René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration

This is without doubt the most thorough and scholarly treatment of the life and political engagement of René Cassin (1887–1976), winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 and one of the architects of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is informed by a deep understanding of French history that only two historians of the stature of Antoine Prost and Jay Winter could provide.

Prost and Winter take us through the long life and political engagement of Cassin, what they quite rightly term a life of ‘extraordinary diversity’. They describe his Jewish heritage which in many respects he rejected, at least in its orthodox manifestations, flouting the conventions of his time by living for six years with the Christian woman who eventually became his first wife. Cassin was severely wounded in the first months of the Great War, and bore the scars of the hecatomb in his body for the rest of his life. They chart his career as a professor of law at the University of Paris, as president of the Union fédérale des mutilés et anciens combattants (UF) in the early twenties, subsequently with the Conférence internationale des Associations des mutilés et anciens combattants (CIAMAC), as a member of the French delegation to the League of Nations from 1924 to 1938 and on into the Second World War where he was among the very first to answer de Gaulle’s clarion call and join the group of men and women fighting for Free France from London. Winter and Prost see these years, especially those before the second war, as essential in the evolution of Cassin’s thinking on the question of absolute state sovereignty, an issue they term the ‘heart of the problem’. After the Second World War, Cassin was perhaps the most important instigator of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a signal accomplishment for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968.

On one level, Winter and Prost have their work cut out for them. Despite being witness to many of the great events of the twentieth century, Cassin was not a terribly interesting man. Perhaps this was due to a career as a law professor. It is difficult to make his sixteen years as vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat (1944–1960)—necessary and worthy though that work is—exciting, even to the specialist reader. It is also difficult to escape the impression at times that Cassin was something of an office and honours chaser; at various places in their narrative, Winter and Prost admit as much, writing of Cassin’s view of his own importance in 1940, ‘he knew he had entered history, and his pride in that fact shows just a bit too much ... he was no paragon of virtue’. Elsewhere, we read that Cassin felt ‘deeply humiliated’ not to be offered a first rank position in de Gaulle’s Conseil national français, something he ‘bitterly resented’. This sense of resentment seems to have been a constant in Cassin’s life.

There are occasional logical inconsistencies in the narrative of Cassin’s life. In one of these, Winter and Prost write that in the 1930s Cassin moved ‘beyond collective security and towards a future universal commitment to the defence of human rights’ by focussing on ‘Leviathan states’ and how to ‘limit their destructive power’. In the next few pages, however, they detail the extent to which Cassin and Georges Scelle, another law professor at the University of Paris, continued to make the case for collective security. The promotion of collective security was integral to the position of the Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix (RUP) in whose creation Winter and Prost imply Cassin was front and centre. In fact, the RUP (rather unhelpfully translated in this book as the Universal Rally for Peace, when in fact it was known in the English-speaking world as the International Peace Campaign) was the creation of Lord Cecil and Pierre Cot.

Winter and Prost engage with a variety of historiographical debates in this book, sometimes fleetingly, and at other times in a more profound way. In the first category, without ever mentioning him by name, they dismiss Chris Millington’s interesting arguments about the flirtation of the veterans’ groups with extreme right-wing ideas in the 1930s, despite admitting that the UF made friendly visits to fascist Italy and to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1934. More to the point for our purposes here, however, they engage with Samuel Moyn and others who believe that human rights are an invention of the post-1970 period. In this they are surely correct.

The argument is not without its problems, however. While there is no doubt at all that the commitment to human rights in France goes back a very long way indeed (see Lynn Hunt, William Irvine and Emmanuel Naquet, amongst others), the notion that the Great War produced pacifism while the Second World War and the Shoah were the catalyst for the emergence of human rights ideas is debatable (they argue this position on p. xix and the opposite on p. 348). And here we come to one of the strangest lacunae in Cassin’s life: his apparent—on the evidence presented by Winter and Prost—total non-engagement with the premier human rights organisation in the world, the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH), founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Surely the LDH constitutes precisely the organisation (and a huge one, at that, in which many academics and law professors were active) which struggled against what Cassin himself called the ‘Leviathan state’. Bringing the LDH into the mix, however, would complicate the narrative progression from pacifism to human rights which Winter and Prost posit. Why? Because human rights existed as the raison d’être of the LDH long before the Great War, and in the interwar period, human rights and pacifism fought for pre-eminence in the Ligue, a bit like Jacob and Esau in the womb. The end result was that both pacifism and human rights—or the LDH version in France at any rate—were almost destroyed by the time the Second World War was over.

Once again on the basis of the evidence presented by Winter and Prost, one must ask why, if Cassin was a ‘pacifist’ (a word denuded of much sense in French historiography), he appears not to have been a member of the Association de la paix par le droit (APD), the most important example of juridical, internationalist old-style pacifism in France, or even to have had anything to do with the Union internationale des associations pour la Société des Nations, whose secretary-general was Professor Théodore Ruyssen, the president of the APD.

Finally, though, there is Cassin’s strange blind spot on the question of the Algerian War and Arab human rights more generally. Winter and Prost write that he ‘was not a consistent spokesman for human rights, and he took decisions in the Conseil d’Etat which effectively meant that he looked away from some of the ugliness of the conflict in Algeria’.

René Cassin got his fondest wish, however: his remains were transferred to the Panthéon in October 1987.

Having said all that, this is an extremely valuable biography of a man who was a witness to, or participant in, all of the great events of the first three quarters of the twentieth century in France. Winter and Prost are to be commended.