In the days following the conference's opening, the victorious Allied powers organized themselves into a Council of Ten, drawing the key decision-making body that would draft the Treaty of Versailles. The arrangement, dominated by Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and Japan, set the stage for months of negotiation that would redraw borders, assign war guilt to Germany, and create the League of Nations.
Paris in January 1919 was a city of anxious diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson had crossed the Atlantic, the first sitting American president to travel to Europe, carrying his Fourteen Points and a conviction that a new international order could prevent future wars. Georges Clemenceau of France wanted German power broken permanently, having watched his country invaded twice in fifty years.
The Council of Ten, comprising the heads of government and foreign ministers of the five principal Allied powers, met in ornate rooms at the Quai d'Orsay to hash out an agenda for the sprawling conference, which would eventually involve delegates from 32 countries. Smaller nations, colonial subjects, and defeated powers had little voice in these early sessions, a structural imbalance that would haunt the eventual settlement.
Within months the Council of Ten proved unwieldy and shrank to a Council of Four, but the January groundwork determined how the peace would be made: by a handful of great powers negotiating largely among themselves. The resulting treaty, signed in June, imposed reparations and territorial losses on Germany that many historians link to the resentments that fueled the rise of Nazism two decades later.