1901Jean Henri Dunant, Frédéric Passy
Jean Henri Dunant – Biography
Jean Henri Dunant's life (May 8, 1828-October 30, 1910) is a study in contrasts. He was born into a wealthy home but died in a hospice; in middle age he juxtaposed great fame with total obscurity, and success in business with bankruptcy; in old age he was virtually exiled from the Genevan society of which he had once been an ornament and died in a lonely room, leaving a bitter testament. His passionate humanitarianism was the one constant in his life, and the Red Cross his living monument.
The Geneva household into which Henri Dunant was born was religious, humanitarian, and civic-minded. In the first part of his life Dunant engaged quite seriously in religious activities and for a while in full-time work as a representative of the Young Men's Christian Association, traveling in France, Belgium, and Holland.
When he was twenty-six, Dunant entered the business world as a representative of the Compagnie genevoise des Colonies de Sétif in North Africa and Sicily. In 1858 he published his first book, Notice sur la Régence de Tunis [An Account of the Regency in Tunis], made up for the most part of travel observations but containing a remarkable chapter, a long one, which he published separately in 1863, entitled L'Esclavage chez les musulmans et aux États-Unis d'Amérique [Slavery among the Mohammedans and in the United States of America].
Having served his commercial apprenticeship, Dunant devised a daring financial scheme, making himself president of the Financial and Industrial Company of Mons-Gémila Mills in Algeria (eventually capitalized at 100,000,000 francs) to exploit a large tract of land. Needing water rights, he resolved to take his plea directly to Emperor Napoleon III. Undeterred by the fact that Napoleon was in the field directing the French armies who, with the Italians, were striving to drive the Austrians out of Italy, Dunant made his way to Napoleon's headquarters near the northern Italian town of Solferino. He arrived there in time to witness, and to participate in the aftermath of, one of the bloodiest battles of the nineteenth century. His awareness and conscience honed, he published in 1862 a small book Un Souvenir de Solférino [A Memory of Solferino], destined to make him famous.
A Memoryhas three themes. The first is that of the battle itself. The second depicts the battlefield after the fighting - its «chaotic disorder, despair unspeakable, and misery of every kind» - and tells the main story of the effort to care for the wounded in the small town of Castiglione. The third theme is a plan. The nations of the world should form relief societies to provide care for the wartime wounded; each society should be sponsored by a governing board composed of the nation's leading figures, should appeal to everyone to volunteer, should train these volunteers to aid the wounded on the battlefield and to care for them later until they recovered. On February 7, 1863, the Société genevoise d'utilité publique [Geneva Society for Public Welfare] appointed a committee of five, including Dunant, to examine the possibility of putting this plan into action. With its call for an international conference, this committee, in effect, founded the Red Cross. Dunant, pouring his money and time into the cause, traveled over most of Europe obtaining promises from governments to send representatives. The conference, held from October 26 to 29, with thirty-nine delegates from sixteen nations attending, approved some sweeping resolutions and laid the groundwork for a gathering of plenipotentiaries. On August 22, 1864, twelve nations signed an international treaty, commonly known as the Geneva Convention, agreeing to guarantee neutrality to sanitary personnel, to expedite supplies for their use, and to adopt a special identifying emblem - in virtually all instances a red cross on a field of white1.
Dunant had transformed a personal idea into an international treaty. But his work was not finished. He approved the efforts to extend the scope of the Red Cross to cover naval personnel in wartime, and in peacetime to alleviate the hardships caused by natural catastrophes. In 1866 he wrote a brochure called the Universal and International Society for the Revival of the Orient, setting forth a plan to create a neutral colony in Palestine. In 1867 he produced a plan for a publishing venture called an «International and Universal Library» to be composed of the great masterpieces of all time. In 1872 he convened a conference to establish the «Alliance universelle de l'ordre et de la civilisation» which was to consider the need for an international convention on the handling of prisoners of war and for the settling of international disputes by courts of arbitration rather than by war.
The eight years from 1867 to 1875 proved to be a sharp contrast to those of 1859-1867. In 1867 Dunant was bankrupt. The water rights had not been granted, the company had been mismanaged in North Africa, and Dunant himself had been concentrating his attention on humanitarian pursuits, not on business ventures. After the disaster, which involved many of his Geneva friends, Dunant was no longer welcome in Genevan society. Within a few years he was literally living at the level of the beggar. There were times, he says2, when he dined on a crust of bread, blackened his coat with ink, whitened his collar with chalk, slept out of doors.
For the next twenty years, from 1875 to 1895, Dunant disappeared into solitude. After brief stays in various places, he settled down in Heiden, a small Swiss village. Here a village teacher named Wilhelm Sonderegger found him in 1890 and informed the world that Dunant was alive, but the world took little note. Because he was ill, Dunant was moved in 1892 to the hospice at Heiden. And here, in Room 12, he spent the remaining eighteen years of his life. Not, however, as an unknown. After 1895 when he was once more rediscovered, the world heaped prizes and awards upon him.
Despite the prizes and the honors, Dunant did not move from Room 12. Upon his death, there was no funeral ceremony, no mourners, no cortege. In accordance with his wishes he was carried to his grave «like a dog»3.
Dunant had not spent any of the prize monies he had received. He bequeathed some legacies to those who had cared for him in the village hospital, endowed a «free bed» that was to be available to the sick among the poorest people in the village, and left the remainder to philanthropic enterprises in Norway and Switzerland.
Nobel lecture not available
Frédéric Passy – Biography
Frédéric Passy (May 20, 1822-June 12, 1912) was born in Paris and lived there his entire life of ninety years. The tradition of the French civil service was strong in Passy's family, his uncle, Hippolyte Passy (1793-1880), rising to become a cabinet minister under both Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon. Educated as a lawyer, Frédéric Passy entered the civil service at the age of twenty-two as an accountant in the State Council, but left after three years to devote himself to systematic study of economics. He emerged as a theoretical economist in 1857 with his Mélanges économiques, a collection of essays he had published in the course of his research, and he secured his scholarly reputation with a series of lectures delivered in 1860-1861 at the University of Montpellier and later published in two volumes under the title Leçons d'économie politique. An admirer of Richard Cobden, he became an ardent free trader, believing that free trade would draw nations together as partners in a common enterprise, result in disarmament, and lead to the abandonment of war. Passy lectured on economic subjects in virtually every city and university of any consequence in France and continued a stream of publications on economic subjects, some of the more important being Les Machines et leur influence sur le développement de l'humanité (1866), Malthus et sa doctrine (1868), L'Histoire du travail (1873). Passy's passionate belief in education found expression in De la propriété intellectuelle (1859) end La Démocratie et l'instruction (1864). For these contributions, among others, he was elected in 1877 to membership in the Académie de sciences morales et politiques, a unit of the Institut de France.
Passy was not, however, a cloistered scholar; he was a man of action. In 1867, encouraged by his leadership of public opinion in trying to avert possible war between France and Prussia over the Luxembourg question, he founded the «Ligue internationale et permanente de la paix». When the Ligue became a casualty of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, he reorganized it under the title «Société française des amis de la paix» which in turn gave way to the more specifically oriented «Société française pour l'arbitrage entre nations», established in 1889.
Passy carried on his efforts within the government as well. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1881, again in 1885, and defeated in 1889. In the Chamber he supported legislation favorable to labor, especially an act relating to industrial accidents, opposed the colonial policy of the government, drafted a proposal for disarmament, and presented a resolution calling for arbitration of international disputes.
His parliamentary interest in arbitration was whetted by Randal Cremer's success in guiding through the British Parliament a resolution stipulating that England and the United States should refer to arbitration any disputes between them not settled by the normal methods of diplomacy. In 1888 Cremer headed a delegation of nine British members of Parliament who met in Paris with a delegation of twenty-four French deputies, headed by Passy, to discuss arbitration and to lay the groundwork for an organization to advance its acceptance. The next year, fifty-six French parliamentarians, twenty-eight British, and scattered representatives from the parliaments of Italy, Spain, Denmark, Hungary, Belgium, and the United States formed the Interparliamentary Union, with Passy as one of its three presidents. The Union, still in existence, established a headquarters to serve as a clearinghouse of ideas, and encouraged the formation of informal individual national parliamentary groups willing to support legislation leading to peace, especially through arbitration.
Passy's thought and action had unity. International peace was the goal, arbitration of disputes in international politics and free trade in goods the means, the national units making up the Interparliamentary Union the initiating agents, the people the sovereign constituency.
Through his prodigious labors over a period of half a century in the peace movement, Passy became known as the «apostle of peace». He wrote unceasingly and vividly. His Pour la paix (1909), which came out when he was eighty-seven years old, is a personalized account - in lieu of an autobiography which he deplored - of his work for international peace, noting especially the founding of the Ligue, the «période décisive» when the Interparliamentary Union was established, the development of peace congresses, and the value of the Hague Conferences.
Passy was a renowned speaker, noted for the intellectual demands he made on his audiences, as well as for his powerful voice, his ample gestures, and his majestic and dignified manner.