INSPIRED BY THE BOOK 'PARIS 1919: SIX MONTHS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD' For six fateful months in 1919, Paris became the centre of the world. The last shots had been fired in the most devastating war of all time. Almost 10 million were dead. Two empires had collapsed. The old world order lay in tatters and a new one desperately needed to be created.
Driven by unprecedented urgency, delegations from over 30 nations descended upon Paris for the most ambitious peace talks in history. The French capital became the destination of emirs and presidents, newsmen and royalty, ambitious socialites and enterprising arms dealers.
At the helm of the conference were the Big Four — U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, British prime minister David Lloyd George and Italian prime minister Vittorio Orlando.
They endeavoured to engineer a peace treaty “for all time”. And while the Big Four staggered under their mind-boggling agenda, separate committees assessed war reparations or realigned national borders, creating new entities like Iraq or Yugoslavia with little chance for reflection. Meanwhile, the streets were teeming with starving widows and war amputees — and Germany was rearming.
Paris 1919 takes us inside this singular event with vivid sense of character and narrative. In a finely crafted and thoughtful work of popular history, director Paul Cowan blends re-enactments with archival images to evoke the cut-and-thrust of diplomacy and a brief moment when the prospect of everlasting peace gave hope to a weary world.
Bringing events into focus are astute observations from John Maynard Keynes and Harold Nicolson, members of the British delegation and players in a real-life cast that includes Lawrence of Arabia, Chaim Weizmann and a young Vietnamese kitchen hand named Ho Chi Minh. Inspired by Margaret MacMillan‘s landmark book — which was hailed by The New York Times as a “blueprint of the political and social upheavals bedevilling the planet now” — Paris 1919 deftly highlights how the spectre of those past events still haunts the present, offering a disquieting and compelling reflection on history and its great missed opportunities.
