Paris 1919
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: February 16, 2017 6:48 PM | Last Updated: May 29, 2017
Margaret MacMillan
For six months in 1919, after the end of "the war to end all wars," the Big Three — President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau — met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities — Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them — born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn. (From Random House)
Paris 1919 won the Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction in 2003.
From the book
Guns fired salutes, crowds along the waterfront cheered, tugboats hooted and Army planes and dirigibles circled overhead. Robert Lansing, the American secretary of state, released carrier pigeons with messages to his relatives about his deep hope for a lasting peace. The ship, a former German passenger liner, slid out past the Statue of Liberty to the Atlantic, where an escort of destroyers and battleships stood by to accompany it and its cargo of heavy expectations to Europe.
From Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan. Published by Penguin Random House Canada.