One hundred years ago Friday, the representatives of 27 nations gathered in the French foreign ministry to open the Paris Peace Conference. The date — January 18 — was pointedly chosen by French president Raymond Poincaré, for it was on this day in 1871 that the Germans had magnified France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War by unifying the confederated states of Germany not in Berlin, the new German capital, but in the château of Versailles, outside Paris.