1907Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, Louis Renault
Ernesto Teodoro Moneta – Biography
Ernesto Teodoro Moneta (September 20, 1833-February 10, 1918) had a personality as paradoxical as the term «militant pacifist» which was so often applied to him. He was a nationalistic internationalist, a deeply religious anticlerical propagandist, a crusader for physical fitness who daily took a tram to avoid walking across a square to lunch in a restaurant opposite his office.
Born of aristocratic Milanese parents, he spent his childhood in two country houses where his impoverished family could still live on a patriarchal scale, although without luxury. He was profoundly affected by his experiences in the uprising against Austria when, at the age of fifteen, he fought next to his father to defend his family home and saw three Austrian soldiers die nearby. It was probably then that Moneta's dual advocacy of peace and yet of fighting for his own kind of nationalism was born. From 1848 to 1866 he spent a great deal of his time in efforts for Italian independence and unification, fighting with Garibaldi in 1859 and 1860 and later under General Sirtori whose aide-de-camp he became. Disillusioned by the campaign of 1866, however, he cut short what seemed to be a promising army career and returned to civilian life, although he remained personally loyal to General Sirtori all his life.
Moneta was a handsome, warm, cheerful man who enjoyed riding horses, acting in amateur theatricals, and contributing play reviews to Il Secolo, daily newspaper founded in 1866 by Edoardo Sonzogno. When two of his friends took over Il Secolo in 1867, he accepted the position of editor, which he held from 1867 until 1895. Journalism proved to be the ideal outlet for Moneta's dynamism and idealism, his career as a pacifist being an organic outgrowth of his daily intellectual stimulation and passionate commitment as editor of Il Secolo.
A man of strong personal convictions, Moneta was respected for his integrity as much as for his courage and willingness to accept innovations. He forged Il Secolo into a powerful instrument for shaping public opinion without compromising its editorial balance. Although he respected religion and was a practicing Catholic, he permitted Il Secolo to adopt an anticlerical stance because he believed for many years that specific abuses among the clergy were impeding Italian unification and social progress. He became virtually estranged from his wife - and from his two sons during her lifetime - largely because she was unable to accept this apparent inconsistency in her husband's attitude toward the religion which meant so much to her.
Since Moneta understood and sympathized with the problems of the Italian army, he campaigned vigorously in the columns of Il Secolo for reforms which public opinion could bring about. He contended that the lengthy basic training of recruits and conscripts was wasteful and inefficient, that organized athletics, target practice, and civilian drills in the villages could drastically cut down the time needed to train recruits, that militarism could be de-emphasized, yet the effective strength of the army actually increased.
During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, Moneta gathered material and insights for his opus Le guerre, le insurrezioni e la pace nel secolo XIX [Wars, Insurrections and Peace in the Nineteenth Century], which he published in four volumes in 1903, 1904, 1906, and 1910. The part of this work which remains of greatest interest is the first volume, in which he describes the development of the international peace movement during the course of the century. Moneta concentrates his interest on military rather than on social or economic issues throughout the work and utilizes the point of view and approach of the journalist, narrating in a first-person, anecdotal style. His recurrent theme is the lack of substantive results achieved by wars and militarism. Yet, during his career as editor of Il Secolo, Moneta was one of the most vocal nationalists in Italy. He managed to make his intense patriotism and his devotion to the cause of national defense and of Italian unification consistent with his dedication to the fostering of international peace and arbitration, becoming a full-time pacifist immediately upon his retirement from Il Secolo. Although his highly personal brand of nationalism almost approached chauvinism, he fought for years against the contempt for Austria displayed by many Il Secolo readers and against the «Gallophobia» which swept Italy during the 1880's.
The range of activities in which Moneta engaged for the propagation of world peace is impressive. In 1890 he began to issue an annual almanac called L'Amico della pace. After his retirement as editor of Il Secolo, he continued to contribute to its columns from time to time and to republish many of his articles in pamphlets and periodicals. Ever aware of the value of propaganda for peace, he even printed one-page tracts and distributed them to rural schoolmasters. In 1898 he founded a fortnightly review, La Vita internazionale, which gained sufficient prestige to ensure publication on a regular basis for many years during a period when most such periodicals languished in Italy for lack of interest and financial support.
His work for peace was not solely of a literary nature. He became the Italian representative on the Commission of the International Peace Bureau in 1895. He attended peace congresses for many years, and his courtly, deceptively diffident presence became increasingly familiar and respected. He had encouraged l'Unione lombarda per la pace e l'arbitrato internazionale [the Lombard Union for International Peace and Arbitration] since its foundation in 18871, and had himself founded, besides several organizations of an ephemeral nature, the Società per la pace e la giustizia internazionale [Society for International Peace and Justice]2, which lasted from 1887 until 19373, long after his death. He lectured at the newly founded Italian Popular University. In 1906 he planned and had constructed a Pavilion for Peace at the Milan International Exposition, during which he presided over the fifteenth annual International Peace Congress.
From 1900 until his death in 1918, Moneta suffered from glaucoma, and he spent long periods in the country recuperating from eye operations which barely prevented total blindness. Physical suffering refined Moneta's high sense of purpose but did not diminish his essential exuberance, even in advanced age, or his ability to state vigorously his convictions. During World War I, for example, supporting Italy's role in the war, he said4: «I, as an Italian, cannot put myself au dessus de la mêlée. I must participate in the life of my country, rejoice in her joys, and weep in her sorrows.»
Moneta succumbed to pneumonia in 1918 at the age of eighty-five. The monument which his friends erected to him in 1925 was carted off to a warehouse during the Fascist regime, thus escaping destruction when a bomb fell on the site during World War II. The inscription on its base preserves the essential paradox of his life, for it honors him both as a partisan of Garibaldi's and as an apostle of peace.
Louis Renault – Biography
Although his active participation in efforts to solve the problems of international law brought him honor and respect from around the world, Louis Renault (May 21, 1843-February 8, 1918) was, in his own words1, «a professor at heart». Born at Autun in the Saône-et-Loire district of France, he received his love of learning as a heritage from his Burgundian father, a bookseller by vocation and bibliophile by avocation. Intellectually gifted, Renault was first in his class at the Collège d'Autun, taking prizes in philosophy, mathematics, and literature before going on to the University of Dijon for his bachelor's degree in literature. For seven years, from 1861 to 1868, he studied law in Paris, receiving three degrees, the highest of them the doctoral and all of them with extraordinary honors.
In 1868 he began the career in the academic world which he never deserted. Twenty-five years old in 1868, he returned to Dijon as lecturer in Roman and then in commercial law. He joined the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris as an acting professor of criminal law in 1873, but he found his true field the next year when the opportunity arose to fill a temporary vacancy in international law. Although at first loath to change his primary field of interest, he continued in the new milieu and so distinguished himself in the next seven years by his teaching and by his publication of some fifty notes and articles and a book, Introduction à l'étude du droit international, that he was offered the chair of international law in 1881.
Renault's scholarly output during his lifetime was extensive, making him the outstanding French authority on international law. He delivered countless lectures, wrote dozens of reports, published upwards of 200 notes and articles, most of them in law reviews and political science journals, and produced several books, of which the most important, in collaboration with his colleague, Charles Lyon-Caen, is the nine-volume Traité de droit commercial (1889-1899). Devoted to teaching as well as to research, he lectured for some years, concurrently with his appointment at the University of Paris, at the School of Political Sciences and at two of the military schools; he directed 252 doctoral theses2; he taught many students who later held important diplomatic posts in France and abroad.
Prior to 1890, Renault had participated in the solving of practical problems of international law, notably those of proprietary rights in literature and art and of the regulations governing submarine cables, but in the following years, having been appointed a legal consultant to the Foreign Office by Minister Alexandre Ribot, he became the «one authority in international law upon whom the Republic relied»3. For the next twenty years he was a French representative at innumerable international conferences held in Europe, figuring prominently in conferences on international private law, international transport, military aviation, naval affairs, circulation of obscene literature, abolition of white slavery, commercial paper used in international transactions, revision of the Red Cross Convention of 1864. In recognition of this and other services, Renault was accorded the titular rank of Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary in 1903.
When the Hague Tribunal was opened to conduct cases of international arbitration, Renault was named one of its panel of twenty-eight arbiters. Voluntarily selected more times than any other member of the panel in the first fourteen years of the tribunal's existence, Renault was involved in six of the court's thirteen cases: the Japanese House Tax case between Japan on the one hand and Germany, France, and Great Britain on the other (1905); the Casablanca case between Germany and France (1909); the Savarkar case between France and Great Britain (1911); the Canevaro case between Italy and Peru (1912); the Carthage case between France and Italy (1913); and the Manouba case between France and Italy (1913).
At the first Hague Peace Conference of 1899, Renault was the reporter for the Second Commission, which was concerned with various questions governing naval warfare, and the principal drafter of the Final Act - the «summary» - of the Conference. A dominant figure at the second Hague Peace Conference in 1907, he was the reporter for the Conventions relating to the opening of hostilities, to the application of the Geneva Convention to naval warfare, to the creation of an international prize court, and to the defining of the rights and duties of neutral nations in naval war, as well as being on the drafting committee for the Final Act, which he presented.
The recipient of many honors for his accomplishments as teacher, scholar, judge, and diplomat, Renault was named to the Legion of Honor and to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in France, awarded decorations by nineteen foreign nations and honorary doctorates by several universities, and chosen to be president of the Academy of International Law created at The Hague in 1914.
Renault never retired. After teaching his last class on February 6, 1918, he went to his villa in Barbizon for a brief holiday, was taken ill, and died on the morning of February 8.
Ernesto Teodoro Moneta – Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture*, August 25, 1909
Peace and Law in the Italian Tradition
When on the afternoon of December 10, 1907, I received the happy news, soon to be made public in the newspapers, that you had conferred upon me the Nobel Peace Prize, the satisfaction of all Italians was reflected in the many marks of affection and esteem I received from people in every walk of life, and in particular from His Majesty King Victor Emmanuel1, who, in his telegram congratulating me on this great honor, reaffirmed "his ardent desire that the great cause of peace should triumph". For all the honors I have received and for a public acclaim as great as any man could wish for, you have placed me in your debt; indeed, the years of life still left to me are too short in which to demonstrate to you, by renewed activity in my propagandist work, my undying gratitude.
Your choice was all the more pleasing to my fellow countrymen in coming from a country we have loved for a very long time for its devotion to truth and beauty, for its civic institutions, and for its poets and dramatists, such as Ibsen and Bjørnson2 who are among the most admired and most widely read in Italy. It was they who focused the world's attention on the admirable way of life, so full of vigor and sincerity, of your wonderful country. It was they who evoked anew your courageous ancestors, the Vikings, who with their small boats and indomitable courage were sailors and warriors truly worthy of being immortalized in legend; conquerors, not mercenaries, they astonished the world by the boldness of their fighting exploits in the days when war was honorable.
I say, without adulation but with the profound conviction that I am truly expressing what the world thinks of you and of your country (especially what the inhabitants of my own country think, and it is well known that foreigners, in their judgment of the affairs of others, are often as impartial and truthful as posterity) - I say to you, in all sincerity, that your civic life today is as worthy of admiration in our time as was that of the bold Vikings in the days of war and armed conquest.
This is because, caught up in the daily struggle, your nation faces ever changing reality with a clear eye and rejects old practices accordingly. It does not cling to customs which no longer have a reason for being; it is constantly readjusting itself to new needs and necessities. That is why your country is today in the vanguard of the world peace movement. Your Storting was the first parliament to uphold officially the idea of universal arbitration, to set aside funds for the Interparliamentary Union and for the Bureau in Bern3 ,and, ever since 1890, to encourage the King to lend support to arbitration treaties between Norway and the small nations. Furthermore, the memory of the recent attainment of your independence, for which you strove so long in the midst of the gravest difficulties, is still fresh in all our minds4. Your independence, achieved as it was without violence or bloodshed, is a living example of good sense and wisdom, prudence and great tenacity, and brings everlasting credit both to you who obtained it and to those who did not refuse it to you.
Pacifism - as we have always advocated it, and as you are practicing it - does not seek to obliterate countries by throwing them into the melting pot of cosmopolitanism, but to organize them, if this is not already the case, according to the dictates of justice.
In varietate unitas! The more each nation contributes to world society from the wealth of its own aptitudes, its own race, and its own traditions, the greater the future development and happiness of mankind will be.
And now, allow me to say a few words in respectful tribute to the memory of Alfred Nobel whose last act is responsible for my being here with you. Although Alfred Nobel was Swedish, he wished the choice and award of the Peace Prize to be in the hands of the Norwegian Parliament, which, as I have already said, was the first parliament in Europe to support the idea of international arbitration.
The service done our cause by Nobel was immense; for here was a man of science, a man of industry, always in search of practical goals, who rejected the old cliché that peace is an unattainable utopia, capable only of seducing the minds and souls of sentimental idealists.
The inception of the Nobel Peace Prize put an almost immediate end to the scoffing of skeptics and pseudo-intellectuals; and ever since then, our ranks have been reinforced by newcomers from all sides: politicians, industrialists, merchants, bankers - all hitherto aloof, now sympathetic to our cause.
The gravest difficulties faced by our Society5, however, occurred at the very beginning of its existence when our members, who had founded it to combat a militant nationalism which imperialist politicians wanted to foster in Italy, were denounced by our adversaries as the "stateless ones".
This accusation was totally inconsistent. Before devoting ourselves to the propaganda of peace, my friends and I had first taken part in Italy's battles of independence, and by defending peace and brotherhood among peoples we were faithfully interpreting the great men who had planned and instigated our revolution. Like them, we proclaimed our primary obligation to be that of liberating our country, believing with Immanuel Kant6 that to hasten the great and beneficial advent of united mankind, it is first essential to restore nations to their natural frontiers.