Henri-Marie La Fontaine

Belgian lawyer and politician

• Born: April 22, 1854
• Birthplace: Brussels, Belgium
• Died: May 14, 1943
• Place of death: Brussels, Belgium

La Fontaine was a leader in the European popular peace movement and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913. In addition to being an influential pacifist, he was an outstanding jurist, dedicated professor, Belgian senator, social reformer, and prolific author.

Early Life

Henri-Marie La Fontaine (ahn-ree-mah-ree lah-fohn-tehn) was born in Brussels, Belgium. He studied law at the Free University of Brussels, received his doctorate when he was twenty-three, and was admitted to the bar in 1877. He maintained a successful private law practice for the next sixteen years, during which he became an authority on international law. In 1893, he was appointed professor of international law at the Université Nouvelle in Brussels.

Throughout his early legal career, La Fontaine developed a sharp intellect and compassion that would be the trademark of his future peace work. La Fontaine’s legal career led him into politics, first nationally and later internationally. He became an active though moderate Social Democrat and was a founding member of the socialist political newspaper La Justice.

His enthusiasm for reform issues and his talent for organization were perfectly suited for a political career. He was elected senator to the Belgian parliament in 1895 and served for thirty-six years, eventually becoming the vice president of the senate. While a senator, he was active in education and labor reform, foreign affairs, and economic issues.

Life’s Work

La Fontaine is most widely known as a spokesperson for world peace. He first became active in 1889 in the loosely organized international peace movement, when he was asked by the English pacifist Hodgson Pratt to organize and operate the Société Belge de l’Arbitrage et de la Paix (Belgian Society of Arbitration and Peace), which was to be modeled after Pratt’s London organization. La Fontaine’s insight and ability to mobilize and manage followers for the peace movement soon proved invaluable to the cause. He organized the Universal Peace Congress held at Antwerp in 1894 and prepared the report of its proceedings. La Fontaine was soon recognized as a leader of the peace movement and a tireless advocate for world peace.

La Fontaine was a founding member and a staunch supporter of the International Peace Bureau . The bureau, located in Berne, Switzerland, was conceived in 1882 by Élie Ducommun (Nobel Peace Prize corecipient in 1902) as a clearinghouse for international peace information. La Fontaine worked as a bureau commissioner and, in 1907, succeeded Frederik Bajer as its director. Through his association with the bureau, La Fontaine played an active role in arranging the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907.

La Fontaine’s election to the Belgian senate in 1895 entitled him to a seat in the Interparliamentary Union, an organization created in 1888 by Frédéric Passy and William Cremer (Nobel Peace Prize recipients in 1901 and 1903, respectively) and dedicated to ending international war. The union encouraged members of parliaments from many nations to meet regularly and resolve international disputes before the antagonists became so passionately involved in their own positions that arbitration would be impossible. La Fontaine served as chair of its juridical committee prior to 1914 and served on two other committees that drafted a model treaty for arbitration and created a world parliament model. Moreover, La Fontaine worked outside officially sponsored peace activities to create informal peace associations among diverse private organizations to build international social interdependence, which he believed was a necessary element of a unified world.

Prior to his senatorial election and direct participation in the Interparliamentary Union, La Fontaine observed and criticized union affairs for leading periodicals and was acutely aware of the union’s limitations. He believed that the union was only the first step toward a world government that would be the ultimate arbitrator of international disputes. Though La Fontaine was a visionary, he was also realistic enough to know that a true world state was possible only in the distant future.

In 1895, La Fontaine established, with the help of his friend Paul Otlet, the Institut International de Bibliographie (known since 1988 as the Fédération Internationale d’Information et de Documentation, or International Federation for Information and Documentation, until it was dissolved in 2002). This immense bibliographical scheme was an attempt to index, collate, and provide information on significant scientific works written in all languages, aimed at the unprecedented task of cataloging all written material in the world. At the same time, Otlet and La Fontaine created a universal information classification system and produced several reference works, especially bibliographies of the social sciences and peace. This work reflected La Fontaine’s conviction that institutionalized international culture and achievement was a significant step toward world harmony.

Another related body that La Fontaine and Otlet founded was the Union of International Associations, located in Brussels. Established in 1910, the union’s purpose was to coordinate international nongovernmental organizations and enable them to operate effectively in international affairs. In 1951, with the United Nations Social Council and in 1952 with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the union was granted consultative status, and it remains today the only organization in the world devoted to the research, promotion, and documentation of international organizations.

In 1913, La Fontaine was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and was heralded by the Nobel committee as “the true leader of the popular peace movement in Europe.” One year later World War I began, and La Fontaine fled first to Great Britain and then to the United States. It was during the war that he wrote his best-known work, The Great Solution: Magnissima Charter (1916). In this work, La Fontaine proposed a number of measures to prevent future war among nations. He sought to influence traditionally isolationist nations, especially Britain and the United States, into accepting his concept of a union of nations; he proposed a set of principles for international organization; and he sketched the rough outline of a federal world constitution that would eventually be incorporated into a world government. He stressed the need for international courts and provisions for collective military sanctions to enforce international court judgments. He proposed the creation of an international language, institutions such as a world school and university, library, parliament, bank, and sources for labor, immigration, and trade statistics. Also during the war, La Fontaine wrote International Judicature (1915), an article outlining the basics for a world supreme court.

At the end of the war, out of respect for his vision of postwar world organization, La Fontaine was appointed technical adviser for the Belgian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. In 1920 and 1921, he was a delegate to the First Assembly of the League of Nations, at which he pressed for obligatory armed intervention against aggressor nations that violated the rules of the league. Many of the ultimate weaknesses of the league, primarily its inability to enforce its rules with collective military force, were anticipated by La Fontaine in The Great Solution and other writings. Some of La Fontaine’s ideas were incorporated into the postwar peace scheme, such as his Centre Intellectual Mondial (world intellectual center), which evolved into the league’s Institute of Intellectual Cooperation.

After the war, La Fontaine continued his peace efforts. He endorsed the Kellogg-Briand and Locarno pacts and supported disarmament. He worked with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Interparliamentary Union, and the International Peace Bureau. Until 1940, he continued to teach international law at the Free University of Brussels. He lectured on international disputes, disarmament, world government, the League of Nations, and the relationship between politics and morality. La Fontaine continued to attend peace conferences and meetings of the International Peace Bureau. He lived long enough to see his homeland invaded a second time and the world plunged once again into war. He died in Brussels in 1943 at the age of eighty-nine, working for the cause of world peace almost until his death.

La Fontaine left a prodigious written legacy of hundreds of articles, pamphlets, and books, including a manual on the laws of international peace and arbitration, a source book of 368 documents on international arbitration written between 1794 and 1900, and a bibliography on international arbitration containing 2,222 entries.

Throughout his life, La Fontaine displayed a wide scope of interests. He supported reforms in the Belgian bar to allow women to practice law and was a lifelong advocate for women’s rights. He was an avid mountain climber and drafted a two-volume mountaineering bibliography. He published respectable translations of the operas of Richard Wagner and lectured on such diverse topics as modern art and his personal impressions of the United States.

Significance

The cause of world peace was a popular preoccupation among educated people, especially prior to World War I. La Fontaine was at the heart of the international peace movement as both an organizer and an inspiration. He was an advocate of a world state that would prevent international disputes and war through the operation of law and arbitration. He was one of the first to recognize the emergence of an international culture in the industrial age and attempt to make it understandable and give it an institutional form. He was a visionary whose ideas proved prophetic, though they were all too often ignored by politicians.

La Fontaine was a devoted but moderate socialist rather than a revolutionary and was concerned with far-reaching social reforms, not solely with reforming the working class. He was the only socialist among the international peace movement leaders of the era and was unique in that he was active in all social classes of the peace internationalists as well as with the Socialist Party.

Bibliography

Abrams, Irwin. The Nobel Peace Prize and the Laureates: An Illustrated Biographical History, 1901-1987. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. This illustrated work presents a historical overview of all the Nobel Peace Prize laureates of the twentieth century. Each article is concise, with an excellent bibliography. It is a good starting point for a general understanding of La Fontaine.

Chatfield, Charles, and Peter van den Dugen, eds. Peace Movements and Political Cultures. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988. This collection of essays provides solid background for understanding the international peace movement. Included are works on the First Hague Peace Conference and the International Peace Bureau.

Davis, Hayne, ed. Among the World’s Peacemakers. New York: Progressive, 1907. Reprint. New York: Garland, 1972. Michael Lutzker wrote an insightful new introduction for the Garland edition that helps to put the international peace movement into perspective. Chapter 30 is based on an interview with La Fontaine.

Gray, Tony. Champions of Peace. New York: Paddington, 1976. This presentation of the Alfred Nobel story also contains biographies of the prize-winners and highlights the Nobel Prize committee’s reasons for making their award to La Fontaine. Included are some interesting statistics on La Fontaine’s publications.

Hull, William I. The Two Hague Conferences and Their Contributions to International Law. Boston: Ginn, 1908. Reprint. New York: Garland, 1972. This two-volume work is the most detailed account of the two Hague conferences. It is valuable because it provides a contemporary, optimistic view of the events and the peace movement.

Josephson, Harold, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. The book includes an exhaustive list of biographies of many diverse pacifists. Each article is written by an authority on a particular figure; in the case of La Fontaine, the article was written by Nadine Lubelski-Bernard after review of the original La Fontaine papers.

Keenan, S. “FID: Federation Internationale de Documentation.” In International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science, edited by John Feather and Paul Sturges. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 2003. A brief article on the Institut International de Bibliographie cofounded by La Fontaine in 1895.