No one is more surprised over the success of Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 than its author herself.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” says the baffled Trinity Provost, 60, in her high-ceilinged, book-filled Trinity College office.
Explaining the book’s success is the least of her worries. Feelings of bewilderment have been replaced by surprise and elation. The 570-page tome about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 finished near the top of the bestseller list in 2003 and has yet to let up steam. Enter any bookstore and the book, now in paperback, is usually placed prominently on a separate rack of its own.
“It did catch me off guard,” says the tall and slender professor of history, in her lilting English accent. “I thought I’d probably get reviewed in a couple of places but the first review I got was in the Financial Times and I thought, ‘Good heavens’-I didn’t think it would get reviewed there. And then suddenly, all these other places began reviewing it. And then it started winning prizes-and I really did not expect that.”
And not just any prizes. Paris 1919 recently won the prestigious Governor- General’s Award and the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize, making MacMillan the first female honoree ever.
So how has an academic book about old white diplomats come to grab the imagination of readers? As it turns out, with the same ingredients found in all bestsellers: a good story and compelling characters. “I think a lot of people like the gossip,” quips MacMillan.
The book is never short on that. Drawing from diaries, transcribed minutes and letters, MacMillan details the backdoor politics of an unprecedented conference in history. At the center were the Big Three: France, Britain, and the US (Italy was also included, but unceremoniously departed over unfulfilled Adriatic land claims). Their task: secure the peace from a war-ravaged Europe and re-map a new world order-in six months.
What makes the book so vivid, however, are the characters that populate the conference: Clemenceau, the aging French leader constantly worried about the nascent German military; Lloyd George, the opportunistic Brit burdened increasingly by the fragile British Empire; and Woodrow Wilson, a righteous, stubborn politician whose Fourteen Points offered a chance at statehood for all those seeking national independence in a fragmented European continent.
Add to this an assassination attempt, a ravishing Romanian beauty, a charismatic Greek leader, and a pianist-turned-Polish president, and before long you have the workings of a real page-turner.
“I’m interested in the individuals,” admits MacMillan. “I’m fascinated by the individual characters in the past and why they do what they do.”
It was this affection for characters, in fact, that prompted her to write the book. “Here was this interesting event with all these fascinating people, everyone from Woodrow Wilson to Ho Chi Minh to Lawrence of Arabia. This was a very interesting event in itself.”
MacMillan’s interest in the Paris Peace Conference began in the early 1970s, soon after taking a PhD from Oxford. After oscillating between self-doubt (“I thought ‘I can’t do it. It’s too big, I’m not an expert'”) and writing a book about British women in India, her teachings in international relations would summon her back to the topic years later. Strategically scheduling conferences with libraries in Washington, Yale, London, Paris, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Ottawa, she began the book several years ago, working most intensely in the last two years.
In explaining her fondness for history, MacMillan is quick to answer. “I just loved it from the first moment,” she says. “I liked English a lot too and I liked Latin and I liked science. History was just the thing I found fascinating.”
Family may have also played a part. MacMillan’s parents both trained as scientists, but read history. Most strikingly, she is the great-granddaughter of Lloyd George. Although only one year old when he died, MacMillan was privy to first-person history lessons. “My grandmother talked about her childhood. She told me what her father was like,” she recalls. “She met Lawrence of Arabia, and I said, ‘So what was he like?’ and she said, ‘All I remember is he had a funny handshake.”
After spending most of her childhood in Canada, MacMillan spent her last two years of high school in England. She returned to Canada in 1962 to attend Trinity College. She arrived both green and clueless. “I didn’t know much of Trinity when I came here. I think I just came because I didn’t know which other college to choose-often times you don’t choose colleges very rationally.”
After spending 25 years at Ryerson as a professor of History, she has now come full circle, having assumed the position of Trinity Provost last year.
Meticulous character sketches and detail aside, Macmillan has a broader explanation for Paris 1919’s appeal: “Given the state of the world, people want to know how we got here. The world is a complicated place. I think history has been big, and has been for a number of years now, and people are used to buying history books.”
In that sense, the book could not have come at a more prescient time. The war in Iraq no doubt helped generate interest. The final quarter of MacMillan’s book describes the conditions that gave shape to today’s Middle East, starting with the Ottoman Empire’s unfortunate decision to side with Germany.
Faced with a crumbling and vulnerable Middle East, the Allies made their move. There was much at stake. The French foresaw oil’s pivotal role in the new world order, while the British coveted the region’s strategic advantage in securing Indian trade routes.
In the book, MacMillan recounts this astonishingly breezy conversation between Lloyd George and Clemenceau as they divvy up the spoils of the Middle East:
Clemenceau: Tell me what you want.
Lloyd George: I want Mosul (northern Iraq).
Clemenceau: You shall have it. Anything else?
Lloyd George: Yes, I want Jerusalem too.
Clemenceau: You shall have it but [French foreign minister] Pichon will make difficulties about Mosul.
Talk about power politics. In the end, Iraq was placed in the hands of King Faisal under British approval, only to discover Faisal’s unwillingness to bend under imperial interests.
Given a similar strategy under the current Anglo-American coalition in Iraq today-whose reasons for war MacMillan says were not just-the historical echoes are hard to miss.
“History never repeats itself exactly but there are often interesting parallels,” she says. “You think of the British at the end of World War I saying, ‘We’ll sort out the Middle East and take these bits and create an Iraq and find a local government.’ It seems to me the Americans are taking the same attitude, thinking they can sort things out without really thinking it through-and wanting to do it on the cheap, which is what the British wanted to do.”
The history lesson, says MacMillan, is that national re-engineering by outsiders is often less streamlined than originally imagined-and many times messier. History, with its hodge-podge forces of culture, political intrigue, economics and luck, has always eluded strict categorization and confused policy makers.
The book suggests, however, that the Middle East’s requirement for deeper reflection may have been lost in the sheer array of concerns facing the peacemakers. The Big Three were constantly bombarded with petitions and pleas, concessions and compromises. Add to that workarounds for German reparations, the Russian revolution, Polish borders and the always-dicey Balkan territories, and a picture of overworked diplomats quickly emerges.
But MacMillan seems to be comfortable with history’s complexity, offering that it has its own appeal. “Mish-mash is sort of how I approach [history].”
Since the book’s Canadian release, MacMillan has remained busy travelling and lecturing while managing Trinity’s vibrant intellectual life. She is also looking ahead. Her next endeavor will be a book about Richard Nixon in China. “It’s an interesting moment in history, and it’s a good story,” offers MacMillan. “But it won’t be as long as this book.”
Paris 1919 continues to rack up the laurels-it was nominated last week for the prestigious Lionel Gelber prize for the best book about international affairs. The award, worth $15,000, will be announced March 3rd and the winner will be feted at the Munk Centre at U of T on March 24th.
