The Inside Story of the Peace ConferenceDillon, Emile Joseph
History
The Inside Story of the Peace Conference
Dillon, Emile Joseph
Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920)
On several occasions passages of the discourses of the plenipotentiaries
underwent a certain transformation in the well-informed brain of M.
Mantoux before being done into another language. They were plunged, so
to say, in the stream of history before their exposure to the light of
day. This was especially the case with the remarks of the
English-speaking delegates, some of whom were wont to make extensive use
of the license taken by their great national poet in matters of
geography and history. One of them, for example, when alluding to the
ex-Emperor Franz Josef and his successor, said: "It would be unjust to
visit the sins of the father on the head of his innocent son. Charles I
should not be made to suffer for Franz Josef." M. Mantoux rendered the
sentence, "It would be unjust to visit the sins of the uncle on the
innocent nephew," and M. Clemenceau, with a merry twinkle in his eye,
remarked to the ready interpreter, "You will lose your job if you go on
making these wrong translations."
But those details are interesting, if at all, only as means of eking out
a mere sketch which can never become a complete and faithful picture. It
was the desire of the eminent lawgivers that the source of the most
beneficent reforms chronicled in history should be as well hidden as
those of the greatest boon bestowed by Providence upon man. And their
motives appear to have been sound enough.
The pains thus taken to create a haze between themselves and the peoples
whose implicit confidence they were continuously craving constitute one
of the most striking ethico-psychological phenomena of the Conference.
They demanded unreasoning faith as well as blind obedience. Any
statement, however startling, was expected to carry conviction once it
bore the official hall-mark. Take, for example, the demand made by the
Supreme Four to Bela Kuhn to desist from his offensive against the
Slovaks. The press expressed surprise and disappointment that he, a
Bolshevist, should have been invited even hypothetically by the "deadly
enemies of Bolshevism" to delegate representatives to the Paris
Conference from which the leaders of the Russian constructive elements
were excluded. Thereupon the Supreme Four, which had taken the step in
secret, had it denied categorically that such an invitation had been
issued. The press was put up to state that, far from making such an
undignified advance, the Council had asserted its authority and
peremptorily summoned the misdemeanant Kuhn to withdraw his troops
immediately from Slovakia under heavy pains and penalties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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