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

Abstract

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.