A Citizen's Mission: The Cause of Peace Since 1815

Book Reviews A Citizen's Mission: The Cause of Peace Since 1815 Sandi Cooper. Patriotic Pacificism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815-1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. vn + 330 pp.; ISBN 0-195057515 -5 (cl); $39.95. JiU Liddington. The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Reprint of London: Virago, 1989. xiv + 349 pp.; ill.; ISBN 0-8156-2539-1 (d); 0-8156-2540-5 (pb); $32.95 (cl); 14.95 (pb). Johanna Alberti Opposition to war has a long history. Before the nineteenth century, the Christian message was heard as a caU to peace and nonviolence by smaU groups of men and women, particularly those whose thinking was shaped by the Protestant Reformation. These early pacifists stubbornly resisted calls to serve the state with weapons but they did not seek to influence governments or persuade other subjects of those governments. Peace became a dtizens' mission, in Sandi Cooper's phrase, with the gradual transformation of the individual, whether male or female, from subject to dtizen. These two books dig down to the nineteenth-century roots of the more familiar post-Second-World-War activities of women and men who combined actively to work for peace, and Jul Liddington foUows through the activities of British women up to 1988, with an Afterword for the American edition on the GuLf War. Cooper describes the genesis of her book in the preface: her path to "patriotic pacifism" started where her book finishes, with the origins of the First World War. She was "amazed to discover that a group of people Hved in pre-1914 Europe who had worked strenuously, though unsuccessfuUy, to prevent that war" (p. v). The grounding of Cooper's scholarship in international affairs can be seen in the way she places peace movements firmly and confidently within the context of nineteenth-century European poHtics. Looking at the history of peace movements since 1945 one can trace waves and troughs of activity and popular support for that activity. This pattern is also apparent in her description of one hundred years of "waging war on war in Europe" before the outbreak of the Great War. Her detailed exposition of the ideology and practices of European peace movements is integrated with developments and debates regarding the rights of individuals and the duties of governments. © 1993 Journal of Women's History, Vol 5 No. 2 (Fall)____________ 1993 Book Review: Johanna Alberti 155 This book covers the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the outbreak of another devastating European war in 1914. The outbreak of that war was, of course, a signal of the faUure of peace activism: one hundred years earher, it was the experience of devastation which had provided the spur for peace activists in 1815. "Nothing inspires interest in a durable international peace quite as effectively as decades of murderous, debilitating warfare" (p. 13). In 1815, the Old Regime, the founders of the modem schools of pohtical economy, and private dtizens shared a determination to avoid the recurrence of the carnage which had lasted for twenty-three years, and they provided a sympathetic ambiance and an impetus towards the formation of the first international peace sodeties. Between 1815 and 1850 organized peace activity had time and space to take root and, whüe the mid-century turbulence of revolution, counter-revolution , and the Crimean War destroyed the structures of earlier efforts to form an international network of peace activists, ideas and individuals survived to continue a more sophisticated struggle in the second half of the century. The growing confidence of peace activists meant that the Franco-Prussian War was both a bitter disappointment and a stimulus for new initiatives. Peace campaigns and the potential for campaigners to bring influence to bear on governments were made possible by the changing pohtical structures and ideologies in Europe during the nineteenth century. The ideas of the Enhghtenment were distorted into an ideology which gave birth to the Napoleonic wars, but they also led to poHtical changes which made possible organized dtizens' movements. As Cooper puts it with her customary luddity: "From a subject fitfuUy...