ABSTRACT
John Maynard Keynes was chief Treasury representative of the British del-egation at the Versailles Conference in 1919 and was horrified to witness the triumphalist Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau demand punitive reparations from Germany and its allies, which they could never pay. They jollied along Woodrow Wilson by assuring him that his idealistic League of Nations would be included in the deal. But the deal left Europe hungry, ruined, and prostrate, all for the short-term political gain of Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Keynes left the British delegation in anger and wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he denounced the Versailles Treaty as a nightmare for Central Europe and therefore all Europe. The widespread shock of Keynes’s denunciation guaranteed that his voice would be heard for the rest of his short life; he was sixty-two when he died in 1946.
