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Sound and fury

At the time, The Economic Consequences of the Peace created an instant controversy. Keynes was the official representative of the British Treasury at the negotiations in Paris. He was in the room during all the crucial discussions about “making Germany pay”, saw the protagonists of the treaty (Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau) in action at first hand, and was able to witness for himself the making of an international catastrophe: “My … most vivid impression is of … the president [Wilson] and the prime minister [Lloyd George] as the centre of a surging mob and a babel of sound, a welter of eager, impromptu compromises and counter-compromises, all sound and fury signifying nothing, on what was an unreal question anyhow, the great issues of the morning’s meeting forgotten and neglected; and Clemenceau silent and aloof on the outskirts…”

Keynes’s essay was bestseller worldwide. It rapidly became the source of conventional left-liberal wisdom on Versailles Keynes’s arguments for a more generous settlement were prescient. Above all, he saw with unique clarity the geopolitical tenor and perspective expressed by the Big Four, a combination of grandeur, vanity and vengeance that would shape Europe after the great war and send it spiralling towards an even bigger catastrophe.