In June 1919 John Maynard Keynes communicates to Lloyd George the resignation as Treasury representative at the Versailles Conference. Shortly thereafter he leaves for Charleston, Sussex, to write in less than two months a book destined to have far-reaching consequences: this one. Keynes had vainly opposed the short-sightedness of Clemenceau, Lloyd George and president Wilson, who were distant in everything but agreed in reducing the post-war problems to a mere fact of ‘frontiers and sovereignty’. Before that, Keynes was sure that the very harsh reparations imposed on Germany would lead the continent, within two or three decades, to a second conflict – and, as he wrote to his mother already in a letter of 1917, to the disappearance of the social order ‘as we have known it hitherto’. If, nine decades later, most of these issues are still on the agenda, it’s easy to understand the immense fortune of the book, and also the immense scandal it aroused.
Between the two wars the book, still enormously popular, was accused of being both an encrypted manifesto of Hitler’s revanchism and one of the hidden roots of the inexplicable Western appeasement. Senseless accusations, for what was meant to be only the denunciation of a chain of suicidal choices: but accusations that transformed the book into a legend.
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