By the latter third of the century a new wave of peace advocacy emerged, and the scale of organized activity increased. Peace societies extended far and wide, attracting support from intellectuals, members of Parliament, and even leading industrialists. In the United States it was an era of optimism, of “cosmopolitan reform,” as DeBenedetti phrased it.40 In continental Europe peace societies multiplied in France and emerged in Scandinavia, the Latin countries, and even in imperial Germany and Austria–Hungary. The growth of the European peace societies brought new dynamism to the cause and introduced fresh political perspectives linking peace to national self-determination and social justice. In most of Europe peace groups overlapped with the rising socialist movement, as a new concept of“scientific” pacifism emerged under the influence of Darwin and positivism. Peace activism also emerged within the working class. In the 1870s W. Randal Cremer, the first British worker to be elected to the House of Commons and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1903, founded the Workman’s Peace Association, which opposed excessive military spending and supported arbitration and the development of international law.
Two distinct schools of thought and separate organizations emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Ligue internationale et permanente de la paix, formed in Paris in 1867, represented the more moderate wing of the movement. Its animating spirit was the French economist Frédéric Passy, later co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a dominant figure among nineteenth-century European peace activists. The Ligue represented the “bourgeois, liberal, internationalist tradition within French pacifism,” wrote historian Norman Ingram. It considered peace the preeminent concern and necessary requirement for national liberation and all other social progress. Passy believed that political freedom and social justice would evolve naturally once the burdens of war and excessive military spending were lifted from society. Liberal economic policies would naturally lead to prosperity and would solve the problems of injustice and poverty.
Passy disagreed with democratic revolutionaries who prioritized the struggle for social justice. He did not believe that democracy and greater social equality were prerequisites for peace. He advocated an incrementalist agenda that sought to achieve international arbitration agreements rather than wholesale social change. Progress would come through lobbying for gradual reform, he argued, not through demands for revolution. He disdained radicalism as alienating to the middle-class constituencies that he believed had to be won over to the cause of peace. The Ligue changed its name a couple of times over the decades and in 1922 merged into the Association de la paix par le droit (APD), which remained in existence until after World War II.
An alternative perspective was articulated by the Ligue internationale de la paix et de la liberté, which was formed in Geneva in 1867 and continued until 1939. The Ligue was the largest and most influential continental peace organization of the nineteenth century. It was home to those who believed that peace required a commitment to social justice, national liberation, and democracy. The agenda of the Ligue prefigured the concern for social justice and human rights that was to become the hallmark of peace activism in the twentieth century. The Ligue was inspired by Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Hugo and was led by Edmond Potonié-Pierre and Charles Lemonnier. Wars would not end, Garibaldi famously argued, until oppressed nationalities won their freedom, through war if necessary. National liberation, democracy, and human rights were prerequisites for peace. Many socialists held similar views. Self-determination for oppressed nationalities and the extension of the franchise to women and previously excluded populations – these were the foundations for a more peaceful society.
The Ligue internationale de la paix et de la liberté sponsored the largest peace congress of the nineteenth century at its founding meeting in Geneva in September 1867. The crowd of 6,000 people in attendance included Europe’s leading democrats and nationalist radicals.45 Presiding over the congress was Garibaldi, who stirred controversy by calling for the overthrow of the Papal States in Italy. The League’s journal was Les États-Unis d’Europe, which openly supported wars of national liberation. An article in 1868 read:“War is . . . legitimate and just against oppressors. Every armed struggle is a crime if it does not have the noble aim of attaining the eternal, immutable right of peoples and individuals for self-determination.” The Ligue’s Lausanne meeting in 1869 was also memorable because of the opening address of Victor Hugo, who came out of exile to preside at the assembly. His message in 1869 was more sober and less utopian than his famous oration at the Paris congress twenty years earlier. He spoke not of a United States of Europe but of a necessary struggle for national liberation and democracy:
The first condition of peace is liberation. For this liberation, a revolution is needed which shall be a great one, and perhaps, alas a war which shall be the last one. Then, all will be accomplished. Peace . . . will be eternal; no more armies, no more kings. The past will vanish. The people of Italy, Germany, and other European countries were successful in forging unified nations, but the peace of which the nationalists dreamed proved illusory, as the principle of justifiable war gave way to militarism, world war, and dictatorship.
The Decision for War: Triggering Violence and Chaos
