United Kingdom
John Maynard Keynes
1883–1946 Treasury representative at Paris; economist and author
Keynes, a Cambridge economist who had managed Britain's wartime finances at the Treasury, attended the Peace Conference as a delegate and resigned in June 1919 in protest. He retreated to the country and in a few months wrote <em>The Economic Consequences of the Peace</em>, which attacked the treaty's reparations clauses and the men who made them. The book, widely read in Britain and the United States, helped to turn opinion in the English-speaking world against the treaty. Its argument was challenged then and later, but it shaped the debate for generations. Keynes went on to become the century's most influential economist, and in 1944 helped to design the Bretton Woods system, which was meant to avoid the mistakes of 1919.