Held in the Salle de l'Horloge at the French Foreign Ministry, the opening session brought together leaders including Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George. The conference's decisions redrew borders across Europe and the Middle East, created the League of Nations, and imposed harsh reparations on Germany, sowing resentments that historians link to the outbreak of a second world war two decades later.
The date was no accident: January 18 marked the anniversary of the 1871 proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and French officials relished the symbolic reversal. Clemenceau, known as 'the Tiger,' wanted Germany crippled; Wilson pushed his idealistic Fourteen Points; Lloyd George tried to balance both.
Germany itself was excluded from the negotiations entirely, only summoned months later to sign whatever terms the victors had drafted—a humiliation German nationalists, including a young Adolf Hitler, would exploit for years afterward.
Over the following months the conference splintered into dozens of committees haggling over borders in Poland, the Balkans, and the former Ottoman territories. The resulting patchwork of treaties, most famously Versailles signed in June 1919, is still debated by historians as either a flawed but necessary peace or a vindictive settlement that guaranteed future conflict.