I've always been curious as to how much truth was in the German argument that the Versailles peace treaty was too harsh and punishing. How does it compare though to the previous time a major power plunged Europe into all-out war- the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars?
France got off very easily after Napoleon's first defeat in 1814. The treaties of Paris and Fontainebleu restored the Bourbon monarchy, returned France's borders to their 1792 positions, and demoted Napoleon to Emperor of Elba. The finer details were set to be ironed out at the Congress of Vienna, which was interrupted by Napoleon's return for the Hundred Days. The second Treaty of Paris after Waterloo was considerably firmer. It pushed France's borders even farther back to those of 1790, taking from them Savoy, imposed an indemnity of 700 million francs (28,000 pounds) to be paid over a period of 5 years, placed France under allied occupation for 3 years, and abolished the slave trade.
The indemnity was somewhat smaller than the one placed on Germany, but it was the largest ever to be completely paid by a country. Unlike Germany, which had chosen to fund the war on borrowed money, France's economy had not been crippled by wartime debt. France's old debts had been wiped out after going bankrupt during the revolution, and Napoleon had effectively made it so that the wars paid for themselves with the large indemnities he placed on his foes after each victory. France was able to raise much of the money through internal borrowing and taxation and paid off the indemnity ahead of schedule in 1818, whereas Germany was forced to print money it could not back up, leading to hyperinflation. France also did not experience the problems that came with mass demobilization; it was allowed to keep its army and the Waterloo campaign had claimed enough casualties that little demobilization was needed. The only area in which France was worse off than Germany was in the amount of territory lost, if only because of the sheer amount it had gained in the past two decades.
To Germans, the most objectionable part of the Treaty of Versailles was the humiliation of Article 231, in which they were forced to accept blame for the entire war, justifying their punishment. One explanation for the difference in severity between the two treaties is that the coalition tended to place the blame for the wars on Napoleon alone, and viewed their victory as liberating France and restoring it to its rightful rulers, the Bourbon monarchs. This was also an era when diplomats believed strongly in the concept of the balance of power. They thought that rather than be destroyed, France needed to be brought back to its feet and kept in check with the other powers in order to maintain a lasting peace.
Napoleon considered himself to have been stabbed in the back in 1814 by Marshal Marmont who had surrendered Paris to the allies, forcing his abdication. There were also accusations of treason against Marshal Grouchy, who had failed to march to the sound of gunfire at Waterloo and was forced to live in exile in America. Both names were forever maligned by Bonapartists.
Sources: https://www.jstor.org/stable/6495?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
It's worth adding that one reason for the relative harshness of the terms dictated at Versailles was that Germany, in turn, had forced extremely harsh peace treaties on Romania (Treaty of Bucharest) and Russia (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk) in 1918, leaving the victorious allies in little doubt as to the sort of terms that would have been handed to them had the war ended in a victory for the Central Powers.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest (May 1918), Romania was required, in addition to ceding significant territory to both Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary, to hand over all its oilfields to Germany on a 90 year lease. In addition, Germany acquired the power of veto over all Romanian government decisions, thus effectively turning the whole country into a dependency of Germany.
At Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), the Russians were forced to renounce claims to all territories (other than Poland) east of Russia proper (including Ukraine, the Baltics and what is now Belarus). These lands (about 1.3m square miles of territory with a population of over 60 million) were occupied by German troops and, had the war gone Germany's way, would have become either German, or German client states of some sort. The land thus ceded included about three quarters of Russia's iron and coal, over a quarter of its heavy industry, and the fertile Ukrainian "black earth" farm lands known as "the bread-basket of Europe."
I didn't want to include this in my original question as it's more or less unrelated, but was there anything like a 'Stab in the back' theory in France after Napoleon was beaten (1st or 2nd time)?