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  • René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration by Jay Winter & Antoine Prost
  • David Allen Harvey (bio)
Jay Winter & Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration( Cambridge University Press, 2013), ISBN 978-1-107-65570-6, 376 pages.

In this well-researched and well-written book, Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, leading historians of the First World War and its aftermath in France and throughout Europe, seek to elucidate the gradual and circuitous development of human rights and liberal internationalism through the life story of a remarkable individual. René Cassin, a French jurist, activist, scholar, and diplomat, is a fitting protagonist for this story. His life spanned nearly nine decades, from the Belle Époque to the later stages of the Cold War, and he not only lived through, but witnessed and helped to shape, a striking number of the most important moments of the twentieth century. These included the carnage of the First World War, the bright hopes and ultimate disaster of the League of Nations, the struggle of continental exiles in wartime London to keep alive the flame of democracy during its darkest hour, the efforts to remake a better and more just world at the foundation of the United Nations, the challenges of restoring republican legality in the chaos of postwar France, the tensions between liberal universalism and reason of state in the age of decolonization, wars in the Middle East, and superpower brinksmanship. In addition to chronicling a remarkably long, productive, and diverse life, this book intersects and illuminates a number of different historical narratives—the history of human rights and liberal internationalism, the history of the collapse and subsequent resurgence of French Republicanism, the history of French Judaism between assimilation and Zionism, and the history of the world wars and that of the generation of men whose lives were forever changed by them. It should be read with interest by a wide variety of readers.

René Cassin was born in 1887 to a prosperous bourgeois Jewish family in the South of France. His early years coincided with the rise of anti-Semitism in fin de siècle [end of nineteenth century] France, best exemplified by the Dreyfus Affair, and his childhood home, divided between a secular, nonbelieving father and a pious, traditional mother, mirrored the tensions between integration and parochialism, between modernity and tradition, that were felt not only by French Jews, but by most of his countrymen during the early years of the Third Republic. The young Cassin broke with family tradition by choosing to study law rather than enter the family’s wine-trading business and by his cohabitation and later marriage to a young woman of Catholic origins. The First World War interrupted both of these pursuits. Mobilized like all young Frenchmen of his generation, Cassin was more fortunate than most—wounded in October 1914, he survived a serious abdominal injury that left him hobbled, but not incapacitated, for the rest of his life, and he spent the remainder of the war in convalescence.

After the war, Cassin juggled an academic career as professor of law in Lille and later in Paris with growing responsibilities as the leading spokesman for the Union Fédérale, a veterans’ rights organization which demanded pensions and job placement assistance as matters of civic rights rather than charity, and which remained loyal to the Third Republic even as many of its rival organizations drifted toward the antidemocratic right. During this period Cassin also served as part of the French delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva where he met like-minded [End Page 269] men from across the continent, pragmatic idealists, many of them fellow veterans who shared his dream of a more just and peaceful world. During this period, Cassin also launched two unsuccessful campaigns for election to the French Chamber of Deputies. Paradoxically, Winter and Prost persuasively argue that had he been successful in electoral politics, Cassin might have served in one of the ephemeral ministries of the late Third Republic, but ultimately he would have had less influence over French and world affairs than the less-traveled path...

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