Paris Peace Conference of 1919 : The Challenge of a New World Order

For more than a century, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 has remained an object of historical scrutiny. As an attempt to consolidate peace in the wake of World War I and to prevent future conflict, it was instrumental in shaping political and social dynamics both nationally and internationally. Yet, in spite of its implications for global conflict, little consideration has been given to the way the Paris Peace Conference constructed a new global order. In this illuminating and geographically wide-ranging reassessment, The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 reconsiders how this watershed event, its diplomatic negotiations and the peace treaties themselves gave rise to new dynamics of global power and politics. In doing so it highlights the way in which the forces of nationality and imperiality interacted with, and were reshaped by, the peace.

Laurence Badel is Professor of Contemporary History and International Relations at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. A specialist of European diplomatic practices, her research focus is two-pronged: the history of women in diplomacy and international relations and the history of diplomatic capitals. Her most recent publications are Écrire l'histoire des relations internationales. Genèses, concepts, perspectives XVIII^e-XXI^esiècle (Armand Colin, 2024) and Diplomaties européennes: XIX^e-XXI^e siècle (Presses de Sciences Po, 2021), which won the Institut de France’s 2022 Prix Edouard Bonnefous.

Eckart Conze is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Co-Director of the International Research and Documentation Centre for War Crimes Trials (ICWC) at the University of Marburg (Germany). He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Toronto, Cambridge, Bologna, Utrecht and Jerusalem. Among his book publications is Die große Illusion. Versailles 1919 und die Neuordnung der Welt (Siedler, 2018).

Axel Dröber is lecturer at Sorbonne Université. He studies nineteenth and twentieth-century Western European history, with a focus on the history of public security and the state monopoly on violence in post-revolutionary Europe. He published a book-length study on the National Guard during the Restoration and the July Monarchy in France (Nation, Militär und Gesellschaft, HeiUP,2022) and is currently working on the topic of migration and citizenship after the First World War.