From Paris to Sèvres

Book excerpt: Following the end of the First World War, elated and distinguished statesmen representing the victorious powers gathered in Paris, London, and San Remo to draft terms that were to be imposed on their defeated enemies as safeguards of a hard-won peace. Of the five pacts that were ultimately concluded, the treaty with the Ottoman Empire took by far the longest to negotiate; for it involved not only the drafting of the peace terms themselves, but also the division that was to be made among the victors of vast territorial spoils. Professor Helmreich traces the troubled history of the negotiations among those nations -- which included, for a time, the United States -- that ultimately produced the remarkable document known, by virtue of the place in which it was signed, as the Treaty of Sevres. -- book jacket