By 1907 the organization claimed 6,000 members in sixty-nine chapters. In Sweden Klas P. Arnoldson and other Members of Parliament launched a similar effort to build support for neutrality. The Swedish society also worked to resolve the emerging dispute between Sweden and Norway, which separated peacefully in 1905. The Scandinavian peace societies helped to steer their governments toward support for neutrality and away from involvement in the great power alliances of the major European states.
The French peace movement expanded significantly in the late nineteenth century. In Nîmes an energetic group of mainly Protestant students formed the Association des jeunes amis de la paix, which later became the APD. Peace societies emerged in many of the provinces. At the national level Émile Arnaud succeeded Charles Lemonnier as leader of the Ligue internationale de la paix et de la liberté. By 1910, according to historian Sandi Cooper, France had “the largest and most diversified peace movement on the Continent.” Thirty-six separate organizations were active at the time, some with many local branches.
The French national council, the Délégation permanente des sociétés françaises de la paix, attracted broad support from many sectors of society, including labor unions, chambers of commerce, members of local municipal councils, educators, and eminent writers and intellectuals. One estimate placed the number of French men and women involved in peace societies at 300,000. The peace movement also developed in Italy, where the Unione lombarda per la pace was established in Milan in 1887 and a national network of peace activists was created at a congress in Rome in 1889. By 1904 there were twenty-five separate Italian peace societies, which came together in Turin to create a national coordinating committee.
The first peace society emerged in the Netherlands in 1870. Within a year the nascent Dutch Peace League had twenty-six branches, although few of these lasted. It was not until the turn of the century that an enduring peace movement took root, when the Peace League merged with the Dutch section of the Women’s League for International Disarmament to create a new organization, Peace through Justice (Vrede door Recht). The group organized public meetings, monitored textbooks, and actively participated in international peace congresses. It also produced a children’s book on the life of the great Dutch pioneer of international law, Hugo Grotius. Peace through Justice grew slowly at first but expanded rapidly in the months before the war.
Peace movement groups emerged in Germany and Austria as well. They were inspired by Bertha von Suttner, whose international success and popularity provided a launching pad for the Austrian Peace Society in 1891. The first peace society in Germany emerged in 1850, but it was hounded by the police in the counterrevolutionary atmosphere of that time and was soon disbanded. It was not until 1886 that the first enduring peace society appeared in Frankfurt. Germany was seen as a “citadel of militarism,” to use Von Suttner’s words, and the emergence of peace groups there gave hope to peace advocates elsewhere.
Most German peace groups were concentrated in the liberal southwest part of the country, but a few emerged even in authoritarian Prussia. By the 1890s dozens of peace societies were active, with thousands of members. Von Suttner’s protégé Alfred H. Fried was the driving organizational and intellectual force in the German peace movement. In 1892 he helped to create the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (DFG), which developed into a substantial national organization in the years prior to the world war.
Peace Inside and Outside: How Islamic Nonviolence Policy Works in Practice?
