Abstract
Reviewed by: Gearóid Barry, NUI Galway, Ireland
The French version of this co-authored book – a biographical case study of the French academic lawyer and Nobel peace laureate René Cassin –was published by Fayard in 2011. Authors Jay Winter and Antoine Prost argue that, in French history writing, human rights are almost taken for granted as a foundational inheritance from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789.Obliged to puncture ‘the illusion that everyone knows what rights are’, Winter and Prost present here ‘the rich and complex French contribution to the internationalization of human rights in the twentieth century’ (xvii). The additions that differentiate this second helping from the original are twofold; first, Winter and Prost make use of some new material that became available between 2011 and 2013, and, more substantially, they also include a more extensive engagement with the ever-growing corpus of human rights history in English. The first measure of this book, however, must be how well it melds conventional biography with thematic analysis. In this, it succeeds admirably. Cassin’s itinerary is indeed exceptional but the authors state their preference for a generational approach which would place his life and work in the context of the double ‘war generation of 1914–45’ and of a transnational group of advocates, like the Czechoslovak Eduard Beneŝ and Greek Nikolas Politis, whose lives and political beliefs were tempered by war and their frustrated ambitions for the League of Nations of the 1920s and 1930s. The book meets some, if not all, of these great expectations.
Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Bayonne in 1887, Cassin suffered a near-fatal war injury in October 1914 near St Mihiel in the Meuse when he was hit three times by a burst of machine-gun fire. His night stranded in No Man’s Land is recounted in vivid detail; here, as throughout the book, the authors mine an absolute wealth of documentation in France and Geneva (21–3). Stoic Cassin wore a hidden thoracic brace for life and adopted a mission to speak up for the rights of disabled veterans, war widows (such as his own sister) and orphans. The Union Fédérale, the premier advocacy group, became his vehicle to represent citizen-veterans who were owed a debt, not charity. Turned against war by the bitter experience of 1914–18, Cassin’s attachment to the international veterans’ movement was of a piece with his interest in the welfare activities of the League of Nations. Cassin served at Geneva as part of the French national delegation from 1924. In time, such liberal idealism was superseded by realism about the even worse prospect of Nazi hegemony, prompting a painful parting of the ways between Cassin and his long-time partner in the Union Fédérale, Henri Pichot. Choosing Free France, Cassin served in London as De Gaulle’s jurist, from where he attacked the Vichy government’s very legality.
At the core of this book is the argument that Cassin was but one member of a pan-European and indeed global group whose experience of the Second World War ‘turned their pacifism into a quest for making human rights the basis of the new world order after 1945’ (x). A drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Cassin later served on the Council of Europe’s new European Court of Human Rights. Winter and Prost explain, without jargon, his most significant judgements, balancing state sovereignty with protection against its abuses. Cassin’s international connections are ever present in this book but what remains elusive is a concentrated discussion of his transnational milieu itself. This is glimpsed in relation to the veterans’ international meetings and wartime London but not sustained throughout. This is a minor disappointment, however, and compensations include a sensitive discussion of Cassin’s Jewish life – secular but proud, in the Marc Bloch mould – and his attitude to Israel and Palestine. His ecumenical contacts included post-war papal nuncio Angelo Roncalli who later became Pope John XXIII (though, here again, Cassin’s undoubted sympathy in the 1920s with the small but lively current of French Christian Democrats around pacifist Marc Sangnier is largely overlooked). Particular pleasures are the no less than 42 illustrations, mainly photographs, depicting the public and private Cassin. Cassin appears meeting world figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Pope Paul VI but we also encounter the extended Cassin family in turn-of-the-century photographs of Cassin’s boyhood – like studies for a Renoir painting – alongside photos of the recuperating soldier in Antibes in 1914 and, finally, of the two (Gentile) women he married, Simone (who died in 1969) and Ghislaine, whom he married in 1975, in the final year of a long life that had combined rare moments of vanity with years of enduring service to the common weal.