politics, Economics and Diplomacy of Reparations 1918–1932, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 1, 2, 6, fn. 7.

  129. 129.

    See Stephen A. Schuker, ‘J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations: Part 1’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 25, 2014, pp. 453–471.

  130. 130.

    Donald Moggridge and Robert Skidelsky, ‘Critique of Schuker: “J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations”’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2015, 736–744.

  131. 131.

    See Jurgen Tampke, A Perfidious Distortion of History: The Versailles Peace Treaty and the Success of the Nazis, Melbourne and London, Scribe, 2017.

  132. 132.

    Quoted in Anthony Lentin, ‘Maynard Keynes and the “Bamboozlement” of Woodrow Wilson: What Really Happened at Paris? (Wilson, Lloyd George, Pensions and the Pre-armistice Agreement)’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2004, p. 740.

  133. 133.

    In the publicity advertising the conference to be held at Keynes’s old College, The Economic Consequences of the Peace was held up as a ‘brilliant piece of advocacy’ as well ‘an accurate prophecy of the consequences of a “Carthaginian peace”… which later went on to inform ‘key aspects of reconstruction after World War II..’ Economics of the Peace Centenary Conference, University of Cambridge, 9–10 September 2019, Kings College, Cambridge.

  134. 134.

    ‘Versailles Revisited’, The Economist, 6 July 2019, p. 16.

  135. 135.

    Zara Steiner quoted in her ‘The Treaty of Versailles Revisited’, in Michael Dockrill and John Fisher eds., The Paris Peace Conference, 1919: Peace Without Victory, New York, Palgrave, 2001, p. 13.

  136. 136.

    Margaret Macmillan, ‘Keynes and the Cost of Peace’, New Statesman, 31 October 2018.

  137. 137.

    Erich Rauchway, ‘There Ought to Be an Opera About Keynes at Versailles’, 17 July 2012. http://www.chronicle.com.

  138. 138.

    Charles S. Maier, ‘Economic Consequences of the Peace, Social Consequences of the War’, Contemporanea, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2009, pp. 157–163.

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  1. King’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    John Maynard Keynes

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  1. Emeritus Professor of International Relations and Director of LSE IDEAS, London School of Economics, London, UK

    Michael Cox

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Keynes, J.M. (2019). Introduction by Michael Cox. In: Cox, M. (eds) The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04759-7_1

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