1920Léon Victor Auguste Bourgeois

Léon Victor Auguste Bourgeois – Biography

Léon Victor Auguste Bourgeois (May 21, 1851-September 29, 1925), the «spiritual father» of the League of Nations, was a man of prodigious capabilities and diversified interests. A statesman, jurist, artist, and scholar, Léon Bourgeois, in the course of a long career, held almost every major office available in the French government of the Third Republic.
The son of a clock-maker of Jurassian and Burgundian descent, Bourgeois lived most of his life in Paris in an eighteenth-century townhouse on the rue Palatine. He was an insatiable student, reflective, diligent, enthusiastic, and possessed of a happy propensity for becoming involved in whatever he did. Concerned throughout his life with the improvement of man's condition through education, justice under the law, medical care, and the abolition of war, he was that political anomaly, a politician without personal ambition, who twice refused to run for the presidency of the Republic despite assurances that he could easily capture it.
As a schoolboy at the Massin Institution in Paris, Bourgeois displayed his intelligence, leadership, and oratorical flair early. He continued his education at the Lycée Charlemagne, and, after fighting in an artillery regiment during the Franco-Prussian War, enrolled in the Law School of the University of Paris. His education was remarkably broad. He studied Hinduism and Sanskrit, worked in the fine arts, becoming knowledgeable in music and adept in sculpture - indeed, at the height of his political career he exercised his talent as a craftsman, so it is reported, by drawing caricatures of his colleagues in cabinet meetings.
In 1876, after having practiced law for several years, he assumed his first public office as deputy head of the Claims Department in the Ministry of Public Works. In rapid succession he became secretary-general of the Prefecture of the Marne (1877), under-prefect of Reims (1880), prefect of the Tarn (1882), secretary-general of the Seine (1883), prefect of the Haute-Garonne (1885), director of personnel in the Ministry of the Interior (1886), director of departmental and communal affairs (1887). In November of 1887, at the age of thirty-six, he was appointed chief commissioner of the Paris police.
When in February, 1888, Bourgeois defeated the formidable General Boulanger to become deputy from the Marne, his political future was assured. He joined the Left in the Chamber, attending the congresses of the Radical-Socialist Party and rapidly becoming their most renowned orator. He was named undersecretary of state in Floquet's cabinet (1888), elected deputy from Reims (1889), chosen minister of the Interior in the Tirard cabinet (1890).
As minister of public instruction in Freycinet's cabinet from 1890 to 1892 and again in 1898 under Brisson, Bourgeois instituted major reforms in the educational structure, reconstituting the universities by regrouping the faculties, reforming both the secondary and primary systems, and extending the availability of postgraduate instruction. When he gave up the education portfolio in 1892, he accepted that of the Ministry of Justice for two years.
On November 1, 1895, Bourgeois formed his own government. His political program included the enactment of a general income tax, the establishment of a retirement plan for workers, and implementation of plans for the separation of church and state, but his government succumbed, not quite six months old, to a constitutional fight over finances.
Chairman of the French delegation to the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899, Bourgeois presided over the Third Commission, which dealt with international arbitration, and, together with the chairmen of the British and American delegations, was responsible for the success of the proposal adopted by the Conference to establish a Permanent Court of Arbitration. In early 1903, after the Court had become a reality, he was designated a member.
Bourgeois became president of the Chamber of Deputies in 1902; briefly withdrew from public life in 1904 because of poor health; traveled for a time in Spain, Italy, and the Near East; resisted the urging of his friends to run for the presidency; sought and won election as senator from the Marne in 1905, an office to which he was continuously elected until his death; became minister of foreign affairs under Sarrien in 1906.
In 1907, Bourgeois represented his country at the second Hague Peace Conference where he served as chairman of the First Commission on questions relating to arbitration, boards of inquiry, and pacific settlement of disputes. His speeches at The Hague and at other peace conferences were published in 1910 under the title Pour la Société des Nations.
Soon after the turn of the century, Bourgeois twice declined the invitation of the president of the Republic to form governments, but he continued his services to the nation in other posts. He was minister of public works under Poincaré (1912), minister of foreign affairs under Ribot (1914), minister of state during the war, minister of public works (1917).
In January of 1918, heading an official commission of inquiry on the question of a League of Nations, he presented a draft for such an organization. President of a newly formed French Association for the League of Nations, he attended the 1919 international congress, convened in Paris, of various organizations interested in establishing a League, and in the same year served as the French representative on the League of Nations Commission chaired by Woodrow Wilson. He brought out another collection of his speeches at this time, Le Pacte de 1919 et la Société des Nations.
The culmination of Bourgeois' career came in 1920 when he assumed the presidency of the French Senate, was unanimously elected the first president of the Council of the League of Nations, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Because of deteriorating health and approaching blindness, he was unable to travel to Oslo to accept the prize in person, and in 1923 he retired from the Senate. He died at Château d'Oger, near Epérnay, of uremic poisoning at the age of seventy-four. The French people honored him with a public funeral.

Léon Victor Auguste Bourgeois – Nobel Lecture

Communication to the Nobel Committee*, December, 1922

The Reasons for the League of Nations

Some weeks ago, Mr. Branting1 went to Oslo to fulfill the obligation incumbent upon every Nobel Peace Prize laureate. I wish to offer my apologies for not having been able to do the same this last year. The state of my health has not permitted me to make the journey to Norway, and this has caused me the most profound regret.

Your Chairman informed me that you would permit me to address you in writing. I now send you my sincere gratitude and an account of certain ideas of mine, which I would much prefer to have offered you in person. Gentlemen, please accept my heartfelt thanks.

I

I am in full agreement with the views Mr. Branting expressed to you last June. With great perspicacity, he analyzed and placed in proper perspective "the great disillusionment" which the Great War of 1914-1918 had engendered in the minds of men. Certainly, this sudden unleashing of a cataclysm unequalled in the past, appeared to be the direct negation of the hopes which Nobel had nurtured when he founded the Peace Prize. But in place of the discouragement which had taken hold of the public, Mr. Branting offered reasons for believing that we could still derive confidence from the catastrophe. He showed that, under the ruins left behind by the bitter times we have just experienced, there were to be found far too many signs of rejuvenation to allow us to discount the present years as a period of regression.

The victory had been, above all, a victory for law and order, and for civilization itself. The collapse of three great monarchies based largely upon military power had given birth to a number of young nations, each representing the right of peoples to govern themselves, as well as to enjoy the benefits of democratic institutions which, by making peace dependent on the will of the citizens themselves, infinitely reduced the risk of conflict in the future.

The same movement had brought not only the resurrection of oppressed nations, but also the reintegration in political unity of races hitherto torn apart by violence.

Finally, one singularly important fact had succeeded in giving true significance to the victory of free nations. Out of the horror of four years of war had emerged, like a supreme protest, a new idea which was implanting itself in the minds of all people: that of the necessity for civilized nations to join together for the defense of law and order and the maintenance of peace. The League of Nations, heralded in 1899 and 1907 by the Hague Peace Conferences, became, through the Covenant2 of June 28, 1919, a living reality.

But, can it furnish us at last with a stable instrument of peace? Or shall we again encounter, at the very moment when we think we are reaching our goal, the same obstacles which for centuries have blocked the way of those pilgrims of every race, creed, and civilization who have struggled in vain toward the ideal of peace?

II

To answer this question, which touches upon all the anguish of the human race, and to understand the causes of the upheavals which have beset mankind, we must delve not only into the history of peoples but into that of man himself, into the history of the individual, whose passions are no different from those of his community and in whom we are certain to find all propensities, good or bad, enlarged as in a mirror.

Human passions, like the forces of nature, are eternal; it is not a matter of denying their existence, but of assessing them and understanding them. Like the forces of nature, they can be subjected to man's deliberate act of will and be made to work in harmony with reason. We see them at work in the strife between nations just as we see them in struggles between individuals, and we realize at last that only by using the means for controlling the latter can we control the former.

To assert that it is possible to establish peace between men of different nations is simply to assert that man, whatever his ethnical background, his race, religious beliefs, or philosophy, is capable of reason. Two forces within the individual contribute to the development of his conscience and of his morality: reason and sensitivity.

His sensitivity is twofold. At first, it is merely an expression of the instinct of self-preservation, springing from the need of all beings to develop at the expense of their surroundings, to the detriment of other beings whose death seems essential to their very existence. But there is also another manifestation of the instinct, which makes him sensitive to the suffering of others: it is this which creates a moral bond between mother and child, then between father and son, and later still between men of the same tribe, the same clan. It is this instinct of sympathy which enables man to fight against and to control his brutish and selfish instincts.

A great French philosopher, criticizing the doctrine according to which "one could wish no more for a race than that it should attain the fullest development of its strength and of its capacity for power", has pointed out that this is only an incomplete concept of what man is. "This is to place man in isolation and to see in him a noble animal, mighty and formidable. But to be seen as a complete whole, man must be viewed in the society which developed him: The superior race is the one best adapted to society and to communal progress."

In this respect, goodness, the need for sociability, and, to a higher degree, a sense of honor, are spontaneous attributes, valuable beyond all other instincts but just as natural. Now these feelings are present in a national community just as they are in the individuals who compose it. To place them above the gratification of individual egotism is the task of civilization. Never should the power of an individual be allowed to impede the progress of the rest of the nation; never should the power of a nation be allowed to impede the progress of mankind.

Man has a sensitivity which can be either selfish or altruistic; but it is reason which is his essence. It is not his violent and contradictory impulses, but rather his reason which, at first hesitant and fragile in childhood, then growing in strength, finally brings man to reconcile the two sides of his sensitivity in conscious and lasting harmony. It is reason which, from the beginning of history, has led mankind little by little in the course of successive civilizations to realize that there is a state preferable to that of the brutal struggle for life, not only a less dangerous state, but the only one capable of conforming to the dictates of conscience; and that is, in its ever increasing complexity and solidity, the truly social state.

The rise of man from the animal to the human level was prolonged by the necessity of rising from a state of barbarism and violence to one of order and peace. In this process too, it was reason that finally persuaded man to define, under the name of law, some limits within which each individual must confine himself if he wishes to be worthy of remaining in the social state.

At first, laws evolved out of religious doctrines. It followed that they were recognized only when advantageous to those who practiced the same religion and who appeared equals under the protection of the same gods. For the members of all other cults, there was neither law nor mercy. This was the age of implacable deities, of Baal and of Moloch; it was also the age of Jehovah, preaching to his people the extermination of the conquered.

The torch of reason was first held up to the world by Greek philosophy, which led to the stoicism according to which all men are equal and "are the members of a single body", and in which the human will, regulated by law, is regarded as the guiding mechanism of man's activity.

This doctrine of the human will was expressed in Roman law of the Imperial Age by that admirable theory of obligations which, in private law, makes the validity of contracts dependent upon the free consent of the contractors.

What a gulf there still exists between these affirmations of private law and the recognition of the same law as the guiding force for the policies of nations!

Then came Christianity which gave to man's natural capacity for sympathy a form and a forcefulness hitherto unknown. The doctrine of Christ enjoins men, all brothers in His eyes, to love one another. It condemns violence, saying: "He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword."3It preaches a Christian communion superseding all nationalities and offering to the Gentiles - in other words, to all nations of the earth - the hope of a better life in which justice will finally rule.

The Middle Ages, on the whole, embodied the history of the development of this doctrine, and for several centuries the efforts of the Papacy reflected a persistent desire to bring to the world, if not justice itself, which seemed still to be beyond the human grasp and which was generally left "in the hands of God", at least a temporary, relative state of peace, "the Truce of God"4, which gave unhappy humanity a respite from its suffering, a brief moment of security.

But a new period of conflict arrived in its turn to upset Europe with religious wars5. These were perhaps the more. cruel because they obliged the conscience itself to repudiate compassion and seemed to incite conflict between the two forces which had hitherto shared the world between them: sensitivity and reason. Not until the eighteenth century were they finally reconciled.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man6 at last set down for all of mankind the principles of justice without which it would never be possible to lay any foundations for true and lasting peace.

But how much suffering, how much blood had to be squandered for more than a century before we could finally hope to see the application of the truly humanitarian, moral principles proclaimed by the French Revolution! It has been necessary, as Taine7 says, "to multiply ideas, to establish earlier thinking in the conscious mind, to marshal thoughts around accepted precepts: in a word, to reshape, on the basis of experience, the interior of the human head".

Was not the greatest revolution in history that which allowed reason to regard the whole of humanity as being subject to law and to acknowledge the status of "man" in every human being?

All men equal in rights and duties, all men equally responsible for the destiny of mankind - what a dream!

Will the concept of law as mistress of the world finally make reason reasonable?

III

Have we arrived at a stage in the development of universal morality and of civilization that will allow us to regard a League of Nations as viable? If its existence is feasible, what characteristics and what limitations should it have in order to adapt itself to the actual state of affairs in the world?

Certainly, immense progress has already been made in the political, social, and moral organization of most nations.

The spreading of public education to nearly every corner of the globe is producing a powerful effect on many minds.

The prevalence of democratic institutions is evident in every civilized nation.

We are witnessing a weakening of the class prejudice so obstructive to social progress and we see, even in Russia, a rejection of Communist systems that seek to stifle personal liberty and initiative.