PACIFISM

Pacifism as the absolute refusal to bear arms or engage in violence, a doctrine derived from the strict construction of New Testament protocols, became a secularized ideology in the decades between the French Revolution and World War I. Its content was loosely defined depending on time, place, occasion, class, gender, and objective. When the French activist Emile Arnaud (1864–1921) first used the word in a 1901 article, he assured readers that pacifists were not "passive types," but active "peace makers," negotiators, and something more—believers in the rational application of peaceful methodologies to resolve conflicts that did not have to produce war. By the opening of the twentieth century, Arnaud's community of pacifists was composed of approximately 3,000 activists across a dozen European and North American nations, organized into local, national, and international groups—the Universal Peace Congress and the Interparliamentary Union. Members could be conservatives, liberals, socialists, feminists, international law specialists, diplomats, politicians, businessmen, union leaders, authors, journalists, philanthropists, salonnières, united in a belief that the future of civilized nations required civilized means of resolving conflicts.

An idea expressed in 1849 by Victor Hugo (1802–1885) at a peace congress held in Paris that anticipated a "United States of Europe" was understood in the late century to be a very distant objective. Its realization first required that nation-states learn to apply law to the international anarchy just as governments had applied law to the feudal anarchy. Slow steps such as arbitration tribunals, mediation, leagues of neutrals, the establishment of constitut ional regimes respecting basic civil rights, and the spread of international law to both commercial and political conflicts might need a century to evolve.

The movement that organized annual conferences from 1889 to 1914 was the culmination of a century-long evolution on the European continent. While peace societies were initially small, church-related Anglo-American groupings following the Napoleonic Wars, by 1840 there was enough of a base to convene an international congress in London—largely composed of people involved in the antislavery movement. A few years later in 1848–1852 when peace congresses assembled on the continent and in Great Britain, attendees were drawn from a wider pool than the original Quaker-inspired voices. Peace activism increasingly attracted followers of liberal economic thinking—people such as Richard Cobden (1804–1865), Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850), and Frédéric Passy (1822–1912), who were convinced that war was bad for business; peace-induced prosperity and free international trade opened the path toward the end of poverty. Hugo gave their economistic analysis a moral and humanitarian vision. By mid-century, when intellectuals joined ministers in promoting peace congresses, the process of secularization was well established.

The nineteenth-century movement had an erratic history. The promising midcentury initiatives were overwhelmed by the tides of revolution and

counterrevolution, but in 1867, a new set of voices appeared to try once again. Under the formal presidency of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), a meeting convened in Geneva that brought together an amazing array of European progressive liberals, democrats, progressive revolutionaries, professors in exile from Napoleonic France, Saint-Simonians, and a few delegates from First International Socialist contingents. The resultant Ligue internationale de la paix et de la liberté and its long-running journal, Les États-unis d'Europe, was frankly democratic in orientation, committed to the notion that international peace required more than free trade—it demanded the end to absolutism, privilege, established religion, and social birthrights. In short, it wanted the realization of the French Revolution as the basis of human rights across Europe. This meeting included the first peace initiative where women raised independent voices and established separate organizational efforts, led by the Swiss activist Marie Goegg (1826–1899). The Ligue that followed had a heady growth until the Franco-Prussian War, but it survived under the determined leadership of Charles Lemonnier (1806–1891), a Saint-Simonian democrat, and in the 1890s under Arnaud.

In 1889, on the centennial of the French Revolution when a huge exposition was to open in Paris, a group of English and French parliamentarians who had been in communication over the possibility of joint lobbying for an arbitration treaty, invited members of European parliaments to attend an organizational meeting. This produced the Interparliamentary Union (which still exists) and the decision to establish a central headquarters with a permanent secretariat. Simultaneously, citizen activists called a meeting to consider an organization to study and further international peace. This initiative created the Universal Peace Congress movement that opened a permanent headquarters in Bern (it still exists, but now in Geneva). Initially, there was no collaboration with the other international founded in 1889—the Socialist Second International—but in the following quarter century, individuals would work with peace parliamentarians and citizens in discreet national groups. By 1900, women drawn from the national councils of women, from the international associations of women suffrage organizations, and from societies of women teachers, as well as a few women lawyers and journalists, brought their voices into the international peace movement.

By and large, the late-century peace movement, often defined as liberal internationalism, de-emphasized disarmament as a provocative strategy that would elicit ridicule and cries of utopianism. Nor did they reject the right of self-defense, and indeed, their new definition of "just war" was contained in a doctrine of defense. A major exception to this cautious approach, however, arose from some feminist peace crusaders who campaigned against the arms race and tied its costs to the absence of social programs that they saw as crucial to democratic development. Thus, while liberal internationalism often confined itself to limited and presumably realistic objectives, by the opening of the twentieth century voices agitated for a more holistic anti-war approach. Just as the 1867 Ligue saw democratization as a first step toward peace, many feminist peace activists connected arms reduction to social justice and peace. Nonetheless, the establishment

core of the movement campaigned for objectives that seemed realistic for nineteenth-century bourgeois and progressive values: arbitration tribunals, international law codification, mediation, arbitration treaties between and among specific states. Despite this cautious approach, the moderate peace activists—such as the German Ludwig Quidde; the French Passy, Arnaud, and Gaston Moch; the Austrians Bertha von Suttner and Alfred Hermann Fried; the Italian Ernesto Teodoro Moneta; the Belgians Henri La Fontaine and Edouard Descamps; the English Sir William Randal Cremer, William Thomas Stead, and Hodgson Pratt; the Swiss Elie Ducommun and Charles Albert Gobat; the Dane Frederik Bajer—were subject to biting ridicule and denunciations ranging from anti-patriotism to brainless utopianism. Le Pacifisme by Emile Faguet (1908) typified the assault from the nationalist, militarist, and masculinist point of view.

When the first Hague Conference called by the czar convened in 1899 to discuss the dangers of the arms race; when the peace prize established by Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) was first awarded in 1901; when the Russian Revolution of 1905 introduced a version of representative government in Europe's last remaining autocracy; and when the millionaire Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) contributed an enormous fortune to the Endowment for International Peace as well as the structure to house the arbitration tribunal at The Hague, peace activists believed that their message was reaching the circles that counted and made political decisions. The Hague Convention of 1899 standardized procedures for convening arbitration tribunals when two powers agreed to adjudicate differences—the century-old ancestor of the twenty-first-century International Criminal Court and the standing World Court. Nations began to use arbitration to solve "minor" issues; Norway and Sweden separated and avoided the war that threatened; books such as von Suttner's Die Waffen nieder! (1889) and Norman Angell's The Great Illusion (1913) reached mass audiences; congresses addressing new forms of international law, issues of race, and women's rights multiplied and added peace proposals to their agendas. The centrist vision of the Socialist Second International strongly hinted that workers might call a general strike in the event of war, and the radical wings of the left, including anarchists, preached noncompliance and threatened barracks strikes in a variety of forms of anti-militarism. A major war had not been fought on European soil since Waterloo—and a sense of the vast dangers that a modern technological war would produce was captured in Jean de Bloch's six-volume 1898 study of the probable effects of modern warfare (originally in Russian, German, and French; only one volume in English). Peace activists clung to these signs of progress even in face of the imperial confrontations, escalating arms expenditures, and the increasingly violent language of nationalism that existed simultaneously. The struggle between the "old" and the "new" forces for Europe's soul, observed von Suttner who became the first woman to win the Nobel peace prize in 1905, was not settled, but at least a serious challenge had been made to the sovereign right of a government to declare war at will. Moreover, peace activists even began to debate what might be done to isolate a state that did declare war.

Obviously the twenty-five years of organizing and propagandizing, the constantly expanding membership base of peace societies, the millions of signatures assembled by women's groups in support of the Hague conferences, did not prevent the outbreak of that Great War that peace activists feared and tried to prevent. But when that war came, its initiators all insisted that it was a defensive and justifiable struggle, one for the survival of the nation and its civilization. Political, official discourse no longer allowed for aggressive warfare.

See alsoHague Conferences; International Law; Nobel, Alfred; Suttner, Bertha von; Tolstoy, Leo.

bibliography

Brock, Peter. Pacifism in Europe to 1914. Princeton, N.J., 1971.

Caedel, Martin. Thinking About Peace and War. Oxford, U.K., 1987.

Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914. Princeton, N.J., 1975.

Cooper, Sandi E. Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914. Oxford, U.K., 1991.

Grossi, Verdiana. Le Pacifisme Européen 1889–1914. Brussels, 1994.

Petrocoli, Marta, Donatella Cherubini, and Alessandra Anteghini, eds. Les Etats-Unis d'Europe/The United States of Europe: Un Projet Pacifiste/A Pacifist Project. Bern, 2004.

Van den Linden, W. H. The International Peace Movement, 1815–1874. Amsterdam, 1987.

Sandi E. Cooper