(Jay Winter, Antoine Prost) René Cassin and Human

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René Cassin and Human Rights
Through the life of one extraordinary man, this biography reveals what
the term human rights meant to the men and women who endured
two world wars, and how this major political and intellectual movement
ultimately inspired and enshrined the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. René Cassin was a man of his generation, committed to moving
from war to peace through international law, and whose work won him
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968. His life crossed all the major events of
the first seventy years of the twentieth century, and illustrates the hopes,
aspirations, failures and achievements of an entire generation. It shows
how today’s human rights regimes emerged from the First World War as
a pacifist response to that catastrophe and how, after 1945, human rights
became a way to go beyond the dangers of absolute state sovereignty,
helping to create today’s European project.
j ay w i n t e r is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University.

He has published widely on the history of the First World War, and is
one of the founders of the Historial de la grande guerre, the international
museum of the Great War in Péronne, France. He is author of Sites of
Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge, 1995).
a n t o i n e p r o s t is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris I
Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is the world’s leading authority on the history
of French veterans’ movements and the history of French education,
and has written extensively on twentieth-century social and cultural
history. He is co-author with Jay Winter of The Great War in History:
Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge, 2005).
Human Rights in History
Edited by
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung
Samuel Moyn Columbia University
This series showcases new scholarship exploring the backgrounds of

human rights today. With an open-ended chronology and international
perspective, the series seeks works attentive to the surprises and con-
tingencies in the historical origins and legacies of human rights ideals
and interventions. Books in the series will focus not only on the intel-
lectual antecedents and foundations of human rights, but also on the
incorporation of the concept by movements, nation-states, international
governance and transnational law.
René Cassin and Human
Rights
From the Great War to the Universal Declaration
Jay Winter and Antoine Prost

c a m b r i d g e u n i ve r s i t y p r e s s
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,
New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107655706
Originally published in French as René Cassin by Fayard, 2011
First published in English as René Cassin and Human Rights: From the
Great War to the Universal Declaration by Cambridge University Press, 2013

C Jay Winter and Antoine Prost 2013
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2013
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Prost, Antoine, 1933–
[René Cassin et les droits de l’homme. English]
René Cassin and human rights : from the Great War to the Universal
Declaration/Jay Winter and Antoine Prost.
pages cm. – (Human rights in history)
Originally published in French by Fayard, 2011.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-03256-9 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-107-65570-6 (paperback)
1. Cassin, René, 1887–1976. 2. Lawyers – France – Biography.
3. Human rights. I. Winter, J. M. II. Title.
KJV251.5.C37P7613 2013
341.4 8 – dc23 2012035056
ISBN 978-1-107-03256-9 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-107-65570-6 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
‘No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narra-
tives that locate it and give it Meaning. For every constitution there is
an epic.’
Robert Cover, ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and
Narrative’, Harvard Law Review, 117 (1983), p. 4.
Contents
List of plates page ix

Preface and acknowledgments xiii
Introduction to the English edition xvii
List of abbreviations xxii
Part I In the shadow of the Great War

1 Family and education, 1887–1914 3
2 The Great War and its aftermath 19
3 Cassin in Geneva 51
4 From nightmare to reality, 1936–1940 80
Part II The jurist of Free France

5 Free France, 1940–1941 109
6 World War, 1941–1943 134
7 Restoring the Republican legal order: the ‘Comité
Juridique’ 168
8 Freeze frame: René Cassin in 1944 200
Part III The struggle for human rights

9 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: origins
and echoes 221
10 The vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat, 1944–1960 265
11 A Jewish life 301
vii
viii Contents
Conclusion 341
An essay on sources 354
Index 361
Plates
Between pages 194 and 195

1 Henri (Azaria) Cassin at age ninety-five (Photo Chantal Connochie)
2 Cassin’s mother Gabrielle and her twin sister Cécile (Photo Josette
Cassin)
3 The Cassin children: Fédia, René, Félice and Yvonne,
c. 1892 (Photo Josette Cassin)
4 Cassin and his sister Yvonne, Nice, c. 1900 (Archives nationales,
Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, 382AP229)
5 Cassin in Nice, 1902 (Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine,
382AP229)
6 Cassin the student, 1902 (Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine,
382AP229)
7 Cassin the student in Aix-en-Provence, c. 1908 (Archives
nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, 382AP229)
8 Félice Abram, with her children, c. 1930 (Photo Josette Cassin)
9 Rachel Cottage, Bayonne, c. 1930 (Photo Josette Cassin)
10 Medical record of Cassin’s treatment, Antibes, 1914 (Archives
11 Recuperating from his war wounds, 1914 (Archives nationales,
12 Recuperating, 1914 (Photo Chantal Connochie)
13 René Cassin and Simone Yzombard, 1915 (Photo Josette Cassin)
14 Cassin in the early 1920s (Photo Chantal Connochie)
15 Simone in the 1930s (Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine,
382AP229)
16 Drawing of Cassin speaking at the UF Congress, 1923 (Archives
17 At UF Congress, c. 1930 (Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine,
382AP230)
ix
x List of plates
18 In the French Delegation to the League of Nations, 1925 (Archives

19 Official report on Professor René Cassin, University of Lille, 1929
(Archives départementales du Nord, 2T194)
20 CIAMAC delegates in Geneva, 1930 (Archives nationales,
21 In medical clinic for surgery, 1936 (Photo Chantal Connochie)
22 ‘This is not a last will and testament’, envelope addressed at the
time of Cassin’s operation, 1936 (Archives nationales,
23 Cassin on holiday, 1939 (Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine,
382AP230)
24 In Free French headquarters, Carlton Gardens, London, 1940
(Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, 382AP230)
25 At St James’s Palace, 24 September 1941 (Archives nationales,
26 The French National Committee, London, October 1941 (Photo
AFP)
27 Cassin in Aleppo, 1941 (Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine,
382AP231)
28 Reviewing the troops at Brazzaville, 1942 (Archives nationales,
29 Ceremonial sword as member of the French Institute, 1948
30 René Cassin and Eleanor Roosevelt, 1948 (Archives nationales,
31 Cassin presiding at the European Court of Human Rights,
Strasbourg, 1966 (Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine,
382AP234)
32 In the Galleries of the Palais Royal, Paris, 1968 (Archives
33 Brandishing the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, 1968
34 At the UN, 1968 (Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine,
382AP234)
35 Cassin and the president of the Swedish Nobel committee, Oslo,
1968 (Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, 382AP234)
36 With Pope Paul VI, c. 1968 (Archives nationales,
37 In Jerusalem with the family of André Chouraqui, 3 March 1968
List of plates xi
38 Dancing in Mauritius after a jurists’ congress, c. 1968 (Archives

39 Ghislaine Bru in 1935 (Ciné Miroir)
40 Ghislaine Connochie in 1943 (Photo Chantal Connochie)
41 Ghislaine Connochie in 1944 (Photo Chantal Connochie)
42 Madame Ghislaine René Cassin, 1987 (Archives nationales,
Preface and acknowledgments
Writing a biography poses particular problems for historians. First, it

is impossible to approach this task without a certain sympathy for the
person whose life you intend to explore. We are the first to admit that
we share the admiration and the respect which René Cassin inspired
in many of his contemporaries, as well as a kind of complicity as we
traverse the century in his company. In this effort we have been blessed
with abundant documentation preserved in archives, in particular the
diaries he kept during the Second World War, and in a blessedly legible
handwriting.
A historian, though, cannot accept without scrutiny what the subject
said about his life and his actions. The meaning we give to our lives
at a given moment may look very odd a few years thereafter. That is
why we need to adopt a perspective which permits distance from the
self-perception of our subject. Without this separation, history becomes
hagiography. Biography suffers if it is based on affection or uncritical
admiration. Our task is not to instruct the reader by magnifying the
achievements of a hero, but in retracing his career and his action, in
measuring the impact of his work and its meaning. Biography is a work
of critical intelligence and elucidation, neither a panegyric nor an accu-
sation. Our job is to explain what our subject did, why he did it, and to
what effect. Moral judgment remains the province of the reader.
The second problem we face is of a different order. It arises out of
the diversity of the work and experience of our subject. To attract our
attention, such individuals must have passed a life to a degree out of
the ordinary, and have passed through experiences in different settings,
in particular if they lived a long life, as Cassin did. Here is one of the
attractions of biography: in the effort to describe accurately the role
of a public figure, we need to offer a somewhat panoramic view on
the world through which he passed. From this perspective, Cassin lived
an exceptionally varied life; indeed, it makes sense to say that in his
eighty-eight years, he lived several lives, each one of which merits its own
xiii
xiv Preface and acknowledgments
biography. By surveying his multiple posts and responsibilities, his story

becomes that of a century seen through the prism of an individual’s life.
To tell the story of Cassin’s work in different periods and settings, we
have had to find and master very different and scattered archives, entering
into the specialist literature of several fields, and into learned disputes in
jurisprudence or administration over most of a century. What may appear
to be a linear narrative of the life of a man inevitably becomes the study
of multiple crossing relationships, like weaving a tapestry of substantial
and uneven dimensions. Because it touches on so many subjects and
themes, biography is necessarily a multi-disciplinary matter, and given
the unknowns in every life, a full biography can never be written. We
come as close to it as we can, knowing the difficulty and limits of the
exercise.
Biographies present a third set of unavoidable problems. They reside
in what Bourdieu termed ‘the biographical illusion’. To study the life of a
man, whoever he may be, naturally means to seek its coherence, its logic.
To do so, we depend on the traces which the person left, and yet as real
as they are, they remain only traces, and our reading of them, without
being arbitrary, always remains personal. Working together, we were able
to limit the risk of too subjective an approach, since our points of view,
our native languages and our writing styles differ. We do not pretend to
have portrayed with equal justice all the varied facets of Cassin’s life. And
we have been very well aware that, like everyone else, Cassin took with
him to his grave mysteries which we must acknowledge and respect.
This biography is in no sense definitive. Every single life can be read in
different ways, and his is no exception. Other biographers, closer to him,
notably Marc Agi and Gérard Israël, have written studies to which we
are indebted. Approaching this biography as historians who have spent
considerable time exploring the history of the Great War and its imprint
on those who waged it, we hope to show the extent to which Cassin
expressed the hopes and anguish of an entire generation. That was our
starting point, but we went well beyond it. We have tried to enrich our
interpretation not only by using Cassin’s extensive archive, but also in
seeking out the traces he left both in organizations close to his heart and
in other sites of his extraordinarily varied public life. This effort led us to
emphasize the importance of his role in both national and trans-national
history, while never losing sight of the universal element in his thinking.
This biography was only possible to complete as the work of a partner-
ship. To give a preliminary idea of our principal sources, we drew heavily
on the Cassin archive and other holdings of the Archives Nationales
in Paris, including those of the Offices Nationaux des Mutilés and
des Pupilles, the Conseil d’Etat and ENA. We have explored the archives
Preface and acknowledgments xv
of the Quai d’Orsay and the Comité Juridique in Algiers and then in
Paris, of the League of Nations, the ILO, the UN, UNESCO, the Nobel
Foundation, the Council of Europe, the National Library and University
Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Union Fédérale, the
Alliance Israélite Universelle, as well as the private archives of André
Chouraqui, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, and the family archives of Josette
Cassin and Chantal Connochie. Every one of these collections provided
us with essential information. Without a long and convivial history of
working together, we simply could not have mastered this range of mat-
erials, which made it possible for us to finish this task of more than a
decade. Even now, we do not pretend to have provided an exhaustive
treatment of all the themes raised in this life of René Cassin and his
generation.
The happy task that remains is to thank the many people who have
helped us. Nicole Questiaux, Bernard Ducamin, Marceau Long, Pierre
Laurent, Stéphane Hessel and Jean-Marcel Jeanneney provided insights
on Cassin, with whom each of them worked. We profited greatly from
interviews with members of the Cassin and Abram families. René’s niece
Susy Abram, now 100 years old, received us in Digne-les-Bains, with
charm and vivid family recollections, as did her cousin Josette Cassin, a
mere 93, in Paris. Josette was particularly helpful in providing us with
shrewd judgments, accounts of family travails and celebrations, its Jewish
life, and family photographs, some of which appear in this book. We had
the pleasure of meeting René’s nephew and godson Gilbert Cassin in
St Maxime, and learned much about the wine trade, the family and
their lives in Marseilles, Nice, St Maxime and Antibes. Both in Provence
and in the Grande Chartreuse, Chantal Connochie, Ghislaine’s elder
daughter, warmly welcomed us and went through her mother’s papers
with us. The photograph of her mother, taken from her wartime identity
card, is reproduced in this book. The generosity of all these people is part
of what makes historical research a pleasure.
The directors of the Institut International des Droits de l’Homme, who
hold the rights to René Cassin’s archive, were kind enough to authorize
us to use them liberally. It is simply impossible to list all the people with
whom we discussed different aspects of this biography, or who provided
us with a venue to present a paper or talk on an aspect of Cassin’s life.
We benefited from many criticisms, remarks and suggestions, and are
grateful for them all. We hope they recognize the debt we owe to them
all. Let us single out Jean-Pierre Azéma, Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac,
Jean Massot, Julian Jackson, Kolleen Guy, Samuel Moyn, Hanne Vik,
Marco Duranti, Nathan Kurz, Paul Lauren and Maud Mandel who read
parts or all of this book in draft. We are particularly grateful to the many
xvi Preface and acknowledgments
archivists who guided our research, and especially to Caroline Piketty,

conservateur en chef au département des archives privées au Centre
Historique des Archives Nationales. Through her help, suggestions, wise
cautions and counsels, she not only paved the way for us to finish this
book, but joined us on the long journey we have made in search of René
Cassin. She deserves a special place in this list of the professional and
personal debts we incurred in this project over the last ten years.
a n t o i n e p r o s t a n d jay w i n t e r
Introduction to the English edition
The end of the Cold War in 1989 inaugurated a new period in the history
of human rights. The peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire and the tran-
sition from apartheid in South Africa surprised many observers. Those
who worked in non-violent movements seemed to have had more power
than many realists in the field of international affairs had imagined. Since
then, dictatorships which seemed unassailable have been toppled by other
mass movements, and without an attendant bloodbath. Not everywhere
to be sure – witness Tiananmen Square and the former Yugoslavia –
but in states with substantial armed forces and police powers like Egypt,
Tunisia, Chile, Ivory Coast, East Timor and elsewhere. There have been
successful prosecutions in the United Nations Criminal Court in The
Hague and in the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania
for violations of human rights and genocide.
In this dramatic and fast-moving context, there has been considerable
scholarly and general interest in the subject of human rights, in particular
in the English-speaking world. Lawyers, sociologists, historians, political
scientists, anthropologists, literary scholars have all contributed to this
ongoing and voluminous discussion.1 Paradoxically, the European coun-
tries have not advanced the conversation as much as to the meaning and
1 For literary criticism, see Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. The World Novel, Nar-
rative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); for
critical legal studies see Upendra Baxi, The Future of Human Rights (Oxford University
Press, 2002) and Inhuman Wrongs and Human Rights. Unconventional Essays (New Delhi:
Haranand Publications, 1994); and Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire. The
Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge Cavendish, 2007); The End of
Human Rights. Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Hart, 2000); in
anthropology, see Richard A. Wilson (ed.), Human Rights, Culture and Context. Anthro-
pological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 1997) and Alison Renteln, ‘Relativism and
the search for human rights’, American Anthropologist, 90, 1 (1988), pp. 56–72; in gen-
der studies, see Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives. The
Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave, 2004); in political science, see Jack Donnelly,
International Human Rights (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993), Universal Human Rights
in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Alison Brysk
(ed.), Globalization and Human Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
xvii
xviii Introduction to the English edition
practice of human rights, despite the fact that they were in the forefront
of the construction of the first Convention on Human Rights to apply
to an entire region. The European Convention on Human Rights was
ratified in 1950, and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg
began its work in 1960.
To be sure, the sheer volume of publications in English now dwarfs that
in European languages in every field of scholarship. And yet that is not
the end of the story. It may be that Europeans in general and French writ-
ers in particular take human rights for granted as a foundational element
of their polities. They see it as the basis of the European community,
each country of which has its own domestic human rights institutions,
and representation on the Strasbourg Court. This is especially true for
French people, who see human rights today as the continuation of the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. Every primary
school in the Republic has had somewhere on its walls the text of this
foundational Declaration. What everyone knows is not the basis for schol-
arly controversy. In the French version of this book, we tried to puncture
that illusion that everyone knows what rights are, by examining the rich
and complex French contribution to the internationalization of human
rights in the twentieth century.
In the Anglo-Saxon literature, there are two extreme positions which
attending to the French case enables us to avoid. On the one hand, the
deeply learned histories of continuity, especially notable in the writings
of Paul Lauren, emphasize the long march of moral thinking, from Ham-
murabi’s code to the present.2 On the other hand, there is the recently
developed interpretation of a radical break in the history of human rights,
which emerged, like a super-saturated solution, from 1970 on. To Samuel
Moyn, the failure of ideologies of left and right after 1968 created an ideo-
logical vacuum which human rights filled.3 This interpretation, like that
of Lauren, has much to recommend it. However, we need a different,
generational, approach, fully to appreciate the French part of the story.
This biography aims at such a perspective by focusing on René Cassin as
Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN. The Political History of Uni-
versal Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); in sociology see Bryan S.
Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press,
2006). And this leaves aside the voluminous periodical literature specifically on human
rights. The Yale University Library’s online collection includes sixty-nine journals with
the words ‘human rights’ in the title. The hegemony of English in the academy is evident
here; journals in French and other languages reach a significantly smaller readership.
2 Paul Gordon Lauren, Visions Seen. The Evolution of International Human Rights, 3rd edn
(Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2011).
3 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. A History of Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass. and
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).
Introduction to the English edition xix
a figure within the generation into which he was born in the 1880s, and
who lived through the two world wars.
This biography is a history of the struggle for human rights in a spe-
cific time and place. We offer a different chronology and a compromise
between those who see human rights as advancing in a glacial manner
in a cumulative or additive process of gains and losses, and those who
see it in terms of truncated evolution, with a radical break at a specific
point in time. There are elements of truth in both, but they need to
be supplemented by the history of what we term the war generation of
1914–45. Usually, the term ‘war generation’ applies to one conflict and
to those who saw service or who suffered through it. We want to draw
attention to the long-term history of those who, as young men, fought in
the Great War, and as older men played a significant and active role in the
Second World War. The war generation of 1914–45 faced the Shoah as
well, and they did so as men and women who knew the brutality of war,
but who believed that they saw something even more monstrous in the
Nazi phenomenon. While their experience of the First World War turned
them into pacifists, the 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.
This story gives us a different chronology in which to place the history
of human rights in the twentieth century and beyond, one which adds a
third approach to the recent English-language literature on human rights.
To date no one has seen in the struggle for the rights of wounded veterans
the origins of later developments in the rights of the victims of war in
general. The arrival of Hitler was a decisive moment in the construction
of a new kind of thinking on the dangers of absolute state sovereignty,
but the story does not start there. It goes back to the Great War and its
catastrophic consequences.
This biography is that of a man of his generation, born in the 1880s,
who reached maturity before the Great War and who suffered its con-
sequences. René Cassin was not the only man of his cohort who had
endured the two world wars and who was committed to the human
rights project. This biography enables us to see striking similarities in
the profiles and experiences of a substantial group of men and women.
Many worked in the League of Nations. Cassin’s long-time friends and
colleagues Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia and Nikolas Politis were
there. They saw the flaws of the League, in terms of its acceptance of
absolute state sovereignty, and began the work of constructing an alter-
native approach to international affairs, one based on what we now term
human rights. That term emerged fully in the Second World War in Lon-
don, where Cassin was joined by many of his former colleagues in the
xx Introduction to the English edition
League. Thereafter, Cassin established his reputation as a major cham-

pion and central figure of the Human Rights Commission of the UN,
then presided over the European Court of Human Rights, and lived long
enough to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968. It is hardly surprising
that he became the symbol of the long-term, multi-faceted effort to make
human rights instruments a reality. In delimiting the absolute sovereignty
of the state, he and his colleagues were advancing towards a new inter-
national legal order, where conflicts between states would be resolved by
arbitration, and where individuals had the standing to bring their own
states to book for violations of the human rights of their own citizens. This
radical departure from traditional jurisprudence is what makes the Euro-
pean community in 2012 different from any configuration of European
states before 1950.
There is another European dimension to the story of human rights not
compatible with the individualist tradition of much American thinking
on human rights. To Cassin and many others, the rights of individuals
to live and thrive in civil society were social rights, paired with social
obligations, and they were not reducible to matters of voting practices and
legal procedure alone. Men had the right to dignity, and that opened the
door to social and economic rights, without which political rights could
not exist. Following his story is following one important tradition in the
history of human rights, with its own particular French and European
coloration.
The story we tell about René Cassin is more than that of the drafting
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948; there has been
excellent scholarship on this subject.4 Instead we want to show the evo-
lution of a man who grew up in the shadow of the Dreyfus affair, facing
situations and events he could not have imagined in his childhood. The
total war in which he served in 1914 produced much worse challenges
to the dignity of man than he knew before the war. He not only suf-
fered war in his own body in 1914 – he was very severely wounded and
miraculously survived – but twenty-five years later, he was also hit by the
Shoah, in which twenty-six members of his family, including his sister,
were deported and killed in Auschwitz. He was sentenced to death in
absentia as one of the leaders of Free France, and played an essential
role in the re-establishment of the Republican order after Liberation in
4 Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001); Johannes Morsink, The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1999); John Humphrey, On the Edge of Greatness. The Diaries of John
Humphrey, First Director of the United Nations Division of Human Rights, ed. A. J. Hobbins
(Montreal: McGill University Libraries, 1994–98), 4 vols.
Introduction to the English edition xxi
1944; thereafter he headed the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest admin-

istrative court. Cassin was the first man named to the vice-presidency
(effectively, to the presidency) of the Conseil d’Etat without having pre-
viously served in it. Exceptional times called for exceptional measures,
and for exceptional men to carry them out.
This book is not the story of ideas separated from the dramatic histor-
ical conjunctures in which they developed. This is the history of a man
who lived the struggle to which he dedicated his life. His life was spent in
the struggle to move from war to peace through law, and his passionate
dedication to this effort was clear as his fist emphasized his words in his
acceptance speech in Oslo in 1968. It was no mere turn of phrase when
he said then that there are ideas for which a man is prepared to give
everything, including his life. Human rights were that idea.
We undertook this biography, first published in French, and have
adapted it for the English-speaking public and developed it using new
material not available at the time of its publication in 2011. We aim not
to present the life of a saint or a hero. Cassin was a man whose ideas were
rooted in one place and one time. He had the prejudices and presuppo-
sitions of his generation, just as we all do. But he formulated questions
the answers to which we are still seeking. Every generation must define
human rights in its own way and in its own language. René Cassin pointed
towards one way forward; it was by no means the only way, and to under-
stand his strengths and weaknesses, we must pause and reflect on the
contribution of the generation of 1914–45. This is their story, and its
achievements and its failures are with us still.
jay w i n t e r a n d a n t o i n e p r o s t
April 2012
Abbreviations
ACP Provisional Consultative Assembly

AEF French Equatorial Africa
AFN North Africa
AGMG General Association of War Disabled Men
AIU Alliance Israélite Universelle
AJI Jewish International Association
AM Modern Archives, AIU
AN Archives Nationales
AOF French West Africa
ARAC French Veterans’ Association
BBC British Broadcasting Company
BIT See ILO
BSM Office of Seized Property
CA Executive Committee of UF
CAC Centre for Contemporary Archives, Fontainebleau
CCOJ Consultative Council of Jewish Organizations
CD Departmental Committee
CDC Caisse de Dépôts et Consignations: Deposits and
Consignments Fund
CE Conseil d’Etat
CFLN French Committee for National Liberation
CGQJ General Commissariat on Jewish Questions
CHEA Centre for Advanced Administrative Studies
CIAMAC International Conference of Disabled Men and Veterans
CIP International Permanent Committee
CJM World Jewish Congress
CNRS National Centre for Scientific Research
CRIF Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of
France
ECOSOC Economic and Social Council
ENA National School of Administration
xxii
List of abbreviations xxiii
FAO Food and Agricultural Organization of UNO

FIDAC Inter-Allied Veterans’ Federation
FSJU Unified Jewish Social Fund
GPRF Provisional Government of the French Republic
IEP Institute of Political Studies
ILO International Labour Organization
IRA Irish Republican Army
NGO Non-governmental organization
NSKOV National Socialist Organization to Aid War Victims
OD Departmental Commission for Wards of the Nation
ONAC National Commission for Veterans
ONM National Commission for Disabled Veterans
ONMAC National Commission for Disabled Men and Veterans
ONP National Commission for Wards of the Nation
RAP Rules of Public Administration
RUP Universal Rally for Peace
SDN League of Nations
TA Administrative Tribunals
TP Pensions Tribunals
UF Union Fédérale
UGIF General Union of Israelites of France
UIS International Union of Aid
UNC National Union of Combatants
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization
UNO United Nations Organization
USR Socialists-Republican Union
WZO World Zionist Organization
Part I
In the shadow of the Great War

1 Family and education, 1887–1914
Telling the story of René Cassin’s life is more than an essay in the art of
portraiture. His profile matters, to be sure, but to do justice to him we
must enter into many other lives, for any biographical study has a socio-
logical and cultural dimension. In history as in painting, the character
of a man, in his individuality, always emerges from a particular milieu
to which he belongs, and from his family, his friends and his schooling.
To introduce you to René Cassin requires us to explore late nineteenth-
century French society, in all its complexity and diversity.
The family
René Cassin came from a family of prosperous middle-class Jews, whose
fortune in mid-nineteenth-century France had been made, apparently,
on a whim. Before becoming very wealthy, the Dreyfus family, on his
mother’s side, enjoyed a degree of prosperity in their family home in
Bayonne, near the Spanish border in the south-west of France. They
traced their lineage to René Cassin’s great-grandfather, Samuel Dreyfus.
He was an Ashkenazi Jew, born in Alsace in 1790, but drawn to Bayonne
as a soldier. He had fought the British at Bayonne and was wounded in
action in 1814. While recovering there from his wounds, Dreyfus met
and married Félicie Gomès, the daughter of a local Jewish family of
Spanish origin. The couple eventually settled in Bayonne, and had one
son, Simone Léonce. He became a textile merchant of modest means
and frail health. And then his world turned upside down, when he hit
the jackpot in 1856. He won the pools, or more precisely the Lottery of
the Congo, which made him a very rich man in one fell swoop. With this
money – 150,000 francs, then a considerable sum – the family came up
in the Jewish world of southern France, adding a residence in Nice to
their properties in and around Bayonne. His wife, Egle Nuñes, gave birth
to twin girls, Cécile and Gabrielle, in 1860.
In light of their father’s windfall, these girls became very marriageable
indeed. They came to the notice of several young men from a Jewish
3
4 René Cassin and Human Rights
family in Nice. The Cassins of Nice (René’s father’s side of the family)
had come to the town between 1840 and 1860. Their ancestors had been
residents of the south of France for centuries. The earliest traces of the
family appear in a thirteenth-century legal dispute in the Lubéron. There
were Cassins too in the Comtat Venaissin, until they were expelled in
the sixteenth century, and some who had converted to Catholicism in
the Vaucluse and the Gard. Some of the family claimed Italian origins,
tracing their lineage from Florence to the Piedmontese town of Cuneo,
but in later years René Cassin, recalling his father’s knowledge of the
subject, rejected this idea. The Cassins were French Jews, who, dur-
ing periods of persecution or difficulty, had sought and found refuge
in Cuneo in nearby Piedmont, and in the 1840s had returned to Nice.
René’s grandfather, Moı̈se Samson, was a colporteur, a travelling mer-
chant, who lived in Cuneo and plied his trade in Nice, where he later
settled down. René’s father Azaria was born there in 1860, just eight days
before the vote making Nice French.1
Then the family became French citizens, but in all other respects they
were Jews from the south of France, with an Italian branch of the family
not far away. One relative, Roberto Cassin, was a pilot who was killed
in the Italian Air Force in the Great War. His father was a banker, head
of the Roman Chamber of Commerce. Later, René Cassin met him in
Paris in the 1920s. During the fascist period, the fortunes of this part of
the family went downhill, and the survivors scattered.2 The French part
of the family was more fortunate though, as we shall see, the two world
wars and the political upheavals in their wake took their toll on the French
Cassins as well. These were Sephardi Jews, people who shared the rich
cultural traditions of the Spanish and Portuguese communities dispersed
after 1492.3 Their mid-nineteenth-century descendants were to be found
in every port city of the Mediterranean, including Nice. Already in the
seventeenth century, Jews in Nice established a ‘Jewish university’ for
the education of Jews from anywhere in the Mediterranean or beyond.4
There may very well have been a Rabbi Cassin in this period too.
1 Archives Nationales, Paris, Fonds Cassin, 382AP167, René Cassin to Gabriel Cassin,
31 Dec. 1949. Interview with Josette Cassin, 12 Aug. 2011.
2 382AP198, note sur la famille Cassin, 12 April 1972, p. 3. This was written by Cassin
in early 1972.
3 Josette Cassin emphasizes that they followed Portuguese practice in a Portuguese syna-
gogue. We use the term ‘Sephardi’ to distinguish these Jews from the Bayonne side of the
family, some of whom came from Alsace and had ‘Ashkenazi’ origins and practices. We
are grateful to Josette Cassin and her cousin Suzy Abram for their views on their family
origins and family life.
4 Honel Meiss, ‘Coup d’œil rétrospectif sur l’Université Israélite de Nice 1648–1860’, Nice
Historique, 622 (1922), pp. 88–119.
Family and education, 1887–1914 5
The maiden name of René Cassin’s paternal grandmother, Judith

Viterbo, reflects this trans-national past. She was born in the ghetto
of Nice ‘in the heart of the old city’, and married Moı̈se Samson in 1856.
After her husband’s premature death, she raised her eleven children with
the considerable aid and assistance of her extended family. René Cassin
knew seven of Judith Viterbo’s children, who were his uncles and aunts.
There were businessmen among them. René’s uncle Israel Cassin was at
the helm of Cassin et Cie Meubles. The sons of his aunt Léontine were
merchants of wine and all kinds of beverages; their firm was based in
St Laurent du Var. One first cousin abandoned the academic study of
the law when his father, René Cassin’s uncle Maurice, died in an automo-
bile accident. He became a local lawyer, and looked after the well-being
of his mother and brothers and the family company. Another cousin,
Ralph, made it to Paris and practised law in the Tribunal de Commerce.
His offices were on rue Caumartin. When René himself finished his
legal studies and came to Paris before the First World War, Ralph Sam-
son gave his nephew a helping hand and counselled him in his chosen
profession.
Another of the uncles in René Cassin’s early life was Abraham Cassin,
René’s father’s elder brother, who married Rachel Halph, a woman of
Viennese extraction. René Cassin wrote in later years that she brought to
the family artistic talents and interests not conspicuously present in these
circles. René said the same of his first wife, Simone Yzombard, whom
we will meet in a moment. This part of the Cassin family stayed in Nice,
until the final years of the Second World War.
This large family of nine children extended from Nice to Marseilles.
René Cassin’s aunt Fortunée married Honel Meiss, who served as rabbi
in Nice and then Chief Rabbi in Marseilles.5 We shall return to him in a
moment. The eldest of their children, Hélène, taught voice in Nice.
This was the family into which the Dreyfus twins, Gabrielle and Cécile,
married in 1884. Their family was very committed to traditional Jewish
observance. However, Gabrielle married a free-thinker, Azaria Cassin,
and her sister Cécile married Azaria’s brother, Benjamin, a more con-
ventional man. The brothers’ family was composed not only of observant
Jews but also of free-thinkers. Among those who stood apart from tra-
ditional Jewry, none was more insistent and assertive than Azaria Cassin.
Azaria was independent, assimilated, a ‘modern’ Jew unconstrained by
tradition and convention, as his wife’s family understood and practised
them.
5 Meiss, ‘L’Université Israélite de Nice’, for more on the history of the Jewish community
in Nice.
Azaria took the name Henri, as befitted a free-thinking up-to-date

Frenchman who was also a Jew. He was an energetic man, and had a
rebellious side, which made for a stormy family life. Educated first in
Nice, and then, through the generosity of an uncle who paid his tuition,
in the academy of commerce in Lyons, he lived a frugal life. He even
managed to earn his keep in the circus, on the flying trapeze.6 It is clear
he was a risk-taker, a part of his character which would serve him well in
his business career.
Henri Cassin did not settle well into the family firm, Cassin Frères
in Nice, and spent a year in Marseilles, during which he almost died
of typhoid fever. His robust constitution, it was said, enabled him to
survive. He was determined to strike out on his own, and did so with
great business acumen and success.
On the surface, the match between Azaria Cassin and Gabrielle Drey-
fus was a good one. But even then, there were doubts. Azaria’s entire
posture was pointed away from Judaism and the enclosed life of ortho-
dox Jews. Gabrielle Dreyfus was more conservative, and had more of her
Bayonne family’s Jewishness in her. And yet, this difference was hardly
unique. Millions of Jews all over Europe were facing similar choices and
similar conflicts. The couple were bound to feel the strains within French-
Jewish culture produced by their citizenship and their assimilation to the
Republican community on the one hand, and by their ongoing social
and cultural segregation, some self-imposed as Jews, on the other hand.
This set of issues was at the core of a number of literary reflections on
the difficulties imbedded in the Jewish condition before the First World
War.
Azaria Cassin and Gabrielle Dreyfus appeared rapidly to become an
integral part of the Dreyfus family circle in Bayonne. There they joined
an orthodox, traditional Jewish family, still observant. Their lives still
moved in the rhythms of the Jewish holidays and religious practices. In
2011, their granddaughters Suzy Abram and Josette Cassin both recalled
fondly the warmth of the benediction they and other children received
under the tallith, or prayer shawl, of an uncle, at the end of the fast day
of Yom Kippur. Josette Cassin retains an image of Cécile and Gabrielle,
identical twins, wearing identical clothes, praying rhythmically, facing
Jerusalem, morning and night.7 Holidays meant grand feasts, replete with
Marseillaise recipes of traditional Jewish pastries. These recollections of
6 Interview with Suzy Abram, 27 July 2011.

7 Interviews with Suzy Abram, 27 July 2011 and with Josette Cassin, 12 Aug. 2011. Suzy
Abram is the daughter of Félice Cassin and Raoul Abram; Josette Cassin is the daughter
of Fédia Cassin and Renée Crémieux.
family practices refer to the 1920s, but they capture the texture of Jewish
life in this family before the Great War.
In Biarritz, not far from the brides’ family, the two Cassin brothers and
their wives started their families. Gabrielle gave birth to Fédia in June
1885; and to Félice in August 1886. Shortly thereafter the family moved
to Bayonne, where René was born on 5 October 1887, in an apartment
above the Café Farnié just opposite the town hall. The growing family
then moved to rue Frédéric Bastiat, where René’s younger sister Yvonne
was born in August 1890.
For many reasons, both recently married brothers were unsettled in
Bayonne, and in short order they both decided to return to Nice with
their young families. Azaria, or, as he preferred, Henri, and Gabrielle
moved into their home at 10 rue de l’Hôtel des Postes in Nice, and
from this base Henri slowly built up his wholesale wine business, under
the name ‘Chais Olympia’, organized along the lines of what René later
remembered to be ‘the most scientific and the most modern’ design
possible.
The wine business boomed in this period, partly through the devel-
opment of the tourist industry in the south of France. The population
of Nice trebled between 1848 and 1908. Here was a very cosmopolitan
town, peopled by visitors from all over Europe. By the end of the cen-
tury, the city enjoyed royal patronage. Queen Victoria herself enjoyed the
waters at Nice, and came to Cimieux overlooking the Mediterranean with
a staff of 100 in attendance, and with tens of thousands, and later mil-
lions, of commoners in her wake. The local and domestic trade in wine
was one source of custom; the Mediterranean market was another. Henri
Cassin, and other members of the family, prospered in these years.8
Family life, unfortunately, was more disturbed than business life. The
rift had appeared right at the start of the couple’s life together in Bayonne.
Gabrielle’s father, troubled by the temperament, political and personal,
of his son-in-law, as well as his indifference to religious practices, was not
disposed to hand over the agreed dowry to his son-in-law. This would
have caused trouble anywhere, and it did here too. The removal of René’s
mother, father, and young sister and brother to Nice followed. In Nice,
away from her own family, though near her twin sister Cécile, René’s
mother Gabrielle lived what appears to have been an unhappy life. She
fell ill, and spent considerable time under medical care outside the family
home. Troubled wives took to their beds in many middle-class families,
Jewish and not, and the Cassin family was no exception. What personal
problems the couple faced remain obscure, but the outcome is not. They
8 Interview with Josette Cassin, 12 Aug. 2011.

divorced in 1910, a relatively rare but not unknown step to take at the
time, at least for families with the means to support two households. The
Dreyfus fortune made this step possible for their unfortunate daughter
Gabrielle.
The Dreyfus family had another property, the recollection of which in
later years provided René Cassin with many happy memories from his
childhood. In 1894, Simone Léonce Dreyfus purchased Rachel Cottage
in St Etienne quarter, then a farming district within easy reach of the
centre of Bayonne. Getting there from Nice, though, was a real odyssey,
necessitating four changes of train. This property included a working
farm, gardens and a fountain in its four hectares;9 in short, it was an
ideal setting for the numerous aunts, uncles, cousins and friends who
came there. At Rachel Cottage family holidays were spent, and the var-
ious cousins and aunts and uncles could enjoy the pleasures of family
life. René Cassin recalled his holidays there with great fondness. The
twins Gabrielle and Cécile each had a woman companion and servant in
attendance. It was, in short, a site of perennial sociability.10
After their parents’ divorce in 1910, the Cassin children, all in their
twenties, dispersed. René started his academic career, to which we will
turn in a moment. His elder brother Fédia started his commercial life
working in his father’s company, and learned the wine trade in Spain,
Sicily, Crete and Algeria. After the war, he left his father’s employ to
start his own firm, specializing in the bulk transport of wine.11 René’s
sister Félice married Raoul Abram, a young law student, and moved to
Aix. Raoul and René were close; they studied law together and were
part of the same social circle in Aix and in Paris before the war. Finally
the youngest child Yvonne married a distant cousin, Henri Bumsel, and
they moved to Paris where Henri served as manager of a munitions plant
during the First World War.
Félice and Raoul Abram had four children, who were orphaned during
the Great War. Félice was remarried to Emile Cahen, a professor of Greek
in the faculty of Aix-en-Provence. Félice’s father Henri was able to help
the family then and later. In particular, in October 1940, when, as Jews,
Emile Cahen was forcibly retired without a pension, and his wife Félice’s
eldest daughter, Suzy, lost her job as a teacher, the family was penni-
less. Suzy sent a telegram to her grandfather, which said: ‘Please send
9 A full description of the property can be found in the Aryanization documents placing
the property under a provisional administrator. See Archives Nationales, AJ38/4235,
d.355, ‘Aryanisation d’immeuble appartenant à des Israélites’, 27 Nov. 1941.
10 Interview with Josette Cassin, 13 July 2011. We are very grateful for her help and for
her permission to use her family photographs.
11 Interview with Josette Cassin, 13 July 2011.
urgently 8,000 francs, due to Félice as her dowry’, never before paid.
Henri did exactly that. It was not entirely an exaggeration when she
spoke of this help seventy years later, as typical of her grandfather, whom
she affectionately called ‘Grand-père Henri, richissime’.12
In sum, René Cassin’s family was composed of middle-class Jews, who
prospered before 1940. Before the Second World War, they lived rela-
tively comfortable commercial and professional lives during a transitional
period, one in which the older generation still followed the old ways, and
inevitably and at times bitterly came into conflict with younger spirits,
like Henri Cassin. Within the family, René’s mother still followed tra-
ditional practices, and lit candles on Friday night; her husband’s beliefs
and mind were elsewhere, much to the chagrin of his wife and her family.
It is uncertain to what degree this difference in religious practice con-
tributed to the breakdown of the marriage of René’s father and mother.
But it is clear that René, while siding with his mother in her conflict with
her husband, was both a free-thinker, not bound by traditional Jewish
observance, and a family peacemaker, both before and after their divorce.
Education
Cutting right across this generational divide between the more traditional
and the more assimilated facets of French Jewry were the fault lines
created by the Dreyfus affair. Proud of their French citizenship, these
French Jews, like all of their co-religionists, were shocked at the depth
of anti-Semitism which accompanied the arrest, trial, sentencing, public
degradation, imprisonment, retrial, investigations, scandals, and final
vindication, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. He was convicted of treason when
René Cassin was seven years old. His exoneration came when René was
nineteen, and about to start his compulsory period of military service.
Here was the formative political event of his early years. If anyone had
an indelible lesson, drawn from contemporary history, in what were the
rights of man, it was René Cassin, then a schoolboy in Nice and Aix,
excelling in his studies in both history and the law.
Anti-Semitism was part of the French political landscape, and no
one, either in his family or in his circle of friends and relations, could
ignore it. Closer or further removed, more or less visible, a venomous
cloud of hatred was there, and it was impossible to miss it. We do not
know if Cassin had to face the kind of insult which the young Albert
Cohen endured in Marseilles at the same time.13 But Cassin learned

13 Albert Cohen, Ô vous, frères humains (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 34–9.
very early that French Jews were both fully part of French society and
the target of the dislike and suspicion of many of their neighbours and
colleagues. Assimilation was an unstable achievement. The dilemma of
French Republican Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century was
to recognize the reality of prejudice and hatred, while superseding them
through Republican institutions. The resolution of these tensions was
found neither in early Zionism nor in a studied indifference to prejudice,
but in working towards a form of universal justice, from which Jews would
benefit alongside everyone else. Here is one of the keys to understanding
the life of René Cassin.
The lessons of the Dreyfus affair were deepened by the story of a
neighbour and local physician, Dr Ducellier. An army physician in Nice,
then a garrison town, he had had to deal with a major outbreak of typhoid
fever. He quickly realized that the source of the epidemic was an impure
water supply tapped by the town’s water company. He made his findings
known to his superiors, who far from complimenting him on his diligence,
sent him to the south of Tunisia. On his retirement from military service,
he opened a small surgery back in Nice. His fate was an object lesson for
René.14 Even non-Jews, his father insisted, faced injustice at the hands
of the army.15
René’s early education took place at home. In part this reflected his
mother’s wish to avoid the conflict between their observance of the Sab-
bath and the demands of the school week, extending to Saturday instruc-
tion. On the recommendation of his uncle Rabbi Honel Meiss, René
was tutored at home for six years, starting in 1895, together with his
brothers Fédia and his aunt Cécile’s first-born son Max, by a young
Alsatian-born instructor, Albert Bloch, who came from the same village
as Honel Meiss.16 These three young Cassins remained close throughout
their lives. In 1901, at the age of fourteen, René started lycée, and began
to study within a public institution of learning.
René Cassin, like his father, went through the Jewish rite of passage
into adulthood, the bar mitzvah. He was taught to read the passage from
the Torah and the Prophets by his uncle Rabbi Honel Meiss. But, as
for many other assimilated Jews, the bar mitzvah marked the end not
the beginning of a life of prayer. There was little trace of religiosity in
his outlook, then or later. He followed in his father’s footsteps, neither
denying his religion nor practising it on a regular basis. He retained warm
14 382AP167, ‘Biographie’, c. 1955, p. 3.

15 René Cassin, La pensée et l’action (Paris: Perrin, 1969), p. 181.
16 382AP167, ‘Note sur les liens rattachant à l’Alsace la personne et les activités de Pr.
René Cassin’, 17 Jan. 1957.
memories of Jewish family life in his early years, but did not participate in
religious services. His brother Fédia kept closer to tradition, and chanted
prayers at his family table in Hebrew; this was not the case with René,
who obediently followed his mother’s wishes that he would have a Jewish
education and would refrain from attending school on Saturday, and then
went his own way.
René’s uncle Rabbi Honel Meiss did have a strong influence on his
feelings about the absolute compatibility of his Jewish origins with his
Republican beliefs. Meiss had left Alsace in 1871 to avoid a life under
German rule, and in 1904 the whole family made a pilgrimage with
him to Mulhouse, Colmar and Strasbourg, as well as to his native town
of Ingwiller, where René Cassin learned much about the lives of his
ancestors.17
From age fourteen on, he attended the Lycée Masséna in Nice, passing
the first part of the baccalauréat examination in 1903, at age fifteen. In the
following year, then came the second part of the baccalauréat, in either
philosophy or mathematics. Cassin mastered both. His father hoped he
would study chemistry at Montpellier, where a friend of the family taught,
and with this training then return to the family wine business. Instead,
he enrolled in the University of Aix-en-Provence, close enough to Nice
to enable him to live at home at the beginning of his studies. In 1905 he
moved to Aix, and lived on a stipend provided by his father.
In the University of Aix, he forged two critical elements in his life:
his profession and (after some delay) his marriage. First he studied law
and history, excelling in both. There in Aix he came into contact with
young men and women embroiled in the conflict over church–state rela-
tions; many of these people followed Marc Sangnier and his movement Le
Sillon, matching faith with a devotion to social justice.18 He also met peo-
ple with other interests, in painting, architecture and music,19 including
a young artist and actress Pauline Yzombard, who took the stage name
of Simone.20
René and Simone fell in love; that very fact, and its enduring character,
shows that in one important respect René Cassin was as much a free-
thinker as was his father. While remaining close to his mother during
17 382AP167, ‘Note sur les liens rattachant à l’Alsace’.

18 382AP167, ‘Questionnaire à retourner à Monsieur Peyrade’.
19 382AP167, ‘Biographie’, pp. 4–5. This is a draft for Nice-Matin, corrected in Cassin’s
own hand.
20 In his testament, dated 31 July 1914, Cassin left his property and all his possessions
to ‘his friend Simone Dylta (Pauline Yzombard), living with her mother, the widow
Yzombard, near Marseilles, at La Valentine, in the Sablière quarter’. On 17 September
1914, he wrote to Simone: ‘I very much hope you find a small place in which to work,
either in cinema or in theatre.’
and after the divorce in 1910, and receiving from her a small sum of
money to help him along throughout his studies, René’s choice of Simone
Yzombard, actress, the daughter of a man who taught in a Catholic school
in Aix, showed affinities with his father’s inclination to move away from
traditional Jewish life. He was the first of his family to entertain the idea
of marrying a woman who was not a Jew. Later his father Henri remarried
a Catholic woman too. Gabrielle Cassin never got over her objection to
René’s choice of Simone; she was never welcomed into the family by
Gabrielle, either then or after their marriage in 1917.21
These were also the years when René Cassin performed his compulsory
military service. In 1906, he was called to the 112th infantry regiment,
and went through his military training in the Alps north of Nice. He
asked for and obtained leave to take his second-year university exam-
inations, and started the army paperwork needed to be trained as an
officer. These papers disappeared – through bureaucratic lassitude or
anti-Semitic prejudice? – so he remained a private soldier throughout the
pre-war years. Part of his service was as a medical orderly in a mountain
infirmary. There was nothing extraordinary about his military service,
which everyone in his cohort shared.
In July 1908, he completed his undergraduate studies of both law and
history, finishing both with distinction. He won all the relevant univer-
sity prizes in law, and, a portent of things to come, the national inter-
university prize for distinction in his studies in law.22 The next step en
route to an academic career was Paris. This success probably encouraged
him to pursue the law, which he understood as current history, rather
than history as the study of past events. But to have any hope of an
academic career in law, it was necessary to ‘go up’ to Paris.
Given the state of war between his parents, René saw it as his respon-
sibility to pay his own way in the capital. On arrival in Paris, he found a
flat on rue Corneille, near Odéon, the Sorbonne and the Panthéon. He
also found a job as sub-editor of the legal publication Recueil des lois et
décrets, known as ‘le Recueil Sirey’ after the man who had launched the
series in 1800.23 He also trained before the bar with Gaston Mayer, who
was a lawyer on the lists of the Conseil d’Etat, the court Cassin would
head four decades later. He was called to the bar, thus earning the title
of Avocat à la Cour de Paris, in 1909, and occasionally appeared as a
barrister.24
21 Interview with Suzy Cassin, 28 July 2011.

22 382AP8, ‘Notice biographique sur M. René Cassin’ [1932], p. 5.
23 382AP167, ‘Titres et travaux’, p. 1.
24 382AP167, ‘Biographie’, p. 5. The briefs before the Courts of Paris on which Cassin
assisted after 1909 may be found in 382AP3, file 3.
The central objective of the five years Cassin spent in Paris before the
war was to earn his doctorate in law, and thereafter to pass the exami-
nation for the Agrégation, or teaching qualification, which he needed in
order to begin his academic career in the law. He persuaded the eminent
jurist Charles Massigli to act as the supervisor of his doctoral disserta-
tion in law. The subject on which he elected to write first was in civil law,
and concerned the nature of reciprocal obligations in the law of contract.
What is striking about this subject is the technical and procedural, rather
than political, focus he chose. His thesis, submitted in April 1914, dealt
with the way contractual agreement, through the spoken or written word,
was based on a principle of reciprocity which had to be balanced on both
sides. The contract itself was based on the good faith of each party to
carry it out, so when one side failed to do so the question arose as to what
remedy in the law the aggrieved party had. On the face of it, failure to
live up to one side of a contractual obligation was apparent justification
for the other side to do the same.25 But this was not always supported
by the courts. Cassin dealt with the many exceptions to this rule and the
many complications arising in law from such circumstances.26 To clar-
ify the law, Cassin led the reader effortlessly through the niceties of the
German and French civil codes and the learned literature surrounding
them from the eighteenth century on. It is evident that he had complete
mastery of the law of contract in more than one European tradition, and
that he was as much an expert on Roman civil law and German civil law
as he was on French jurisprudence and practice. His thesis showed all
the strengths that would serve him well in later years: clarity of prose;
logical exposition; balanced judgment. It was a formidable achievement,
and the thesis is still referred to today.
French universities required doctoral students intending to teach in
universities to prepare a second dissertation, on a theme distinct from
the first. Cassin’s second dissertation showed his interest in comparative
law. He addressed the problem of the law of inheritance by examining
the role of the state set out in the recently revised Swiss civil code.27 Here
we can see the way in which his understanding of the law developed in a
broader, European framework, one imbedded in the scholarly literature
young men preparing for the doctorate in Paris were expected to mas-
ter. Both of his doctoral studies later earned him the highest accolades,
25 René Cassin, De l’exception d’inexécution dans les rapports synallagmatiques (exceptio ‘non
adimpleti contractus’) et de ses relations avec le droit de rétention, la compensation et la résolution
(Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1914). The manuscript of this book is in 382AP2.
26 Cassin, L’exception, part 1, p. 5.
27 René Cassin, Les droits de l’Etat dans les successions d’après le Code Civil Suisse (Paris:
Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1914).
including honours from the Académie de Législation de Toulouse28 and

the prize of the Saint-Paul Foundation.29 Now he was ready to take on
the second hurdle before securing an academic position – the Agrégation
examination. He intended to sit this examination in October 1914. The
war decided otherwise.
Friends
Paris before the war was the setting for Cassin’s formation in other
ways too. He was part of a student society, named ‘the Ihering Soci-
ety’, founded with appropriate libations in 1907, by third-year students
of the Faculty of Law in Paris.30 Its founders claimed it was entirely a
society of friends who abjured any political aims or ambitions. What they
had in common was a commitment to a career in the law in one form or
another. The name of their society was that of a German jurist, Rudolf
von Ihering, who – in their view – had laid the foundations both for the
modern study of the history and practice of law, and for the admirable
advances made in their civil code, promulgated in 1896 and brought
into force in 1900. The very name of their society testifies to the signif-
icant place German scholarship occupied in French legal studies before
the war. Cassin joined this group in the autumn of 1908, on arrival in
Paris.31
Here he parted company from a number of other young men from
Aix who had come to the capital minded to occupy less the libraries
and lecture halls of the Sorbonne and more the cafés and cabarets of
the city. Those who remained his friends included the future jurist Louis
Crémieu, Paul Abram, who turned away from business and medicine
to find his way as a literary critic, and others who came together for a
meal or a drink or a game of bridge at the Café Vachette. Bridge was not
Cassin’s game.
28 382AP2, letter from the secretary of the Toulouse Académie de Législation, 12 Jan.
1916, telling Cassin he had won their gold medal for his thesis, which he presented for
the competition of that year.
29 382AP167, ‘Notice biographique sur M. René Cassin’, 1932.
30 382AP198, ‘Juristes du XXe siècle naissant’ [hereafter cited as ‘Juristes’]. There is
both a typescript and a handwritten draft of this document in Cassin’s own hand. It is
undated.
31 His works were available to Cassin and his circle in French. His name was spelled either
‘Jhering’ or ‘Ihering’. See Dr Rudolphe d’Ihering, Le combat pour le droit, trans. from
German by Alexandre-François Meydieu (Vienna: G. J. Manz, 1875); L’esprit du droit
romain dans les diverses phases de son développement, trans. O. de Meulenaere (Paris: A
Marescq aı̂né, 1880); and La lutte pour le droit, trans. O. de Meulenaere (Paris: Dalloz,
1906).
In this circle he found older scholars and younger like-minded men,

including the son of his own director of research Charles Massigli. René
Massigli would go on to a distinguished diplomatic career. Through the
Ihering Society, Cassin got to know Marcel Plaisant, a future Radical
deputy, whose path in international legal circles and in the Resistance
he would cross in later years. There too he struck up a life-long friend-
ship with Paul Ramadier, who was his closest friend in these years. ‘His
corpulent form contrasted with mine’, Cassin later wrote, but they had
in common the comportment of provincials in the big city – Ramadier
had come from Toulouse – and a taste for endless conversation.32 It
was Ramadier who presented Cassin to Plaisant as a candidate to join
the Ihering Society, among other young men who had won the inter-
university prize in law before coming to Paris. Some were less to Cassin’s
liking. One individual, Jean-Paul Niboyet, was apt to take up whatever
position he had last heard discussed by his peers, and was an odd mix-
ture of ‘a good heart and weak character’. Much more remarkable, Cassin
recalled, was André Amiaud, thoughtful, reticent, and the brightest of
his generation.33
The meetings of the Ihering Society framed learned conversations on
many subjects. Ramadier spoke of the organization of Italy by Rome;
others took more contemporary subjects in civil, criminal or procedural
law. Cassin recalled being struck by discussions of the theory of own-
ership, on the problem of unpredictability, of intellectual property. This
last launched Plaisant on the subject of his doctoral dissertation.34 Mem-
bers heard their peers try out arguments which found their way into their
later publications. Sometimes they spoke of subjects not pursued further.
Cassin himself addressed the subject of droits de la personnalité, a topic to
which he never returned, but which intrigued him in later years.35
In June 1909, virtually every member of the Ihering Society had suc-
ceeded in passing the first set of examinations before the doctorate. To
celebrate, Ramadier invited Cassin and Plaisant to join him on a tour
of Germany and Austria, and in particular to Munich, where Ramadier
intended to study Roman law. They enjoyed the beauties of Basel, the
Black Forest and the Austrian Alps, en route. Ramadier introduced them
to the pleasures of Munich, which he knew well.36 They made a pilgrim-
age to Salzburg too. There Cassin recalls ‘Having always had a weak-
ness for artists whose lives were sad, I felt strong emotion on entering
the Mozarteum [le Mozarte] then just opened and less than it would
32 Juristes, p. 3. 33 Juristes, p. 4. 34 Juristes, p. 5.

35 382AP2, ‘List of possible articles or theses’, c. 1917. 36 Juristes, p. 6.
become.’37 There too he got to know Plaisant on a deeper level, find-

ing him ‘representative of young Frenchmen with a classical education.
He had a taste for eloquence. Cicero, Michel de Bourges, Jaurès, were
his gods. He was a Republican heart and soul, whose human charac-
ter seemed to rebuke ours, since mine reflected my bourgeois origins.’
Plaisant’s sense of the struggle for liberation of the urban working classes
informed his views, and influenced Cassin’s Republicanism, which had
developed in a non-doctrinal way, far beyond his father’s egalitarianism.38
The difference between Plaisant and Cassin was as much temperamental
as intellectual, and led to the choice Plaisant made to practise law at the
bar and the alternative Cassin chose to teach ‘the history and evolution
of our [legal] institutions’. The two men and their careers complemented
each other. They enjoyed Vienna, and rejoiced in learning there of the
fall of Clemenceau’s ministry, one which had acted rashly and intemper-
ately, in Cassin’s view, in muddying the already murky waters of Balkan
politics. Their strolls through the Bavarian Alps were memorable too,
reaching Berchtesgaden, then unsullied by association with the future
Nazi Chancellor of Germany. Running out of cash, Cassin returned to
Paris, but Plaisant continued to Geneva, where their paths would cross
two decades later.
His best friend was Ramadier, and their ties were deepened by a conflict
in which Ramadier found himself between two of his professors, who
resented the fact that he studied with the other, and acted so that he
would fail to win the prize which might have kept his eyes on the academy.
Instead, and perhaps inevitably, he moved towards the political world. He
worked as a journalist with Jaurès on the socialist newspaper L’Humanité,
and had the important task of editing the paper’s stories on foreign affairs.
Cassin noted too that, having recently married a young propertyless
woman from Rodez, Ramadier had to earn his living first and study
later. Prior to this marriage, Cassin and Ramadier shared an apartment.
Ironically, Cassin recalled, he would come to enjoy the hospitality of this
couple and his family after the war in Aix, when Cassin too had married
and was looking for a place to live while preparing for the final hurdle
before receiving a permanent academic post, the Agrégation.
Cassin had a hand in the advancement of another of his fellow members
of the Ihering Society. Maurice Picard was a particularly bright student of
civil law, who had studied in Algiers and presented himself as a candidate
for the Agrégation in Paris. The authorities, Cassin recalled, turned to
him with a question. Was M. Picard Jewish? Cassin replied in the negative,
and that apparently was enough to prevent any further obstacle to Picard’s
37 Juristes, p. 6. 38 Juristes, p. 7.
career. He flourished later, first in Lyons and then as Cassin’s colleague

in Paris, specializing in insurance law. He was, Cassin noted drily, ‘the
Pope of insurance’.39
Here was a society of equals, young men on the edges of the world
of ideas and action they were prepared to join. In this ambience, Cassin
thrived. To be sure, they were competing for future academic and profes-
sional posts, but they managed, perhaps through the conviviality of their
evenings and discussion in the Ihering Society, to find ways to learn from
each other, to support each other and thereby to forge lasting friendships.
It was at this time that Cassin and Simone Yzombard began their life
together. When René moved to Paris to pursue his legal studies, she
followed him. There they lived together starting in January 1910,40 but
did not marry before the war. This was hardly a unique arrangement
in Paris, but given the society from which both came, it did raise some
problems for the couple. It may be impossible to establish the precise
lines of family opinion on both sides about this liaison, but it was highly
irregular for the daughter of a good middle-class Catholic family from Aix
to countenance their daughter’s cohabitation with René Cassin without
the benefit of marriage. It may well have been the case that the obstacle
preventing their marriage came also from René’s family. A family whose
head had refused to hand over the dowry promised to Henri Cassin on
his marriage was unlikely to give its blessing to the marriage of Henri’s
son to a non-Jewish woman. René’s uncle Honel Meiss, as we have seen,
was a rabbi in Nice, and then from 1915 Chief Rabbi in Marseilles, and
a highly respected figure within French Jewry as a whole. Was it the case
that René’s father was on the side of the young couple, but his mother
was not? Perhaps. René’s two nieces, Suzy and Josette, both recalled how
much René’s mother was distressed by her son’s marriage outside the
faith.41 What is clear is that, on the eve of the war, René Cassin was a
young lawyer in training, with a common-law wife, living in the heady
atmosphere of the Left Bank in Paris, dedicated to his chosen career in
the academic study of the law.
It was there, with his brother-in-law Raoul Abram, that he heard
the news of the assassination of Jean Jaurès in Paris on 31 July 1914.
Paul Ramadier joined them in shock and horror. That killing seemed to
unleash the floodgates. General mobilization followed a day later. The
39 Juristes, p. 9.
40 In his personal reflections, dated 17 April 1928, René Cassin wrote that he asked Simone
to share his life from that date (382AP8). In his testament of July 1914, he said that she
had lived with him for over four years (382AP1).
41 Interview with Josette Cassin, 9 July 2011; interview with Suzy Abram, 27 July 2011.
Great War had begun. René Cassin, jurist in training, became René
Cassin the soldier, and returned home to join his unit.
The war brutally brought a halt to these rich, formative years. In 1914,
René Cassin was twenty-six years old, and much of his personality was
already set. Raised in a traditionally Jewish bourgeois family, a Repub-
lican and free-thinker like his father, he was sufficiently detached from
Jewish tradition to start his life with a woman who was not Jewish. The
young men in his circle were mostly law students, talented, Republican
and open-minded, unselfconsciously patriotic. Among them he found
a number of lasting friendships. Finally, the brilliance of his academic
work and his theses promised early success in the Agrégation examina-
tion in law. The path ahead to a distinguished academic career appeared
to be clear. The war did not change his professional trajectory, but it did
change his life. It is to that story we turn now.
2 The Great War and its aftermath
On 1 August 1914, when René Cassin joined his unit in Antibes, he did
not know that his life was about to change radically. The same would
happen again in 1940, during the Second World War. In 1914, he was
still a young man, though his professional training and education were
mostly completed. The Great War opened up a new path. It was, for him
as for others of his generation, a foundational event.
It was not only that this extraordinary experience, totally impossible
even a few weeks before to imagine in its immediate and concrete reality,
marked him indelibly, and above all, in his flesh and bones. The over-
whelming majority of the men of his generation went through the same
hardships, frequently for longer periods and in even more devastating
ways. Cassin was wounded early in the war; thus he did not go through
Verdun, nor the Somme, nor gas, nor the worst of trench warfare. Never-
theless, the war changed the course and shape of his life. Most veterans,
even the disabled men among them, tried to return to their previous lives,
as if nothing had happened to them. They again took up the plough, the
plane and the hammer, put back on their overalls and work clothes,
and set aside their memories of the nightmare through which they had
passed, rarely talking about it, even to their loved ones. For them the
war’s legacies were simple: on the one hand, it was the worst of plagues
and produced shirkers and shameful profiteers. On the other hand, they
never lost sight of love and the simple pleasures of existence and the joys
of camaraderie.
Cassin also took up his career again, but the war was in no sense
a parenthesis within his life. The victims of war were everywhere, and
their needs had to be met. Once involved in this effort, Cassin found a
mission, a cause, which led him into a lifetime’s work in veterans’ affairs.
Through it he gained a wealth of political and administrative experience,
and made a name for himself. These years were but the beginning of
a lifetime of reflection about the relationship between the state and the
citizen. Here is the inspiration for much of his own public service and for
the commitments of his generation.
19
A casualty of war
When general mobilization was announced on Saturday, 1 August in the
middle of the afternoon, Cassin was shopping in the Bon Marché depart-
ment store in Paris. ‘A rumour spread among the shoppers and the shop
attendants. This is it. The mobilization order was posted everywhere. In a
split second, the store was empty, employees left their counters like their
clients.’1 They had expected this and took the mobilization as a relief.
That evening, Cassin managed to catch an overcrowded train; onward to
the 311th Infantry Regiment.
The rupture was twofold. First his professional trajectory was deflected
into a very uncertain future. He was eager to take the Agrégation exam-
ination in law in the autumn. That would have to wait. Secondly, he
parted from Simone, the woman he loved. She was on a cure in Switzer-
land. He had left her on 31 July in order to return to Paris. The same
day he wrote a formal last will and testament, asking his family to look
after her.2 He sent Simone a banker’s order.3 But since they were not
married, she had no right to a separation allowance given to soldiers’
wives, legal or common-law. Nor would she receive a pension in case of
his death. Hence he insisted she obtain from their concierge a certifi-
cate of cohabitation necessary for her to gain common-law status. This
she found to be humiliating. René did not relent, and she finally agreed
to do so.4 By a remarkable coincidence, she made the application on
12 October, the very day René was nearly killed in combat.
The 311th Infantry Regiment was in action from early September
in the Aire valley, in Argonne, and in the hills dominating the Meuse.
This was the most murderous period of the entire war. To the east of
the decisive engagement of the Battle of the Marne in September 1914,
Cassin’s unit fought in the vicinity of the Meuse river near Verdun, in one
of the hundreds of encounters between the invading German army and
French defenders prior to the stabilization of the Western front in late
1914. This was war in the open, not in trenches, and entailed staggeringly
high casualty rates.
Private Cassin’s commanding officer recognized his bravery and lead-
ership, and promoted him to the rank of corporal. ‘I had the satisfaction’,
1 ‘Souvenirs de la campagne 1914–1915’, text in Cassin’s hand, written in 1915 while
recuperating from his wounds, 382AP1.
2 He wrote: Simone, ‘who has lived with me for four years, as my wife forever’. He asked
his parents and his ‘close friend’ Raoul Abram, husband of her sister Félice, ‘to look after
her, since the little I can leave her will be absolutely insufficient for her to survive for very
long’, 382AP1.
3 René Cassin to Simone Yzombard, 2 Aug. 1914, 382AP1.
4 Simone to René, 12 and 13 Oct. 1914, 382AP1.
The Great War and its aftermath 21
he wrote to Simone, ‘to discover that I was brave and full of spirit.’5 Later
on, he would say that he had learned that ‘on the battlefield, he had clear
vision of the field of fire and that he had a kind of leadership of men’.6
His war experience, though, was marked by an overwhelming sense of
solidarity with those men who came from all parts of French society. In
a talk broadcast by the BBC on 8 September 1940, the text of which he
asked to be placed in his coffin, he recalled the villages in flames in which
he had fought and his comrades who fell beside him:
I recognize you very well, Captain Woignier, Catholic from Lorraine with an
ardent soul, whose last sight was that of your native soil, and you, Vandendalle
and Pellegrino, without fear or reproach, whose blood shone as red as your
beautiful flowers. I recognize you Garrus, humble labourer of the hills of the Var,
you the game poacher and free-thinker, always ready to volunteer for dangerous
patrols, and you Samama, examining magistrate who, because you were a Jew,
would not accept a less dangerous position.7
If we set aside the rhetoric, the solidarities affirmed here are not at all
abstract: they took on the form of faces known, the faces of men who
died by your side. Here was a formative experience, one which marked a
man for the rest of his life.
During the night of 12 and 13 October, serving with his platoon in
the attack on the strongpoint of Chauvoncourt, two kilometres from
St Mihiel, Cassin was hit three times by a burst of machine-gun fire,
which injured him and most of his men. Controlling the wound in his
abdomen with his hands, he dragged himself to within shouting distance
of his captain and urged him to retreat, thereby saving the company from
encirclement. That night, he tried to get the attention of stretcher-bearers
by rapping his drinking cup on a stone. By chance, he was heard and taken
behind the lines. In 1959, when he was honoured with the Grand Cross
of the Legion of Honour, he received a letter of congratulations from a
doctor from Nice, who had been a fellow schoolboy there. This was the
doctor who provided Cassin with first aid in the casualty post. ‘Without
5 Journal des marches et opérations du 311e régiment d’infanterie, Service historique de la

Défense (Château de Vincennes), 26N747/1. Also see the letter of René to Simone of
17 Sept. 1914, 382AP1. In the same box, there is a letter from a lieutenant in another
company to René’s father, dated 16 September, in which he confirmed that in an action
on 7 September, ‘indifferent to danger and defiant in the face of gunfire’, he accomplished
his mission ‘with calm and extraordinary sangfroid’.
6 Cited from an untitled typescript, without date or author, but evidently written by
Cassin before his winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and possibly written for the selection
committee. This text, with three parts, of sixteen, fourteen and eighteen pages, may be
found in the personal dossier of Cassin in the Conseil d’Etat. This citation from part 1,
p. 3. CAC, 20040382/65.
7 Cahiers de l’UF, 377, Nov. 1987, ‘René Cassin au Panthéon’, and 382AP185.
these precautions, you would have rapidly succumbed to peritonitis’, he

wrote in 1959. On the battlefield Cassin had said to him: ‘I think that
I’ve had it.’
In his reply to the letter, Cassin recalled the casualty post, ‘surrounded
by the flames of nearby haystacks and shaken by cannon fire and by
machine guns’. He went on:
I managed to avoid unconsciousness, despite my loss of blood, until one of the

two Cortellazo brothers, stretcher-bearers, picked me up, still furious at the loss
of his brother . . . You examined me without recognizing me (on account of my
bushy beard) and having observed your face, as impassive as you could make it,
I read your medical diagnosis and I said it aloud. Happily, my wounds were not
caused by shell fire, as they appeared to have been, but by two bullets fired from
close by which ‘exploded’ or which spent their charges on and in my thoracic
cavity and on my left hip (the iliac bone which was broken) . . . My wounds were
very serious and permanent, and I count myself lucky, after long months of
hospital, due to blue pus [gangrene], to have been able to recover by wearing a
surgical belt with many cushions to hold together the many hernias I suffered
since 1915.8
Gravely wounded, Cassin was still conscious. The same day, he wrote a
note to Simone with a pencil, informing her that he had been wounded,
hiding the seriousness of his injury, though warning her that his recovery
would be a long one.9 The archives are silent on the suffering he went
through then and later.
He was evacuated quickly, contrary to the narrative he himself
recorded, and which his biographers followed subsequently. Admitted to
the hospital of Neufchâteau on 14/15 October,10 he was sent to Antibes,
where he arrived on the 16th, and had surgery on 17 October.11 He
8 Letter of Dr Allouch, 30 July 1959; handwritten draft of a reply, undated, by Cassin,

382AP105. In a letter to his captain from Antibes, dated 20 March 1915, Cassin spoke
of ‘the battalion medical officer Allouch, who is my friend’ 382AP1.
9 Note of a few lines, dated 13 October, 382AP1. The handwriting is unsteady.
10 Contrôle nominatif du 311e RI pour le 4e trimestre 1914, Archives médicales hos-
pitalières des Armées, document provided by Chief Physician Besson. These medical
archives did not retain documents relating to the 2nd Temporary Hospital at Antibes
before 14 November 1914.
11 In his ‘Fragments autobiographiques’, edited by Françoise Beer-Poitevin, in René
Cassin, La pensée et l’action (Paris: Ed. F. Lalou, 1972), pp. 194–5, Cassin said that
he was operated on without anaesthesia by Professor Olmer, for this reason and because
he had been wounded ‘ten days before’. Marc Agi followed this version of events in his
biography (René Cassin: Prix Nobel de la paix, 1887–1976: père de la Déclaration universelle
des droits de l’homme (Paris: Perrin, 1998), p. 35): ‘It was only on 23 October that René
Cassin finally arrived in Antibes, that is, ten days after having been wounded.’ Four doc-
uments contradict this version and leave no room for any doubt. First, Cassin’s ‘Etat
signalétique et des services’ states this: ‘Hôpital temp. 2 Antibes le 16–10–14’ (Depart-
mental Archives of the Alpes-Maritimes). Secondly, the Chief Physician of Antibes,
was very fortunate to have arrived so quickly at his destination. The

policy was to send to the rear the most seriously wounded cases, since
they were unlikely to return to active duty. Such wounded men faced
delays, because hospital trains did not have priority passage. Thousands
of wounded men died from gangrene – what they termed ‘the blue pus’ –
during this interminable journey. Cassin realized that his life was in
danger, and refused food. His arm and chest wounds were not seri-
ous, but the bullet which had ruptured his abdomen had broken his hip
bone, leaving numerous fragments and destroying the abdominal wall.
He underwent surgery on arrival, without anaesthesia, he noted, in order
to gain two hours of time, and he endured a second operation several
months later to remove the casing of the explosive bullet which had been
lodged in his hip.12 But these operations were not fully successful, since
there remained ‘a true traumatic hernia requiring that he wear a surgical
belt’.13 Throughout his life, in effect, Cassin wore an orthopaedic belt,
an encumbrance which he took to be more a form of slavery than of
infirmity.14
Cassin spent six long months hospitalized. On one side of his bed was
his mother; on the other side was Simone, who had succeeded in being
assigned as a nurse to the hospital where he was being treated.15 Their
relations were never cordial. René’s rate of recovery was not rapid, but
the pace of the medical and military bureaucracy was slower. He was
declared unfit on 7 July 1915 and sent on leave until 11 March 1916,
when he was formally invalided out of the army. He received notice of
this administrative decision on 23 March 1916.16 At the same time, he
was awarded the Military Medal and Croix de Guerre.
Cassin was one of the lucky ones. Frequently, wounded soldiers lan-
guished much longer in hospitals or in depots awaiting their medical
examination for being declared unfit for service. The medical commis-
sions reviewing these cases were overwhelmed with work. At the end
of 1915, there were only 17,000 cases formally approved as unfit for
effectively Olmer, signed the medical certificate of Corporal René Cassin on 17 Octo-
ber 1914 (see plate 10). Thirdly, 16 October was a Friday. A letter dated ‘Friday’,
bearing the postmark of 16–10–14 was addressed by Raoul Abram to Simone, to give
her news of René. Abram wrote that she ‘certainly knew he had been wounded’. He
reassured her and said René ‘had arrived yesterday evening’. Fourthly, on the same day,
16 October, Raoul’s wife, René’s sister Félice, sent a telegram from Nice Central at
8:52 p.m., ‘to Private Cassin 5th company Hotel Continental Antibes: ‘Be strong poor
René I am thinking of you and will possibly see you soon. Love. Félice’ (382AP1, files
on ‘correspondance familiale’ and ‘papiers militaires’).
12 To our great regret, we have been unable to use the pension file on René Cassin, which
Antoine Prost had consulted in 1970. Unfortunately, that file has been lost or destroyed.
13 Certificate of visit, already cited. 14 See his Diary for 22 Aug. 1940, 382AP27.
15 Agi, René Cassin, p. 36. 16 ‘Etat signalétique et des services’.
service. A system constructed in 1831 for a relatively small professional

army was completely unsuited for an industrial war in which hundreds
of thousands of soldiers had been mobilized.17
Unlike many demobilized and injured soldiers who were in a precarious
financial position after the military commission had met, Cassin had been
dismissed from the army with a monthly invalidity benefit. In addition
he took up his paid work with the Recueil Sirey, for which he edited a new
version of a well-known legal handbook, the Jurisclasseur. Nonetheless, he
shared for a considerable period of time the hardships and the worries of
the men who had been wounded early in the war. In addition, his sister
Félice lost her husband on 22 February 1916, Raoul Abram, René’s
longtime friend. Abram had died from an allergic reaction to an anti-
typhoid vaccination. He left four children. René Cassin was as vividly
aware as anyone of the way administrative rules worsened the plight of
wounded men, widows and orphans. His feelings of solidarity led him to
offer his services and his knowledge to the innumerable victims the war
continued to create.
It was in this context that he began his career as a professor of law.
Many professors had been mobilized, and they needed to be replaced
temporarily. We do not know whether it was the director of the Recueil
Sirey who then taught in Aix or a former dean of the faculty, who sug-
gested Cassin’s name. Both are plausible.18 In any event, from 1 January
1916 to 1 October 1919, he was named lecturer in charge of the course
in civil and penal law in the faculty of Aix-en-Provence.19 In addition,
he gave a course in the naval college in Marseilles during the winter of
1916–17.
Suspended by the war, the state competition for university posts
reopened in the autumn of 1919, and Cassin came third in the list of
successful candidates for the Agrégation in private and criminal law in
January 1920.20 Normally he would have remained in Aix, but his col-
leagues there had not made provision for such a post, which disappointed
him. He had other offers, and chose Lille, in which there were only three
17 On the material situation of wounded men, and the procedure of their gaining invalid
status, see Antoine Prost, Les anciens combattants et la société française, 1914–1939 (Paris:
Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), vol. 1, ch. 1.
18 The first hypothesis is that of Agi, René Cassin, p. 36, the second, that of Cassin,
‘Fragments autobiographiques’, p. 195.
19 Cassin’s personal file, Faculty of Law, Paris, AN, AJ16/5910. His nomination to Aix was
dated 24 March 1916; see also, Etat général des services, dossier personnel du Conseil
d’Etat.
20 Official notice of 13 Feb. 1920, Cassin’s personal file, in the Rectorate of Lille, AD du
Nord, 2T194.
professors remaining in the faculty. He therefore ‘asked to teach in the

faculty of law in the most devastated region of France’.21 His appoint-
ment started on 1 February 1920.
His choice was due more probably to his extracurricular commitments.
At the time he passed the Agrégation examinations, he had become in
effect one of the leaders of the Union Fédérale of associations of wounded
and disabled men (UF). In this position, he had to spend much of his
time in Paris. Despite the difficulty of the train service between Paris and
Lille, due to the destruction caused by the war, it was still possible for
him to balance his professional life and his commitment to the veterans’
movement. Until he took up his post in Paris in 1929, he divided his
weeks between Lille and Paris. From 1919, he lived in Paris with Simone,
whom he had married on 29 March 1917.
His baptism of fire, his wounds, his hospitalization, his shared expe-
rience with other wounded men, the loss of his brother-in-law, leaving
his sister a widow with four children, his marriage, his formal entry into
the academy as a professor of law: here are the elements of the settled
life Cassin led after 1919. At thirty-two years of age, his life had a shape
and a purpose. His values were the same as those he had held in 1914;
in this respect, the war had not changed him. But the war gave to these
values an existential meaning which informed the mission to which he
dedicated his life thereafter.
Victims’ rights: a prelude to social security in France

The emergence of a vast array of associations of wounded veterans and
ex-soldiers – what the French call les anciens combattants – was one of the
most significant consequences of the Great War. This veterans’ move-
ment is often under-valued. It played a major social and political role
in inter-war France. In the 1930s, there were three million members of
these groups – between four and five times as many men in veterans’ asso-
ciations as in trade unions. Democratic in its procedures, socially diverse
in its recruitment, with many white-collar workers, farmers, artisans and
commercial workers among them, and markedly fewer factory workers,
it was led by lower civil servants, schoolteachers, tradesmen, members of
the middle class and professionals, though not career military officers.
These were not militaristic organizations, and within their ‘defensist’
patriotism there was a strong pacifist conviction. The case of the ‘Croix de
21 Biography Conseil d’Etat, I, p. 5. See also ‘Fragments autobiographiques’, p. 200. The

ministerial decision was dated 13 Feb. 1920. AD du Nord, 2T194.
Feu’, a right-wing group, was a meaningless exception, totally outside the

overall veterans’ movement. Organized mainly in two large associations,
the UF and the Union Nationale des Combattants (UNC), it brought
together thousands of diverse associations, but its true strength came
from its local branches, to be found in between half and two-thirds of
the 36,000 French villages and towns. In many villages, the town council
and the veterans’ committee were the same. This movement aimed to
exercise a kind of ‘moral magistrature’. It had its material and moral
demands, to be sure, but its work stimulated its members to engage in
a wider set of reflections on the great national questions of the day. As
such, it was at the core of the democratic texture of France and one of
the obstacles to the development of fascism in the 1930s.22
Cassin’s participation in this movement dates from March 1916, just
a month after the death of his brother-in-law. He joined one of the first
associations of wounded men in Aix-en-Provence.23 Cassin heard of it
from his barber, who had lost his left hand; its president was an electri-
cian, the secretary a matchmaker. He joined it in this spirit: ‘I want to
help without outshining anyone.’24 In contrast to many other pioneers of
this movement, he had not suffered from the miserable condition of many
of those still with temporary invalid status; Cassin could live without a
pension. He was more concerned with the fate of widows and orphans,
like his sister and her children. But his engagement with these issues
was profoundly disinterested: his bonds with war victims were those of
solidarity.
Cassin did not participate in the very first national congress of rep-
resentatives of wounded veterans in the Grand Palais in Paris on 11
November 1917. He did take part in the Congress of Lyons, on 24–26
February 1918, out of which the UF emerged. He was named a member
of the committee for the control of mandates.25 In the last months of the
war, he emerged as one of the central leaders of the UF, and was elected
to its board at the Congress of Orléans in March 1919.26
He was not readily available, since he was teaching in Aix and preparing
for the Agrégation examination in law. By the autumn, he played a central
part in the daily life of the UF. He ran its secretariat and organized its
administration. His workload increased with the creation on 20 January
1920 of a Ministry of Pensions, in which the president and secretary
general of the UF were required to take responsibilities. When these first
two men resigned in July 1920, Cassin became secretary general of the
22 Prost, Les anciens combattants. 23 Biographie du CE, I, p. 3.

24 ‘Fragments autobiographiques’, p. 197. 25 ‘Fragments autobiographiques’, p. 197.
26 Après la bataille, 17 and 24 Aug. 1919.
UF.27 As the UF did not have the funds to pay its officials, Cassin served
for free. At the UF Congress of 1921, he was elected vice-president.
Henri Pichot, a schoolteacher, wounded early in the war and a man who
had founded the wounded veterans’ movement in the Loiret, was elected
president.28 This was the beginning of a long and occasionally troubled
friendship.
Cassin had not played a part in the framing of the law of 31 March 1919
which is known as the ‘Pensions Charter’. Marcel Lehman and Charles
Valentino, the founding fathers of the UF, had done so. Valentino, who
had dominated the Congress in the Grand Palais in 1917, had used as
a scale to estimate the relative disability of wounded men the 5 per cent
intervals adopted in the workmen’s compensation legislation of 1898. As
to the fundamental question of the presumption of origin of the condition
for which a disabled man made his claim, this appeared first in the law of
9 December 1916.29 Here is the basis of the law of 1919. It was no longer
the burden of the wounded soldier to prove that the army was responsible
for his invalidity, but on the contrary, the state had to prove that his claim
was unfounded. Hereby disabled men avoided the procedural difficulties
of establishing the exact circumstances of their wounds. As soon as the
army recognized a man as fit for service, any and all deterioration of his
health, even without a direct link to combat, was imputable to military
service. A tubercular man serving in an army office could claim that his
service was the cause of his illness: the army should not have taken him
in the first place. This reversal of the burden of proof accelerated the
pace of the awarding of entitlements to a pension. More important still
was the establishment of the principle that the individual came before
the state. Compensation became a right.
In the application of this law, however, Cassin played a decisive role as a
member of the executive board of the National Commission for Disabled
Veterans (ONM),30 to which he was named by decree on 16 May 1919,
together with Lehman, Pichot and seven other representatives of disabled
men’s associations.
The ONM had been created by an inter-ministerial decision of 2 March
1916, signed by the Ministers of War, Home Affairs and Labour. It was
charged with the coordination of assistance to wounded men as well
27 Journal des Mutilés et Réformés, 26 July 1920, executive board of lUF of 18 July. Cassin
was re-elected to the council in sixth place with 109,000 votes out of 119,000 at the
Congress of Tours (1920).
28 Congrès de Nancy, 15–17 May 1921.
29 Loi créant des allocations temporaires spéciales pour les réformés n. 2 (réformés à titre
temporaire).
30 This is the translation of the Office National des Mutilés.
as their re-education and their placement, by providing state financial

support to schools and other institutions dealing with these issues.31
At the beginning, it was a purely administrative body. None of the many
charities and societies formed to help the wounded was part of it; these
groups protested and a law of 2 January 1918 changed the structure of the
ONM to that of a quasi-independent public commission, attached to the
Ministry of Labour, and later to the Ministry of Pensions.32 The ONM
had local committees in every department. It was composed of sixty
members, including parliamentarians, higher civil servants, experts, and
six representatives of charities dealing with the wounded. Wounded men
claimed a right to play a major role in the work of this Commission, whose
action was so significant to them. They were assigned six representatives
initially, and ten more thereafter.33 As one such representative, Cassin
joined the executive board of this Commission.
In May–June 1919, detained by his work in the faculty of Aix, he did
not participate in the executive meetings. He was there on 4 July, but
came fully onto the scene on the 27th, when he presented a report which
impressed everyone in its discussion of the way the law of pensions had
to be applied. His line of argument was devastating.34 He denounced
the abusive power the proposed regulations would give to military physi-
cians, especially in the case of orphans. He pointed out how dangerous it
was to give a decisive role to agencies which would probably disappear,
or shrink, such as the seventy-three special centres created to examine
wounded men returning to service with an eye to setting their levels of
pension entitlement. But the key criticism in his report concerned the
procedures of pensions tribunals. The law had given to disabled men
the right to contest before a tribunal the level of a pension determined
by the army. The proposed regulation would institute a supplementary
examination by the administration before a man could go before the tri-
bunal. This would have led to additional delays. Above all, it would have
created a kind of administrative trial which had not been envisaged by
parliament and which would bring about the opposite of what parliament
had intended. The executive board adopted Cassin’s report unanimously,
31 Ministerial decisions of 2 March, 16 March and 21 April 1916, Bulletin officiel de l’ONM,
1916.
32 The ONM was assigned to the Ministry of Pensions by the law of 5 August 1920.
33 Decree of 4 May 1918, then Decree of 18 March 1919.
34 Minutes of the executive board of the ONM (Comité d’Administration) (PV/CA/
ONM), 6 and 20 June 1919, CAC, 20050206/6, register 2; 4, 18 and 25 July, and
register 3, report of Cassin, pp. 1137–50. Until the end of 1926, these minutes were
kept in large manuscript registers, with continuous pagination. Later on, each meeting
had its own file.
with the exception of the opposition of two representatives of the Min-

istry of War, and it charged Cassin, Lehman and General Malleterre,
governor of Les Invalides and founder of the General Association of War
Wounded Men (AGMG), to present these views to the under-secretary
of state for pensions. The cause of war pensioners would be strengthened
in this procedure, since the voice of the UF was supported by that of an
official state agency, backed by MPs and higher civil servants.
Cassin’s legal skill and his capacity to point out the concrete implica-
tions of abstract propositions are among the reasons for his increasing
influence in this milieu. In this period, when legislation and regulations
had not been clarified, the precision of jurists mattered. They had to
negotiate, for instance, with civil servants and MPs to draft the mea-
sures which would be acceptable to veterans’ groups, for example with
respect to places reserved for them in public services (the law of 30 Jan-
uary 1923), with respect to mandatory employment in private firms (the
law of 26 April 1924), or with respect to the free provision of medical
care, undertaken by the Pensions Charter of 1919, opposition to which
by doctors had hampered its application. Finally, there was a recurrent
claim: the need to raise the level of pension payments. Fixed by law to
the cost of living, these payments were eroded by inflation, in a period of
budgetary restraint.
Cassin did not have a monopoly on juridical expertise in the UF.35
He was not only a technician of law, but someone who could place his
arguments within a broader perspective. He intervened with force on
subjects of general political interest, notably on international questions
and on the relationship between veterans’ groups among allies and former
enemies alike. His precision and his jurist’s rigour mattered in the making
of his reputation, but his power grew as well due to his capacity always to
place debates within the general framework of the founding principles of
the veterans’ movement. Cassin became a leader because he could master
administrative detail and still abide by the principles of the veterans’
movement.
The first principle, from which all others flowed, was that wounded
veterans were citizens. They had rights. Here is a capital difference from
other countries, such as the UK, where many soldiers did not have the
vote before 1918. French soldiers were citizens, electors, and Cassin
proposed that widows or mothers of fallen soldiers should receive the
35 See the report of the Executive Board of the ONM on the proposed law on reserved
jobs in the civil service, by Pichot. PV/CA/ONM, 4 March 1920, CAC, 20050206/6,
register 5, pp. 2239–73.
vote of the dead soldier they had lost.36 A pension is thus not a matter
of grace and favour, but compensation for damage; it is a right one can
establish before a tribunal. This is why in 1921 Cassin insisted that the
government recognize that the first people to whom the nation owed a
profound debt were wounded veterans.37 War veterans were not in debt
to the state: the state was indebted to them, and this was a debt it had to
discharge.
Cassin’s report to the UF Congress of 1921 is a good instance of this
mix of juridical subtlety and insistence on principles. The discussion
was about the length of the period of gestation of war-related condi-
tions, entitling a man to a pension.38 There were infirmities triggered,
for instance by exposure to poison gas, which emerged only after a con-
siderable period. The UF Congress was divided on this question, since
it raised the subject of pensions’ abuse. Public opinion was shocked by
the way soldiers who had served in desk jobs in the rear throughout the
war received substantial pensions. Sensitive to these pressures, some del-
egates suggested that the principle that soldiers had the right to claim the
origin of their war-related conditions should apply only to those who had
combat experience. These delegates thought that, unless they made such
a distinction, it would be very difficult for them to get higher pensions.
Cassin found in the law arguments which registered this point of view:
the administration had the powers to revise abusive pensions, and a law
of 5 September 1919 enabled them to sanction false claims. The prin-
ciple, though, had to be respected. The distinction between those who
had fought and those who had not, he said, was not relevant. All damage
or harm requires compensation, and a pension is a payment for dam-
age endured, not a reward for having served your country.39 This would
be his ironclad stand. Cassin reaffirmed this position in 1925, when the
financial crisis led to calls for cutting the war pensions of those who had
not faced combat.40 His address was welcomed with a standing ovation.
The disabled had rights, and would not settle for charity.
36 Report of the Congrès de Tours, 23–24 May 1920, pp. 35–46. The various congresses of
the UF, from 1920 to 1936, were published by the UF, with the exception of the one
for 1925, published by the Journal des Mutilés et Réformés. We consulted these volumes
in the Paris office of the UF, and we hereby acknowledge their warm welcome.
37 This is the title of his long article in La France Mutilée, 30 Jan. 1921. He commented
on the ministerial declaration of Briand, on 20 Jan. 1921: ‘We insist on affirming that
we consider the wounded veterans, the war widows, the parents of our soldiers and of
our dead as the first creditors of the nation.’
38 Fixed by the law of 1919, this delay had been extended to 2 Sept. 1920 by the law of
11 June 1920.
39 Congrès de Nancy, 15–17 May 1921, pp. 126–334 with discussion.
40 Congrès de Bordeaux, 31 May–2 June 1925, pp. 55–6.
Here was the same principle underlying the combatants’ pension, cre-
ated in 1930. Cassin had supported this idea since 1921.41 He did not
refer to this matter after 1923, but in 1933, when the politics of deflation
threatened these pension rights, he returned to the same arguments: ‘this
is not a matter of the “generosity” of the state towards war victims and vet-
erans, but the just compensation for the harm an individual endured’.42
As those to whom the country remained first and foremost in debt, they
had to come before everyone else. Abuses had to be supressed, but such
action should not create new abuses in turn. The Congress applauded
the jurist who spoke up for their claims for dignity with such precision
and power.
Professional competence would have counted less had Cassin not been
also an active and devoted comrade. His simplicity and his kindness
undermined suspicion his standing could have provoked. In this demo-
cratic audience, to be a university professor constituted both a handicap
and an advantage: the university is a world apart, which can intimidate
those outside it. Cassin was welcomed because he never claimed supe-
riority. He never hid behind authority; he was never arrogant nor con-
temptuous; he always tried to explain his position, clearly and patiently.
His sincerity and disinterestedness were evident, and his passion was
contagious.
Furthermore, this work cost him dearly. You could always count on
him, and he thought nothing, for example, of making three round trips
from Lille to Paris in hopes of meeting members of the executive com-
mittee of the ONP (National Commission for Wards of the Nation).43
He gave to the UF much of his time: weekly meetings of its executive
board, meetings of the executive board of the ONM taking up the whole
morning every two weeks, other meetings, representing the UF abroad.
It was Cassin who installed the UF in its first offices in August 1920.
He looked after its everyday affairs. He took care of lobbying MPs and
Ministers.44 It was enough to fill an entire life. In 1922, on passing on to
Cassin the presidency of the UF, Pichot honoured him with these words:
‘every day at work, in the Chamber of Deputies, in the Senate, in Min-
istries, in professional and trade organizations, in the executive of our
UF, abroad, he has been the man who, by the clarity of his intelligence,
41 ‘La retraite du combattant? Oui. Et l’idée fait son chemin’, La France Mutilée, 3 July
1921.
42 Congrès de Limoges, 3–7 June 1933, report on ‘La défense de la Charte du combattant’,
pp. 46–56. Citation on p. 47.
43 Congrès de Limoges, 3–7 June 1933, report on ‘La défense de la Charte du combattant’
p. 210. This is our translation of ‘Office National des Pupilles de la Nation’.
44 Comité Fédéral of 9 Jan. 1921, La France Mutilée, 16 Jan. 1921.
his incommensurate capacity for work, the probity of his thought, his
loyalty and the strength of his friendship, enabled him [Pichot], to do his
own duty’.45
A third reason accounts for Cassin’s aura in the UF: his reputation,
his standing beyond the UF. He was someone who counted. Minis-
ters received him. For instance, just after his appointment as Minis-
ter of Public Instruction, Léon Bérard received Cassin to talk over the
wards of the nation, in February 1921.46 Leaders of other associations
respected Cassin. His fame arose in large part because of his partici-
pation in the ONM and the ONP. He met political leaders of the first
rank, including Lebrun, later President of the Republic, Ministers like
Chéron, Queuille, Maginot, as well as high civil servants, members of the
Conseil d’Etat, inspectors of finance. Cassin was noticed and respected.
Alliances formed. For instance, Cassin joined Chéron to make represen-
tations to the Minister of Labour.47 Leaders of other veterans’ groups
and members of the UF testified as to his influence, reinforcing it by
choosing him as their spokesman.48 He was considered as first among
equals, which enabled him to play a decisive role in the making of a
coalition of associations aiming to define and to realize common claims.
In one instance, a meeting of associations organized at the ONM ran
into trouble due to the opposition of wounded men and veterans. ‘Thank-
fully’, one participant recalled, ‘Comrade Cassin, who, we must say, was
held in great respect by members of other federations’, overcame the
problem.49
Cassin’s reputation arose also out of the way he conducted business. He
was accepted and recognized because he excluded no one. He was at pains
to take into account all points of view. He was a man of synthesis. For
politicians, he was a constructive interlocutor, a realist, who recognized
their constraints and their timetable; he was a man of compromise. Not
through weakness nor through complacency, but through conviction. He
not only admitted it, he proclaimed it. He was not a maximalist, or an
intransigent; on the contrary, he defended what he termed ‘transactions’.
At the UF Congress of 1921, as we have seen, he resisted strongly the
pressure to lower the pensions of non-combatants. True to his principles,
he said that the UF must not offer compromises, but must not refuse
them either. If Parliament imposes one, that would be a transaction. ‘We
know that transactions do not have the value of principles; transactions
45 Pichot, Congrès de Clermont-Ferrand, 4–6 June 1922, p. 23.

46 Congrès de Nancy, p. 210.
47 PV/CA/ONM, CAC, 20050205/6, register 9, 7 Oct. 1920, p. 4336.
48 See his intervention, PV/CA/ONM, CAC, 20050205/6, register 5, 6 Feb. 1920, p. 2009.
are the outcome of opportunistic combinations. We do not refuse them;

and we are criticized for that.’50 In an article published later, he affirms
this stand more clearly still: If the UF ‘does not refuse transactions on
questions of application and opportunity, she rests irreducibly tenacious on
questions of principle’.51
This acceptance of compromise, at times difficult to sell to the
wounded veterans, was but a part of a gradualist strategy. This is the
approach of one step at a time. Compromises are but steps; the points
for which one must fight are those of principle, which open subsequent
possibilities. Cassin and the veterans’ movement were able to achieve sub-
stantial results, because they were living in a parliamentary democracy.
There was a kind of osmosis between politicians and veterans. Deputies
and senators were open to their demands; it was often the case that the
sponsor of a law was addressed as a ‘comrade’ and that he participated
in veterans’ congresses. In a more authoritarian or more technocratic
regime, this gradualist strategy would have lost much of its effectiveness
and its credibility.
But, to produce results, this strategy worked only if it actually were
independent, ‘that independence which does not consist of rejection and
systematic criticism, but which gives both collaboration and opposition a
unique force’.52 While not necessarily sharing the political commitments
of activists, politicians would thus be able to accept their recommenda-
tions, when they did not express party political interests or objectives.
President of the UF, 1922–23

At the 1922 Congress, Cassin was elected president of the UF. It was
a moment charged with emotion: ‘When a giant like [my predecessor,
Henri Pichot] with his powerful presence, is replaced by a frail person like
me, you, Comrades, could very well feel a degree of fear. But, I ask you
to bear in mind that if my voice is weak, if my body is frail, still the flame
is alive.’53 This was the moment when Cassin devoted most of his time
to the veterans’ movement and when his influence was at its height. His
presence was especially marked in three areas: in international questions,
which we discuss in Chapter 3, in the organization of the structure of
the UF, and in the reform of the Commission for Wards of the Nation
(ONP).

51 ‘Le droit chemin’, La France Mutilée, 26 Feb. 1922 (italics in the text).
52 ‘Le droit chemin’, La France Mutilée, 26 Feb. 1922 (italics in the text).
53 Congrès de Clermont-Ferrand, 4–6 June 1922, p. 449.
The UF was no longer in its infancy. Its membership had grown to the
level of 250,000 veterans in 1922, and nearly 300,000 in 1923. From that
point, membership levels stabilized until 1927, when they rose rapidly,
surpassing 900,000 in 1931, and remaining there until the outbreak of
the Second World War.
The propaganda effort of the UF was up and running. Under Cassin’s
presidency (1922–23), one of the leaders of the UF addressed forty-five
meetings outside of Paris. He himself spoke at sixteen of them, and also
at six meetings in Paris, some of which were small gatherings, such as
one meeting of the association of the widows of the 17th arrondissement
or the veterans of the 3rd arrondissement of Paris. In one speaking tour,
Cassin appeared in Nice on 27 August 1922, and then at Grenoble on 31
August. Thereafter he stopped at one town each day: Valence, Avignon,
Marseilles, Aix, Toulon, from which he left for the sixth inter-Allied vet-
erans’ conference in Yugoslavia. He spoke in Trieste, Lubliana, Zagreb,
and finally Belgrade.54 In addition, there was work to do in reinforcing the
links between the central office and the UF’s departmental federations.
That was not all. There was the need to provide a permanent struc-
ture to the association linking the UF with other national bodies. And
the central office of the UF was growing. As he would do in London
after 1940 and in the Conseil d’Etat after 1944, Cassin created a docu-
mentation centre, to provide reference to publications and jurisprudence
on cases concerning the workings of the pensions charter. Cassin asked
departmental associations to send to the central office documentation
on the judgments of pensions tribunals, so that they could be classified,
and through a bulletin placed at the disposal of lawyers or of veterans
dissatisfied with the decisions of pensions committees.55
The efficiency of this documentation service enabled Cassin to present
to the UF Congress in 1924 a remarkable report on the jurisprudence
surrounding the workings of pension committees.56 The UF published
this report in a thirty-page pamphlet, filled with precise references to the
decrees of pensions tribunals and the Conseil d’Etat. Cassin edited and
signed this pamphlet, rich with practical implications for those concerned
with veterans’ and pensions issues.57 In his reports on litigation to the
54 Congrès de Marseille, 1–3 April 1923, pp. 13–14.

55 Congrès de Clermont-Ferrand, 4–6 June 1922, report by Cassin (just before his election
as president) on the subject, pp. 35–46. This documentation centre was allocated a
significant budget.
56 Congrès d’Arras, 8–10 June 1924, pp. 97–121.
57 René Cassin, Etude de la jurisprudence concernant les pensions de guerre et l’adoption des
pupilles (1924–1925). This brochure, published by the UF, cost 2 francs. The introduc-
tion is dated 25 June 1925, BDIC, côte O, pièce 14723.
congresses of 1925, 1926 and 1927, he extended this body of work and
published it in a new pamphlet. Precise, perfectly readable despite its
technical nature,58 these texts manifest a mastery of administrative law
from which the future vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat would profit
later on. For many in the veterans’ movement, the value of Cassin’s legal
leadership was priceless.
The national commissions for disabled veterans and

wards of the nation
Such was his work in the cluster of organizations responsible for vet-
erans and wounded soldiers, as well as for their widows and orphans,
in the Ministry of Pensions, created in January 1920. The minister was
directly in charge of the payment of pensions for disabled men, widows,
orphans, and parents of fallen soldiers. One commission was established
to carry out the re-education, job placement and other forms of assis-
tance needed by veterans, disabled or not. A second commission was
devoted to overseeing the welfare of war orphans, designated as wards of
the state.
Cassin’s standing in the veterans’ movement arose in large part out of
his participation in these two national commissions. The work of these
groups deserves attention they rarely get, since they developed a charac-
teristic profile of long-term significance in the subsequent history of the
welfare state in France. In 1948, Michel Debré, future Prime Minister,
noted that the work of veterans’ organizations received too much atten-
tion in the curriculum of the National School of Administration. Cassin’s
reply is worth considering in this context:
I would like to say to Mr Debré that he is unaware of the importance of the
Ministry of Veterans’ Affairs in opening the eyes of our country to social problems
which until then had never been addressed: the problem of free care which
anticipated social security; the problem of professional re-education; the problem
of accidents at work.59
There was, in effect, a profoundly original set of ideas in the policy

approach developed in this period by Cassin and other veterans working
in the ONM and the ONP. Here is one of the sources of what we now
term the welfare state. As in other parts of his life, Cassin’s ideas bore
58 See Cassin’s reports: Congrès de Bordeaux, 31 May, 1–2 June 1925, pp. 91–116; Congrès
de Nice, 4–6 April 1926, pp. 63–82; Congrès de Gérardmer, 4–7 June 1927, pp. 67–
90. Brochure de l’UF: le contentieux des victimes de la guerre: étude de la jurisprudence
concernant les pensions de guerre et l’adoption des pupilles (1924–1925).
59 PV/CA/ENA, 20 March 1948, CAC, 19900256/1.
fruit in ways not at all evident at the time of his leadership of the veterans’
movement between the wars.
Autonomous and centralized commissions

These institutions were above all public bodies. Their functions were
fixed by the state and therefore financed by it. Their operations and
expenditure were subject to rigorous public scrutiny. But these were
not conventional bureaucratic offices. The state created them in such
a way precisely to give them a degree of flexibility and a capacity to
mobilize private capital in their work. Many schools, homes and other
institutions had been created by groups of private citizens, patrons. These
charities could not continue without public subvention, but such funds
were not readily available from state sources. In addition, these services
were difficult to place in already existing categories of state activity, and it
made no sense at all either to do without these agencies or to limit them
to private funding.
It is difficult today to realize the upsurge of gestures of solidarity occa-
sioned by the war of 1914–18. Thousands of people gave, in part through
legacies, substantial sums or properties for the benefit of the wounded,
the disabled, the orphans, at times with specific instructions as to their
aims, at times not. An independent commission would be the ideal recip-
ient of these gifts and legacies.
Their status as public establishments required that these commissions
be financially autonomous. Despite the opposition of the Ministry of
Finance, the ONM was free of control from the start, since it was attached
to a new ministry, that of pensions, which had every interest in avoiding
such a heavy burden.
The ONP was attached to an established ministry, that of Public
Instruction, which had experience in managing a large number of schools.
The financial autonomy of the ONP was therefore more difficult to
achieve, though such autonomy was indeed realized in 1924. The fact
that the precedent of the ONM was positive helped give to the ONP
the same status. Cassin was directly involved in this effort, which set an
important precedent for future developments in the way welfare agencies
operated.60
60 See his discussion with the vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat, Hébrard de Villeneuve,
at the Conseil Supérieur de l’ONP, 30 June 1924, morning, p. 12. The minutes of each
session of this council are published separately by the Minister of Public Instruction.
They can be read in the library of the CAC, PO 3009 until 1924, thereafter at PO 3010.
We refer to these minutes as PV/CS/ONP, at an indicated date.
Financial autonomy was not only a means of daily management and

flexibility. The funds available to these two offices arose from two sources:
state subvention, and gifts and legacies from individuals or groups. With
respect to public funds, the state could decide its uses. The boards of
these offices believed that they had to be free to dispose of their own
resources as they saw fit.
In the case of the ONP, this was a particularly difficult issue. In effect,
the law of 1917 which founded the ONP charged it with the education
of these wards until they reached their majority. Cassin insisted that the
ONP help those wards thereafter as well. His demand was refused several
times, notably in 1923.61 Cassin would not let the matter go: ‘When we
are not dealing with state funds, but with our own resources, I state that
legally nothing forbids us to act according to our own lights.’62 Little
by little, therefore, his arguments gained ground and were very partially
accepted in 1927 by the Conseil d’Etat.63 The ONP exceptionally was
permitted to give subventions for education and medical care for wards
over twenty-one years of age. They could help them become farmers or
artisans.64 As the wards got older, this question took on added impor-
tance. Obstinately, Cassin pled for the extension of its assistance, for
the creation of grants for university study,65 unsecured loans or other
facilities.66
To Cassin, there was never any doubt that autonomy was one of the
justifications of the existence of such a commission. Autonomy enabled
them to innovate and to imagine new measures. In order to extend and
develop aid to wards of the state, Cassin believed that it was necessary to
exploit fully the margin of activity created by this autonomy.
Cassin realized that, to be efficient, the commission had to be strong
and centralized. He favoured effective central control at the departmental
level. It was particularly important for the ONP, whose weakness arose
from uncontrolled decentralization.67 This resulted in great disparities
between departments with respect to the proportion of wards adopted
and the level of help offered to them.
61 PV/CS/ONP, 10 Dec. 1923, afternoon, pp. 59ff. Knowing the end of the story, it is
interesting to note that Cassin was opposing the then vice-president of the Conseil
d’Etat, Hébrard de Villeneuve.
62 PV/CS/ONP, 30 June 1924, afternoon, p. 46.
63 Bulletin de l’ONP, 22, April 1927: memorandum of the home section of the Conseil
d’Etat, 8 Feb. 1927, Maringer president, Puget rapporteur.
64 Bulletin de l’ONP, 25, July 1928, circular of 14 Feb. 1928.
65 PV/CS/ONP, 26 June 1933, morning, p. 38. 66 4 July 1931, afternoon, p. 75.
67 Olivier Faron, Les enfants du deuil, orphelins et pupilles de la nation de la première guerre
mondiale (1914–1941) (Paris: Editions de la Découverte and Syros, 2001).
A third commission for veterans was created in 1926, despite Cassin’s

opposition. He supported its merger with the ONM in 1933.68 Then he
also approved of the merger of the ONP and the ONM in one single
body in January 1935, a step which helped realize their objectives. As the
wards were growing older, an isolated body would be at risk. This merger
took time.69 Cassin was personally involved in the organization of this
new administrative structure. His aim was to limit bureaucratic drift.70
Cassin believed too that it would be best to place in the hands of public
commissions much of the available funds arising from gifts and legacies
for the benefit of the victims of the war. It was legally possible to do
so. Scattering so many gifts would produce shocking disparities. With a
broad view of what was needed, the commissions were best placed to
use resources arising from public generosity. The will of deceased donors
was sacred, and no one could oppose legacies given to an association, as
long as it had the legal right to receive them, that is, that it be recognized
as a public utility. Cassin opposed giving this status to small associations,
in order to avoid inequalities.71 In addition he posed this question: what
would be the fate of the resources of such associations if they were to
dissolve?72 For these reasons, he did not believe the UF should ask for
recognition, even though its importance justified such a request. The
devil indeed was in the detail, but that was the only way to do justice to
those whose lives had been turned upside down by the war.
Joint control
Since the commissions were in charge of the material and moral interests
of war victims, their development concerned first and foremost those who
represented them. Disabled veterans were not deemed part of the domain
68 The Veterans’ Office was created by the Finance Law of 19 Dec. 1926, art. 101. Its
merger with the ONM was promulgated by the law of 15 May 1933.
69 It was promulgated by decrees of 2 Jan. and 8 Aug. 1935, but members of the new
single office were elected only in Nov. 1937.
70 Congrès du Touquet-Paris-Plage, 19–26 Apr. 1935, report of Cassin on the Office Unique,
pp. 31–7.
71 PV/CA/ONM, 16 Feb. 1922, on the recognition as a public utility of a charity whose
statutes did not mention how its assets would be used in case of dissolution, CAC,
20050206/9, register 19, p. 9191; PV/CA/ONM, 21 Dec. 1922, report of Cassin against
the recognition as a public utility of a small association in Marseilles, and positive
in the case of the important UMAC in Le Havre, CAC, 20050206/9, register 24,
p. 11931; negative for the wounded men of Dijon, PV/CA/ONMAC, 6 Aug. 1931,
CAC, 20050206/17, for the League of gas disabled, PV/CA/ONMAC 16 Feb. 1933,
CAC, 20050206/19. It is obvious that it was impossible not to give this recognition to
the large associations, but Cassin regretted that they received this.
72 PV/CAC/ONM, 15 May 1930, CAC, 20050206/17.
of public assistance, but they were considered rather as responsible citi-

zens, and thereby they had a claim to participate in the management of
these commissions. Here is a key point in which Cassin developed a way
to enable recipients of services to be responsible for their management.
In the ONM, this principle was established even before Cassin took
up his responsibilities in the UF. The disabled veterans’ associations
had already been given sixteen seats in the ONM, and the UF nomi-
nated Cassin as one of these delegates. That was not enough: veterans
wanted nothing less than parity. The executive of the ONM accepted this
demand, and its president, Chéron, saw it through.73
In 1920 the disabled veterans’ associations obtained half of the seats
in the ONM and its departmental structures.74 At Cassin’s suggestion,
representatives at the departmental level would be elected by local asso-
ciations. At the central level, they would be elected by delegates from
the departments. Such elections were held in May 1922, and Cassin
was elected to the ONM.75 The same democratic process was adopted
in 1926 for the Veterans’ Commission as well. Joint control was a
reality.
For the ONP, things were not so simple as for the ONM, and for
two reasons. In the case of the ONP, joint control needed a law, which
requires a longer process of gestation than does a decree. In effect, the law
of 27 July 1917 had defined precisely the composition of its central and
departmental structures, and this law was difficult to change. Secondly,
the care of wards was in the hands of charities, which contested the
right of veterans to oversee the education and care of these wards of
the nation. The Conseil Supérieur of the ONP had been set up by the
law of 1917 and representatives of charities had a significant number
of seats, the diminution of the number of which they resented. The
veterans’ argument was that the overwhelming majority of wards lived
within families of war victims, and not in institutions. This argument
was not strong enough to persuade the members of the ONP, higher civil
73 PV/CA/ONM, 15 April 1920, CAC, 20050206/6, register 6, pp. 2.577ff. Cassin sup-
ported this position. One month later, Chéron proposed and the executive board
approved a reform of its structure based on parity between members appointed by
the government and those elected by the veterans’ organizations (CAC, 20050206/7,
register 7, 3 June 1920, p. 2894). This reform was voted by the plenary assembly of
the ONM on 10 June. The decree of 20 October 1920 decided the ONM would be
composed of eighty members, forty of these being elected by veterans’ associations.
74 Decree of 20 Oct. 1920.
75 Cassin’s report and discussion of the proposed decree organizing elections:
PV/CA/ONM, 8 Dec. 1921, CAC, 20050206/8, register 16, pp. 8837–54; decree of
10 Jan. 1922. After the departmental elections, national elections took place on 21 May
1922. Cassin was elected in the twenty-first place with 129 votes out of 176 (Bulletin de
l’ONM, April 1922, p. 373 and June 1922, p. 584).
servants and representatives of charities to enlarge the representation of

the associations of wounded men. The adoption of a new law giving them
a larger place than the charities was highly problematic, and had little
chance to succeed.
Cassin and the UF insisted, though, on joint control in the ONP.76
They also criticized its record. Many children who fulfilled the conditions
required for being ‘adopted’ as wards of the nation had not yet been
recognized as such.77 The proportion of wards of the nation varied from
department to department. The law was interpreted in diverse ways by
local tribunals. For these reasons, Parliament debated a modification of
the law on wards of the nation, but other subjects took precedence. For
Cassin and the UF, the ONP would fail in its mission if representatives
of war victims could not put pressure from within on it.
The situation remained at a stalemate until January 1921 when a
spokesman for the wards of the nation, Léon Bérard, became Minis-
ter of Public Instruction who had responsibility for the Commission.
Cassin persuaded him to amend a bill in discussion in order to include
an article giving better representation of the veterans’ associations in the
ONP.78
Two objections were raised, which Cassin had to answer. The first
pointed out that there were insufficient funds set aside for certain arti-
cles in the proposed law. Cassin replied that many years of debate would
be needed to succeed in obtaining the necessary funds, and during this
period the ONP would not fulfil its mission. The second objection crit-
icized the tiny representation of veterans in the ONP: out of 130 places
on the Conseil Supérieur, only eighteen would be given to veterans’
delegates,79 and twelve to those of charities. In a spirit of compromise,
Cassin accepted this proposal, but in return put a new question: that of
the timing of the division of responsibilities in the new ONP. The elec-
tion of representatives of veterans’ associations would take time, while
the naming of representatives of charities would be immediate. There-
fore, in order that the veterans would be able to play their proper role,
76 Cassin’s statements in CA/ONM, 29 Aug. 1919 (CAC, 20050206/6, register 3, p. 1210).

His position is set out in ‘Les premiers créanciers de la nation’, La France Mutilée,
30 Jan. 1921.
77 The children whose fathers had died in the war, but also those of veterans unable to care
for them, were all eligible for the status of being wards of the state, but their families
had to request that their children be given this status.
78 La France Mutilée, 6 Feb.1921, ‘Groupez-vous pour les pupilles de la nation’.
79 Twelve elected by a body formed of veterans designed by departmental structures, six
chosen by the ONM. For details on this issue, see Antoine Prost, ‘Ils ont des droits sur
nous’, in Jean-François Muracciole and Frédéric Rousseau (eds.), Combats. Hommage
à Jules Maurin (Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur, 2010), pp. 369–80.
it would be necessary to await their election before allocating different

posts within the ONP.80
Cassin won this point. The parliamentary debate, however, was by no
means over. True to his gradualist strategy, Cassin insisted that the law be
adopted as it was written, since the ‘indispensable key’, the representation
of the veterans’ associations, had been achieved. To be sure, the text
was not ideal, but once adopted it could be improved.81 To Cassin, the
passage of the law of 26 October 1922 was a great success: the associations
of disabled men and veterans – the pairing of which he supported – were
represented in the numbers approved by the UF in the High Council of
the ONP.
The morning of 29 June 1923, Cassin and eleven other representatives
of veterans’ associations entered this High Council. Five – including two
women – were members of the UF. From this very first meeting, Cassin
took the lead. The first step was to elect supplementary members, among
them six women working in the care of the orphans. Cassin successfully
nominated a widow from Nancy in place of the woman proposed by the
board. For the places reserved for two mothers and two fathers of wards,
his nominees were elected. In addition, he spoke forcefully in favour of
a propaganda effort and for the enlargement of their work to include
the 200,000 orphans not yet adopted. The departmental committees of
the ONP had to ask that the mothers of war orphans nominate them as
wards. It was evident that there was a new dynamism at work in the High
Council of the Commission.82
That afternoon, nominated by Pichot, Cassin was elected one of the
vice-presidents of the Commission by fifty out of fifty-eight votes.83 He
proposed, and the Council approved, that the Minister of Justice send
to public prosecutors a circular to speed up the adoption of orphans.
Cassin dissented from the position of the then head of the Conseil d’Etat,
Hébrard de Villeneuve, who chaired the permanent section of the ONP,
on the question of the adoption of the children of disabled veterans
and on the relative positions of the ministry and the civil courts on this
matter.84 The next day, another vice-president of the High Council of
80 La France Mutilée, 13 Feb. 1921, ‘Pour les pupilles de la nation’; 20 Feb., ‘Les pupilles
de la nation’.
81 La France Mutilée, 10 July, 2 Oct., 11 Dec. 1921; 8 Jan., 18 June, 22 Oct. 1922.
82 Bulletin Officiel de l’ONM, Procès-verbal du Conseil Supérieur, 1923, CAC, bib-
liothèque, PO 3009, p. 9.
83 Bulletin Officiel de l’ONM, Procès-verbal du Conseil Supérieur, 1923, CAC,
bibliothèque, PO 3009, p. 24. Ex-officio, the president was the Minister of Public
Instruction.
the ONP asked Cassin to chair the meeting. He took the chair, to general
applause.85
For the UF, the presence of representatives of war victims in the High
Council of the ONP constituted a recognition of their competence as
well as of their moral standing:
Our colleagues on the High Council saw rapidly that the warmth and strength
of our convictions and interventions was not our only feature. Our knowledge of
the issues at stake, and our ardent will to end injustice and to keep the children
of our dead brothers out of clan rivalries and of political discussions was plainly
evident.86
Cassin at this point was the uncontested leader of a team which intended
to provide a new impulse to the work of the Commission. His lead-
ership is so evident that many people spoke of him as president of
the ONP, though he remained only one of its vice-presidents.87 For
Cassin, this was recognition of the highest order. When we survey the
tangled web of the history of the provision for the victims of the 1914–
18 war, it is to these obscure corners of the bureaucracy that we must
turn.
The struggle for joint control continued, though without success.
There were several proposals; all failed. In 1932, the issue was taken
up again. Cassin insisted that parity was a pledge of dynamism and uni-
formity. He raised this point with the then head of the Conseil d’Etat,
Maringer, who had succeeded Hébrard de Villeneuve as president of the
High Council of the ONP. He cited the discussions he had had ten years
before with Hébrard. Cassin had given up joint control in order to show
the good will of veterans’ associations, which in return were assured of
being always represented in the executive committees of the departmen-
tal structures of the ONP. Occasionally, however, in some departments,
they were excluded from these bodies. He closed by asking Maringer to
change his position, on the grounds not of pure law, but of solidarity.88
The merger of the ONP in the single Commission put an end to this
debate.
Substantial political skill and administrative competence were the
requirement for effective participation in the work of these Commissions.
Cassin accepted a minority representation in the ONP in 1922, because

86 ‘Les représentants des victimes de la guerre au Conseil Supérieur des pupilles de la
nation’, La France Mutilée, 15 July 1923.
87 The other vice-presidents were the Rector of the University of Paris, the Baroness
Murat-Lejeune, and one representative of the trade unions.
88 Conseil Supérieur, 4 July 1932, afternoon, pp. 48ff.
in his eyes there were too few veteran activists able to do the job, and
therefore he insisted that the veterans had to cultivate future delegates.
In his strategy, there were no places for amateurs or for dilettantes. ‘We
have won parity in the ONM’, he said to his comrades, because we have
shown that ‘only our wounded comrades assured the workings of the
machine’.89 It is rare, even today, that the disabled control the workings
of the public bodies charged with helping them. Cassin helped avoid that
deficit of democracy that turns most bureaucracies into impenetrable
obstacles to those with whose assistance they are charged.
Veterans’ representatives had to respect the standards of public service.
Cassin criticized public authorities for ‘ignoring how much our organi-
zations, which perfectly recognize the general interest, differ from those
organizations which do not do so, or which do so to a lesser degree’.90
As a general statement, this claim is open to doubt. But it does express
clearly Cassin’s outlook. Throughout his life, he believed that citizens
had a right to participate in policy making, and that such a right implied
that they had obligations too.
Increasing influence
In 1923, Cassin passed on the presidency of the UF to Pichot, and
devoted henceforth his energy and his talents to making the veterans’
movement partners in the struggle for international peace. Turning to
the Minister of Pensions, Maginot, while handing over the platform to
him in the UF Congress of 1923, he summed up his aim:
We are well aware that we are neither dupes nor utopians. We are well aware that
we fulfil our duty as Frenchmen and as human beings at one and the same time.
(Applause.) We can express simply everything that we say, that we ask and that
we do. We demand only ‘our right to reparation, all our rights, and nothing but
our rights’. And on the same grounds, this is what France should demand of
other nations: she should speak as we do: ‘I want my rights, I want nothing but
my rights, but I want all my rights.’ (Long applause.)91
Let us consider the burdens this varied public life placed on Cassin’s
shoulders. In the 1920s, Cassin had to meet his international obligations,
his work for the Commissions, his duties as a leader of the UF, and his
teaching responsibilities in Lille three days a week. How did he carry out
these many roles at one and the same time?
89 Congrès de Nancy, p. 210. 90 Congrès de Nancy, p. 30.

91 Congrès de Marseille, 1–3 April 1923, p. 550.
Professor of law
Cassin was well aware of this difficulty. In 1928, he mulled over this mat-
ter in a handwritten self-interrogation. For four years, he had considered
adding an additional dimension to his life – that of an elected political
figure. ‘I am’, he said, ‘in a complex and crushing situation, difficult to
manage due to the multiplicity of domains in which I have to defend my
position.’ Furthermore, he was a man alone, and regretted it:
What a burden to be alone? I do not even have in my surroundings a single

possible partner: such as a secretary, a trusted friend etc.: no patron, neither in
politics nor in the faculty nor in the courts. Everything by myself, having to work
hard and without anyone to help me to avoid errors. It is hard at times to be
alone.92
Simone was unable to help him. To him, she was ‘dead set against sharing
effectively the responsibilities and obligations which come to me’. He
wanted to preserve his marriage, but feared endangering it by maintaining
‘outside of it, a life in which she does not want to participate’.93 Having
accepted so many commitments, he had to make choices.
His professional responsibilities were clear. He fully accepted the duties
of a faculty professor at Lille, and then in Paris, where he was elected
professor in 1928. He took up his new post on 1 March 1929.94 In a
memorandum he wrote for himself, in order to answer objections to his
candidacy, he stressed, among other points, that he did not appear at
the courts: ‘He appeared in court only six times in sixteen years – three
times in the last seven years.’ He went on: ‘Cassin never streamlined his
courses, nor suspended them, nor reduced his teaching hours on account
of any external work. Having the most teaching obligations in Lille, he
had made it a matter of honour never to cite for his advantage or use as
an excuse his work outside the faculty.’95
Self-serving perhaps, but sincere and true, as his record confirms. To
his formal obligations, he added from 1922 supplementary lectures on
comparative civil law or on international private law for doctoral students.
92 Manuscript of six handwritten pages, untitled, dated 17 April 1928, 382AP8.

93 Manuscript of six handwritten pages, untitled, dated 17 April 1928, 382AP8 (under-
lining in the original).
94 Decree of 11 March 1929 naming him ‘Professeur agrégé’, while he had been Professor
of the 2nd class in Lille. In March 1930 he was named ‘Professeur sans chaire’, then
Professor of Civil Procedure on 1 Oct. 1931. On 1 Oct. 1933, his professorship was
transferred to the Chair of Civil Law. He was promoted Professor, in the 1st class, on
1 Jan. 1938. Dossier personnel de la Faculté de Droit de Paris, AJ16/5910.
95 ‘Pointes formulées contre la candidature Cassin et réponse’, handwritten document of
four pages, undated [1928], 382AP198. Underlined in the original.
In these lectures he probably developed the ideas he would present in

1930 to the Academy of International Law in The Hague. The reports
of the deans and then the rectors in Lille, G. Lyon and A. Châtelet, were
particularly full of praise, and Châtelet insisted on the need to promote
Cassin, arguing that he was one of the most sought-after professors for
advising doctoral students.96 He never sacrificed his teaching due to
other obligations. Once, when the High Council of the ONP decided to
extend its meeting by an additional day, he demurred, saying that ‘he was
among those who had the painful obligation to take the train to resume
their work’.97
In Paris, his career developed along familiar lines. Every time a chair
was vacated, permutations occurred in the faculty. The most desir-
able chairs were those responsible for first-year students, for whom
mimeographed lectures yielded a substantial income to the authors.
New faculty members taught the rest; the idea of specialization was only
broadly respected. Cassin then taught third-year students and doctoral
candidates fiscal law, a subject remote from his central interests. Only
in 1933 was he permitted to teach civil law to first-year students. In his
doctoral seminar, he taught the law of obligations, the subject of his own
two doctoral theses. Professors had other duties too, and Cassin took
them very seriously. For instance, in May 1940, in the midst of the crisis,
he still found time to correct examination scripts and to return them to
the secretary of the faculty.98 His was a heavy burden.
Though Cassin never sacrificed his teaching to fulfil his other com-
mitments, he neglected necessarily his professional research and publi-
cations. He bitterly regretted it. Referring in 1928 to the gratification
scientific work provides, he noted in parenthesis, ‘I feel all that is lost’,
and furthermore, that he had given up writing extended juridical texts.99
In the autobiographical note he provided for consideration by the Nobel
Peace Prize committee, he portrayed himself as ‘having reduced, then
having abandoned his professional publications in civil law’.100 In effect,
the innovative juridical discussion he provided about the decisions of
pensions tribunals did not appear in academic journals. After having
written 150 pages on obligations in 1925–26 for the sixth volume of the
Traité pratique de droit civil, a reference work edited by Planiol, his only
important juridical publication was the series of lectures he gave in the
Academy of International Law in The Hague in 1930. These lectures did
96 Personal file of Cassin, rectorat de Lille, AD du Nord, 2T194.

97 16 Dec. 1925, afternoon. Cassin was absent the following day.
98 Les hommes partis de rien (Paris: Plon, 1974), p. 21.
99 Handwritten manuscript of 17 April 1928, cited above.
100 Biographie du Conseil d’Etat I, p. 11.
not appear as a book in France.101 The leaders in the field of civil law in
France were Esmein and Ripert, the latter being the future dean of the
faculty of law in Paris. His anti-Semitism was well known to Cassin,102
as was his role later on as Minister of Public Instruction under the Vichy
regime. Cassin was their equal as a jurist, but he chose not to compete
with them in the academic field.
The UF and the National Commission for Disabled Veterans

(ONM)
In the veterans’ world, Cassin remained totally committed to the UF. He
was re-elected to the executive each year in the UF Congress with a high
vote. He regularly attended meetings of the board and the executive com-
mittee of the UF. He wrote many articles, in its special edition of Journal
des Mutilés as he did later in Les Cahiers de l’UF. He represented the
executive in departmental congresses and spoke readily at UF meetings
in Paris and the provinces. He worked hard to inscribe veterans’ associa-
tions in the peace movement, and recognized the importance therein of
not cutting himself off from the rank and file of the UF.
Within the UF executive, his role was that of a trusted counsellor,
whose advice was not always followed. The core of his interventions con-
cerned the jurisprudence of pensions and the state of international affairs.
Aside from speaking on these two subjects, he intervened repeatedly on
the need to avoid any compromise on the right of reparation and on the
work of the Commissions, to which he was very devoted. He limited,
nevertheless, the time he spent on UF affairs.
The daily work of the ONM was heavy. Its executive committee had
huge responsibilities, since it dealt with the distribution of state subsidies
for schools of re-education, departmental committees and so on, aside
from pensions. It controlled their budgets, organization and personnel. It
looked after dozens of schools, old age and disabled pensioners’ homes,
and sanatoria. It reviewed the accounts of departmental committees and
the institutions it supported. It distributed thousands of sewing machines
to war widows. It provided loans, at little or no interest, for the purchase
of smallholdings, or for the start of professional enterprises for re-trained
veterans, or for the purchase of low-cost housing, and so on. For example,
101 La nouvelle conception du domicile dans le règlement des conflits de lois, Recueil de cours de
l’Académie de la Haye, 1930-IV (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1931).
102 ‘Je dus remettre énergiquement à sa place le secrétaire de la Faculté . . . qui eut l’audace,
alors que je rapportais corrigées les compositions écrites de nos candidats, de se faire
l’écho des injures proférées par le chef de la maison contre ceux de ses collègues
d’origine israélite – dont j’étais –’. Les hommes partis de rien, p. 21.
in the 21 March 1935 meeting, the board of the Commission distributed

514,000 francs in loans at rates of interest between 1 and 3 per cent,
with or without collateral, at a term of between two and fifteen years.103
Cassin was there, and spent an entire morning on these matters. He gave
advice on technical questions which did not take too much of his time, for
example on donations and legacies, where his competence as a lawyer was
useful. He avoided, though, committing himself to more time-consuming
work, such as the budgets and accounts of the associations, the depart-
mental commissions, and their properties. Even he had his limits.
Nevertheless, within these boundaries, his presence in the Commission
was substantial. He had to attend between fifteen and twenty meetings a
year. Between 1924–25 and 1928–29, he attended four out of every five
meetings. The following years, his attendance diminished, but he was
more often present than absent until 1932–33. He focused particularly
on issues which concerned the UF, and on the general rules governing
the work of the Commissions, and their departmental committees.104 He
played a central role in the discussion of the application of the law on
compulsory employment of wounded men, and helped find a solution
to conflicts between the Minister of Labour and the Commission.105
For instance, he obtained the decision that an employer had to give a
wounded man a trial period at work.106 The effectiveness of the law
depended on such details, which Cassin followed scrupulously.
His approach was always to keep in mind those whose problems tended
to be set aside or treated as marginal. His concern for individuals, espe-
cially the humble, the vulnerable and the unrepresented, was unshak-
able. On 2 June 1921, for example, after a Prefect had refused to name a
director of a school for re-education as a member of a departmental com-
mission on the grounds that he was a foreigner, Cassin objected that the
law said nothing on this point. The appointment went through.107 When
a case came up as to whether a school accused of embezzlement would
receive less of a subvention, Cassin agreed, with the proviso that this
decision ‘would not prejudice the salaries of workers and foremen above
reproach’.108 He was vigilant on the status and salaries of the personnel
103 PV/CA/ONMAC, 21 March 1935, CAC, 20050206/24.

104 Discussion of the financial rules and electoral rules, PV/CA/ONMAC, respectively
11 Nov. 1934, CAC, 20050206/21, and 8 Dec. 1921, CAC, 20050206/8, register 16,
p. 8337.
105 Law of 26 April 1924, PV/CA/ONM 29 April and 16 Dec. 1926, CAC, 20050206/13,
respectively register 47, pp. 23,001ff. and register 49, pp. 24,357ff.
106 PV/CA/ONM 10 Feb. 1927, CAC, 20050206/15.
107 PV/CA/ONM, 2 June 1921, CAC, 20050206/8, register 14, p. 6517.
108 PV/CA/ONM, 15 Feb. 1924, CAC, 20050206/11, register 32, p. 15,845. Here ‘fore-
men’ refers to supervisors of vocational education.
of the Commission and its departmental committees. For instance, he

proposed the award of a grant to a woman for whom a strict application
of the rules precluded her having a widow’s pension.109 Here was a man
who used the law for those who needed it. There were millions of such
people in France in the post-war decade.
The National Commission for Wards of the Nation (ONP)

We find the same traits in Cassin’s work on behalf of wards of the nation,
with whose future he was even more concerned than with that of war
veterans. Their institutional positions were different. The executive of
the ONM, a board of about fifteen members, met every two weeks,
at least. The ONP was run in a different way. It was attached to the
Ministry of Public Instruction, within which a High Council advised the
minister on the most important questions. The Minister used the same
kind of structure to deal with war orphans. The High Council of the ONP
convened twice a year for several days, and had at least fifty members,
some of whom were provincial delegates. Cassin’s role within this High
Council was not that of an ordinary member, as in the case of the ONM.
He often presided over the High Council, and had an unchallenged
authority in it. The administrative experience he had gained in the UF
was complemented by his chairmanship in the ONP. Here we see the
emergence of ‘President’ Cassin, the eminent jurist and defender of the
disabled, the orphaned, all victims of war.
His leadership in the ONP arose out of a personal commitment. He
spoke out on behalf of orphans because their fathers were not there to
speak for them. When economies were threatened, he protested vigor-
ously, and with strong conviction. Thus in December 1925, during a
political crisis, he rejected placing the burden of cuts on the backs of
orphans:
We are told that every Frenchman must make sacrifices. We, the living, do not
hesitate to say: ‘We are ready to do so, but we do not accept that the children of
our dead comrades will be obliged to repeat their fathers’ sacrifices’. This is the
central point.110
The same scene was played out in 1932. The Minister of National Edu-
cation, de Monzie, had compromised with Caillaux, the president of the
Senate’s Committee of Finance, that he would cover the costs of free
secondary education by cutting the budget of war orphans. This would
109 PV/CA/ONM, 16 May 1929, CAC, 20050206/16.

110 16 Dec. 1925, morning, p. 7.
leave the ONP’s departmental offices in near bankruptcy. Cassin pressed

the minister on this point in the High Council:
Let me express the extremely painful emotion, not only of the victims of the war,
but of all members of the High Council with respect to the decisions recently
taken by Parliament . . . When someone says to us: ‘The funds are not there, and
in order to meet other needs, we will take it out on war orphans, who cannot
defend themselves!’ This we cannot accept. (Applause.)111
Then he gave the figures. The ONP had asked for 148 MF, a 2.75
million reduction on the 1932 level. The Minister had reduced the level
of funding to 134.66 MF, and the budget voted by Parliament was only
114.66 MF. To further applause, Cassin concluded that if it were no
longer possible for the ONP to function correctly within the Ministry
of National Education, it would be better for it to be placed ‘within the
citadel of the ONM’.
The Minister replied that the ONP was not created for the long term,
and that it needed to choose more carefully the children it adopted,
and to tailor its administrative costs in the departmental committees
accordingly. Cassin resented this accusation that the ONP had engaged
in demagogy. The majority of new adoptions were of children of veterans
who had died of their wounds. And the Minister was wrong to demand
of the ONP to reduce administrative expenses, since it was his job to do
so. The ONP had no right so to act.
For Cassin, the cause of the wards of the nation was sacred, and he
had devoted to the ONP much of his intelligence, energy and devotion.
It is not surprising, therefore, that he felt some degree of nostalgia when
he oversaw the absorption of the ONP in a Unified Office of war victims
and veterans on 1 January 1935.112 This fusion of the ONP and the
ONM which he sought on grounds of realism risked endangering the
care of the wards by attention to more immediate interests. In the new
High Council, there were forty representatives of war pensioners, forty
representing veterans, aside from forty MPs and high civil servants and
other qualified people.
In order to cope with issues concerning war orphans, more members
were appointed. There were five representatives of wards over twenty-four
years of age, five members of the High Council of National Education,
111 26 June 1933, morning, pp. 17–22.

112 The absorption of the ONP in the Commission of Veterans’ Affairs was determined by
a decree-law of 19 April 1934. Its organization was fixed by the decree of 8 Aug. 1935.
It took time to define the procedures of election to the departmental commissions and
to the national commission of ‘mutilés, combattants, victimes de la guerre et pupilles
de la nation’. These procedures were set by ministerial act on 4 June and 19 Aug. 1937.
and twelve others, of which at least three women represented charities

working in the care of orphans. This was not enough to preserve the
specific interests of war orphans. The money which the ONP had set
aside was merged with other funds in the new body. As a member of
this new executive board, Cassin stressed that the ONP had disappeared
before its twentieth anniversary, and he asked the Unified Commission
to publish a pamphlet enabling a wide public to remember all that the
ONP had done. He gave to its work a national significance: ‘If the social
unrest which other nations have known has been avoided in France until
now, the reason is that our nation, more than others, has kept its sense
of solidarity.’113
When chairing the last session of the High Council of the ONP, Cassin
struck an optimistic chord in his closing address:
I would like to say to my colleagues that personally I am not signing a death
certificate this evening. Administrative bodies are meant to be transformed,
and . . . We must not conclude that our cause is dead because its ‘legal costume’
has disappeared.114
The cause mattered more than the institution created to advance it. This
is a maxim which Cassin never abjured, however cruel at times it was to
say so.
113 PV/CA/ONMCVGP, 31 March 1938, CAC, 20050206/27.

114 17 Dec. 1934, afternoon, p. 102.
3 Cassin in Geneva
In the inter-war years, René Cassin became a soldier in another kind

of war, one waged against war itself. His point of entry into interna-
tional politics was the international veterans’ movement, launched with
the aid of the ILO in Geneva in the early 1920s. There too, between
1924 and 1938, he served as a member of the French delegation to the
League of Nations. His place at the table in Geneva was as the official
representative of the French veterans’ movement. Year after year, the UF
formally proposed his name for this post. Indeed, Cassin himself drafted
the letter signed by the Federation’s president, making this request, and
dispatched it to the office of the head of the government. And each year
until 1938, Cassin travelled to Geneva and spent the month between
about 10 September and 10 October at work on League of Nations busi-
ness. In Geneva during the disastrous Munich accords of 30 September
1938, he decided not to return thereafter to the League, which to all
intents and purposes had collapsed.
Over the years he spent in Geneva, he was joined by a remarkable
assembly of men, in the ILO in its early days under Albert Thomas,
and in the League itself. In 1926, for instance, Aristide Briand, Louis
Loucheur, and his old friend from student days in Paris, Marcel Plaisant,
served on the League’s first commission, devoted to juridical questions.
Léon Jouhaux, the designated representative of the French trade union
movement, served on the second commission, devoted to economic ques-
tions. In the same year – 1926 – Cassin joined Joseph Paul-Boncour,
Jouhaux and Henri de Jouvenel on the third commission, which focused
on disarmament. In other years Cassin also served on the fifth commis-
sion, devoted to humanitarian matters, and on the sixth commission,
responsible for what were termed political questions.
In Geneva, he also served alongside and formed friendships with dis-
tinguished jurists and politicians, such as Eduard Beneš, foreign minister
of Czechoslovakia, and Nikolas Politis, foreign minister of Greece. Both
were pillars of the League, and dominant figures on the Commissions on
51
which Cassin served. Both made important contributions to the devel-

opment of notions of human rights and state sovereignty at the very time
Cassin began to write substantially about these matters. He presented his
thinking to the Institute of International Law in Geneva and the Hague
Academy of International Law. In a later chapter, we will trace the line
connecting his thinking in these years with the drafting of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War.1
Working in the League, Cassin saw clearly why the theory of absolute
state sovereignty was in need of fundamental revision. In the 1920s, in
the glow of the Locarno agreements, there seemed to be a commonal-
ity of interest among sovereign states in finding alternatives to war as a
means of settling conflicts between states. But after the economic crisis
of 1929, that consensus – always precarious, though palpable enough in
the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 – evaporated. The Japanese invasion
of Manchuria in 1931 opened a decade of disasters for the League of
Nations, a sorry spectacle Cassin saw at first hand. While he and his
colleagues continued to work on disarmament and other matters of com-
mon concern, the League crumbled, and then collapsed after the Munich
accords of 1938.
The third way, the ILO and veterans’ politics, 1919–25

For veterans, there were three paths out of the Great War. The first
was towards communism. Henri Barbusse’s war novel Under Fire (1916)
had won the Prix Goncourt, international acclaim and a wide reader-
ship. Royalties helped launch Barbusse’s Association Républicaine des
Anciens Combattants (ARAC) which took heart from the hopes of social
transformation kindled by the Bolshevik Revolution. The second path
was that of battle-hardened nationalism, of the kind the Union Nationale
des Combattants (UNC) expressed, thereby keeping alive the spirit of
camaraderie and bitterness towards Germany. Cassin helped forge a third
way, an internationalist veterans’ movement aligned with the League of
Nations and committed to reconciliation between the two enemy camps
after the war.
From the start, Cassin was a League of Nations man. As early as
1919 he was invited to become the personal assistant to Jean Monnet,
deputy secretary general of the new League. He was tempted to accept
the post, but instead his success in the Agrégation examination in law
that year opened the door to a chair at the University of Lille, which
1 See chapter 9.
Cassin in Geneva 53
he took instead.2 He helped the nascent organization gather its working

library of books and official statistics and reports, and circulated among
those who saw in the League the only hope against communism on the
left and strident nationalism on the right. It was this middle-of-the-road,
progressive line that he forged in the Union Fédérale (UF). He did so
with other men like Henri Pichot, who had been wounded during the
war, but who came to be committed to transcending the iron bitterness
of the war.
Cassin was not at all averse to joining the inter-Allied veterans’ organi-
zation, FIDAC. But he was against a political and cultural quarantine of
German and Austrian veterans. Why should justified contempt for the old
guard of the Kaiserreich pollute the atmosphere long after those respon-
sible for the war had been overthrown? This is a question Cassin and
Pichot, through their service and their suffering, had earned the right to
ask. They were moral witnesses to the war, men who had faced the enemy,
and had bled for their country.3 What they said commanded respect.
Pichot had spent eleven months in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and
another six months at home recuperating from wounds received at the
end of August 1914, wounds and the maltreatment of which almost cost
him his left leg.4 He was initially convinced that German culture and
the German people were rotten through and through, but abandoned his
initial bitterness and used his fluent German to argue in both Germany
and France for reconciliation.5
As we have seen, Cassin had been fortunate to survive his combat
experience, and had cried ‘Vive la France’ when hit by enemy fire on
12 October 1914. The defeat of Germany was a moral victory to him,
a victory for the right. But his unshakable view was that the only way
to prevent the return of war was to forge an international order which
would block the descent into armed conflict, when international tensions
rose. His was the view of Lord Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, who
said time and again that had there only been in the summer of 1914 a
League, a place for the Great Powers to bring their grievances, the war
would never have occurred.6 After 1918, that conviction made Cassin and
many other veterans turn towards Geneva, the seat of the new League of
Nations.
2 League of Nations Archive, Geneva, S 736, personal dossier of René Cassin, 1919. We
are very grateful to Philippe Oulmont for drawing our attention to this document.
3 Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
4 AN, AS 43 1 and 2, Fonds Pichot.
5 AN, AS 43 2, Pichot’s narrative of his military service and his extraordinarily detailed
account of the treatment of his wounds contain all the venom of a die-hard nationalist.
6 SDN archives, Geneva, Mantoux papers, ‘Que fait la Société des nations?’, p. 1.
By no means did all French veterans share Cassin’s and Pichot’s views.
But what is remarkable is the degree to which their internationalist posi-
tion became the middle way, the dominant position among French vet-
erans in the inter-war years. From the spring of 1920 on, Cassin joined
inter-Allied meetings of veterans, where he and others put the case that
the best defence of France was the strengthening of the democratic forces
represented in the Weimar Republic.7
The man who forged the links between the UF and the League was
Adrien Tixier. Tixier like Pichot was a schoolteacher. Tixier had lost
his left arm in the Battle of the Frontiers in 1914, and like Cassin he
had won the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre for bravery. Tixier
returned to the classroom in 1915, and served as president of one of
the early veterans’ organizations, the Fédération des Mutilés du Tarn.
He joined the UF, and then in 1920, accepted the invitation offered by
Albert Thomas, director general of the ILO, to come to Geneva and take
up the post of secretary responsible for disabled veterans’ affairs in the
new organization.
From the outset, Tixier worked to make the ILO a meeting point for
veterans from countries on both sides of the war. The advantage he had
was that the ILO, an independent satellite of the League, could offer
a venue for the discussion of purely technical questions of interest to
veterans: questions concerning different approaches to developments in
prosthetic surgery and to the retraining and re-education of wounded
veterans. The political arena was elsewhere, a few streets away in the
League of Nations. Thus from mid 1920 on, Tixier did everything he
could to point out to British, French or Belgian veterans the benefits
arising from an exchange of information and experience with disabled
men and their representatives in Germany or Austria, whose wounds and
whose difficulties in coping with disability and with finding and keeping
a job were very similar to their own.
There is no doubt that this was a sleight of hand. Tixier wanted the
ILO to provide the venue for regular meetings of veterans from all com-
batant nations, both to forge an international organization with its own
voice, and to imbed this large and influential population in the culture
and overall work of the League of Nations. The problem was, though,
that there were many veterans’ groups in Britain, France and elsewhere
unwilling to sit down together with their former enemies. The question
was how to get around them.8
7 Antoine Prost, Les anciens combattants et la société française, 1914–1939 (Paris: Presses de
la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), vol. 1, p. 75.
8 See Tixier’s reports to Albert Thomas, BIT archives, Geneva, as well as articles in Après
la bataille, 25 Aug. and 5 Sept. 1920, as cited in Prost, Les anciens combattants, vol. 1,
p. 76, n. 131.
Cassin in Geneva 55
Discussing technical matters was one way to do so. Already in 1920,

an inter-Allied veterans’ meeting was held in Brussels, during which
an international centre for prostheses was born. At the same meeting,
the Allied veterans decided to enter into discussions with the ILO ‘on
international questions of mutual interest to veterans’. This confirmed
an earlier resolution at the 1920 UF Congress at Tours to work towards
an international meeting of veterans at Geneva.
In January 1921, Tixier wrote to the UF, asking if it would participate
in such a meeting to discuss ‘international legislation on war victims’.
Cassin, as secretary general of the UF, replied favourably, since this
request was in line with the Executive Committee’s decision to discuss
technical matters among other veterans’ organizations; such a meeting
would in no way constitute the creation of an ‘international Federation
of war victims’. So much for Allied veterans’ sensibilities. Cassin insisted
that the initiative had to come from the ILO, not from the UF. A majority
of the Executive Committee supported Cassin’s position, giving him a
‘mandate eventually to represent’ the UF ‘in such international confer-
ences which may be organized in Geneva by the ILO, to promote the
unification of protective measures adopted by different countries for the
benefit of wounded men, discharged ex-soldiers and war widows’.9
The first such meeting was held on 12–14 September 1921, when dele-
gates from the UF, the British Legion and the Italian veterans’ movement
sat down in Geneva with representatives of the German Reichsbund and
the Austrian Zentralverbund. Pichot and Gaston Rogé, President of the
UF in Nancy, were unable to attend; Cassin was the sole spokesman for
the UF. He felt some apprehension, he wrote, in starting down this path,
sensing ‘his consciousness that his responsibility towards the veterans
was enormous, and it extended too to all the families which had suffered
in the war, as well as to the ravaged parts of France, the devastation of
which, alongside the effort to recover, and its pacifist outlook, so com-
monly ignored or misunderstood, had to be given pride of place in any
conference aiming at the lessening of suffering’.10
Tixier and the head of the ILO Albert Thomas welcomed the del-
egates. Among them was General Sir Frederick Maurice, representing
the British Legion. There were delegations from Italy and Poland in
Geneva, alongside German and Austrian delegates. Both countries had
participated in the work of the ILO since 1919.
This very first encounter of veterans’ representatives from both sides
was a delicate moment. And yet Cassin saw this meeting as the right
time and the right place to begin to construct a different kind of
9 ‘Entente internationale’, La France Mutilée, 26 Jan. 1921.

10 Cassin, ‘La réunion de Genève’, La France Mutilée, 25 Sept. 1921.
veterans’ internationale. Surely, he said, disabled men should benefit

from developments in care and treatment, whatever their origin. If they
lived outside their country of origin, they had to have the right to receive
pensions and to obtain medical assistance. Cassin knew that there were
employers’ organizations alongside trade union groups attached to the
ILO: here was the natural place to discuss retraining and job placement.
From these points of mutual interest, he argued that veterans could con-
struct a common front, based on the view that the Treaty of Versailles
had opened the way towards a peaceful future.
Cassin himself witnessed the way the German delegate to the meeting,
Reinhard Schumann, representing the Reichsbund, took up the challenge,
and responded by
A declaration the terms of which were heard with rapt attention by all in atten-
dance and especially by the French delegate. This statement was not only a
demonstration of a pacifist outlook, against wars of revenge, and an acknowledg-
ment of the debt of reparations due by Germany to France. It included also a
commitment to support all measures taken by the German government to pay
this debt, and to fight against any attempt to overthrow the Republic or to revive
the imperialistic principles of the pre-war period.11
Here was the opening Cassin had hoped for: a public commitment by
German and Austrian veterans to accept the terms of the peace treaty
and to work together with their former enemies on matters of mutual
interest. Deeds, to be sure, had to follow words, and Cassin expressed
a certain reserve in reporting to French veterans what had happened in
Geneva. His aim was clear: ‘Remember clearly so that our country will
not be misled. Act everywhere to heal the wounds and to see the triumph
of justice.’12
Not all Allied veterans were persuaded that they could work with Ger-
man and Austrian veterans. Suspicions were still set in stone; it would
take time, Cassin believed, to dissolve them. A second step towards build-
ing an international veterans’ movement took place in Geneva in March
1922, with the convening of the first ILO-sponsored meeting of experts
on problems of war disability. Tixier and Cassin worked hand-in-hand to
prepare this meeting. Cassin suggested names of possible delegates, and
hoped that labour and employers’ leaders could be persuaded to come;
perhaps, Cassin suggested, someone from the Comité des Forges, one
prominent employers’ organization.13
11 Cassin, ‘La réunion de Genève’, 25 Sept. 1921.

12 Cassin, ‘La réunion de Genève’, 25 Sept. 1921.
13 BIT archives, Geneva, MU/7/3/1, Cassin to Tixier, 26 Nov. 1921.
Cassin in Geneva 57
Between 2 and 4 March 1922, Albert Thomas himself presided over

the meeting of delegates from Austria, France, Britain, Poland, Italy
and Germany. Their recommendations were uncontroversial: veterans
should have the right to treatment and care wherever they resided; there
should be a centre of documentation on developments in prosthetic and
orthopaedic medicine – a point on which Cassin insisted – and a fully
international exhibition on the care of disabled men; veterans’ organi-
zations should work closely with other associations, including the Red
Cross and the Hygiene Committee of the League of Nations.
The only bone of contention concerned how this initiative cut across
the work of the inter-Allied commission on prosthesis. Here Tixier
was clear. The Brussels exhibition of 1920 was part of the work of
the permanent inter-Allied committee; they rejected the idea of a fully
international association to deal with these questions. That is why
they did not participate in the March 1922 meeting in Geneva. It
was therefore necessary, Tixier felt, that the ILO move into the area
they refused to inhabit. Cassin seconded Tixier: there were matters on
which the inter-Allied commission was the competent authority; and
other, fully international matters, on which the ILO was the competent
authority. They should work in parallel.14
This was easier said than done. Six months later, Tixier took the next
step, once again in tandem with Cassin. On 26 September 1922, he
wrote on behalf of the ILO inviting the UF and other veterans’ groups to
come to Geneva the following year for a second meeting of experts. On
3 October 1922, Cassin, then president of the UF, stated that, after con-
sultation with his executive committee and the council of departmental
associations, his organization was happy to accept the invitation. Such a
programme, he said, ‘corresponds fully with the ideas of the UF’. Cassin
asked Tixier further to send him any information he had about ‘the legal
and economic organization of cooperatives producing prosthetic devices
in Austria and Czechoslovakia’. Following his line of argument in March,
Cassin added that the UF’s decision was without prejudice to the work of
the inter-Allied association for disabled men. It was time, Cassin wrote,
to seize the moment, one which was ‘exceptionally favourable from every
point of view’.15
Getting other associations to join the meeting was not so simple. On
10 November 1922, Tixier wrote to Albert Thomas in no uncertain
terms: ‘I do not hide the fact that the building of relations among men
who had fought against each other during the war is a delicate matter.’
14 BIT archives, meeting of committee of experts, March 1922, procès-verbaux, p. 11.

15 BIT, Cassin to Tixier, 3 Oct. 1923.
There were those who would not sit down with German veterans, but
he believed that after ‘negotiations, possibly lengthy, we will be able to
establish a definitive programme and fix a date, with the agreement of
the major associations of wounded men and other veterans’.16 The UNC
refused to go, but other Allied groups, like the British Legion, accepted
the invitation.
The ILO did indeed convene a second meeting of experts on dis-
abled veterans’ matters in Geneva in July 1923. This time the focus
was on job placement, and on the conditions disabled men faced
on the job in many different countries.17 Delegates attended from
South Africa, Germany, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France,
Britain, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and
the Red Cross. Cassin was joined by Pichot and Rogé from the UF,
as well as the head of the Paris office of labour. The deliberations,
Cassin later noted, were helpful in negotiations on French legislation
passed a few months later on the compulsory employment of disabled
veterans.18
These discussions, while intrinsically useful to veterans, were eclipsed
by the increasingly tense reparations crisis. In January 1923, French and
Belgian troops had occupied the Ruhr valley. German inflation assumed
astronomic proportions. In January 1922, the exchange rate was roughly
200 Deutschmarks to the dollar; in July 1923, the rate was 350,000 to the
dollar; month after month the spiral continued. In this atmosphere, little
could be done to promote international understanding. Though Tixier
kept trying to find common ground among veterans’ groups, he knew he
had to await the end of the crisis.19
The parallel efforts of the new German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann
in Germany and the new French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand created
the conditions for rapprochement. Currency stabilization, through the
Dawes plan, and greater Franco-German understanding, leading to the
Locarno Treaties of 1925, broke the log-jam in Geneva as elsewhere.
Here was the moment Tixier had been waiting for. But once again, it
took a parallel effort by Cassin and the UF to bring about the creation
of CIAMAC, the first fully international association of veterans of the
Great War.
16 BIT, Tixier to Drummond, 10 Nov. 1922.

17 BIT, MU/7/4/2/2, procès-verbaux, meeting of 31 July–2 Aug. 1923.
18 382AP10, Rapport de René Cassin à la Commission de la Paix sur la CIAMAC, p. 3.
19 BIT, MU/7/5/1, Tixier to Cassin, 16 March 1923.
Cassin in Geneva 59
CIAMAC
We must not only acknowledge the difficulty faced by Cassin and Tixier
in this task, but also recognize its ambitious aim. Improved relations
between and among the former enemy countries still left many ex-soldiers
and other nationalists suspicious of the League of Nations in general and
the ILO in particular. For that reason, Tixier, identified unalterably as a
League of Nations man, could not himself convene a meeting of veterans’
groups without alienating many potential delegates; that job was done by
Cassin and the UF.
Here begins a story of eight years of work both in the field of inter-
national veterans’ affairs and in the corridors of the League of Nations
itself. From 1924 on, Cassin served as a French delegate to the League.
At the same time, he launched, with the assistance of the secretariat
of the ILO, the Conférence Internationale des Associations de Mutilés
et Anciens Combattants, known by its acronym, CIAMAC. Since the
two sides to Cassin’s Geneva years form one integral story, we first deal
with his work with anciens combattants in this organization in the years
before 1933, before turning to his parallel activity within the League
itself.
Cassin was fully aware of the differences between the UF and other
French veterans’ groups on questions of working with old enemies. He
and Tixier reached the unavoidable conclusion that they simply had to go
ahead on their own with the plan to create a body in which old soldiers
from both the Allied and the Central powers could come together to
discuss issues of mutual interest and to defend the peace.20
On 7 August 1925, Paul Brousmiche, acting president of the UF,
wrote to Albert Thomas, asking him to provide a venue for an interna-
tional meeting of all veterans’ groups to be held later that year in Geneva.
With Thomas’s support, Tixier wrote back to the UF saying that the
good offices of the ILO were at the disposal of the organizing committee
of CIAMAC. Tixier found two rooms in the University of Geneva, on
the ground floor, to enable disabled men to attend the meeting without
difficulty. The ILO provided translators and secretarial staff, who gath-
ered in the faculty parlour of the university, adjacent to the rooms set
aside for the meeting, whose date was set as 18–19 September 1925. The
ILO provided no financial support, save negotiating a fee of 2 francs for
the rent of the meeting rooms. This was formally a UF affair.21
20 BIT archives, MU/7/9/5, Tixier to Cassin, 15 Oct. 1925.

21 BIT archive, MU 7/9/5, file on September 1925 meeting of CIAMAC.
Hence, Brousmiche, the acting president of the UF, welcomed dele-

gates from eleven countries to Geneva. He saw the meeting as a reflection
of the growing power and confidence of veterans, who felt impelled to
speak out on a broad range of domestic and international issues. Dis-
abled men, in particular, had to voice their views on war and peace.
After the formalities were over, the delegates got down to business. And
business was not easy. Tixier explained to Thomas that it took five to
six hours of negotiation before a text was agreed, committing all del-
egates, including the German delegation, to support unequivocally the
Covenant of the League and the obligatory arbitration of future interna-
tional disputes. Tipping the balance towards agreement was the rapport
developed between Erich Rossmann, the German delegate and Socialist
member of the Reichstag, and Pichot, whom Tixier termed ‘the most
reliable mind and also the best pen of the UF’.22
The next day the delegates were greeted formally by Eric Drum-
mond, the secretary general of the League, by the president of the
League’s Assembly, the Canadian Raoul Dandurand, and by Joseph Paul-
Boncour, the head of the French government, with whom Cassin worked
in the French delegation.23 The publicity was good for CIAMAC, but
some journalists tried to reduce this initiative simply to a League of
Nations public relations exercise. Tixier took care, with Thomas’s prod-
ding, to distance himself from CIAMAC, which thereby became one of
the first of a breed of political groups we now term ‘non-governmental
organizations’.
The originality of CIAMAC was that it was a political group speaking
up on behalf of ex-soldiers, people with rights. They had no intention
of taking or giving charity, and hence were at one remove from the Red
Cross and its allied organizations. They were also at one remove from the
governments of their members, and were emphatically not paid by nor
responsible to the states from which they came. ‘The role of CIAMAC’,
wrote Cassin in 1930, ‘is not to be a substitute for governments, but
to make known to governments what are the feelings of the people’ in
more than one country.24 Their responsibility was to all the men who
had fought in the war, and those whose courage and whose suffering
gave them the moral authority to speak out on a whole range of issues.
They were non-denominational, and hence had none of the advantages
nor any of the disadvantages of the Vatican. They represented a gen-
eration of men in uniform, their families, their widows, their orphans,
22 BIT archive, MU 7/9/5/1, Tixier to Thomas, 22 Sept. 1925.

23 BIT archive, MU 7/9/5/1, Drummond to Thomas, 25 Sept. 1925.
24 382AP10, Cassin, CIAMAC (1930), pp. 15–16.
Cassin in Geneva 61
their dependants. They spoke for those millions of men and women for
whom the war of 1914–18 was a catastrophe. And for whom was it not?
For disabled men like Cassin, Pichot and Tixier, theirs was a moral cru-
sade, a crusade against war. From the outset, their primary aim was to
help build a durable peace, and to work to strengthen the League of
Nations.25
This pacifist voice is what Cassin and his colleagues in the UF trans-
ferred to CIAMAC. It was a forum for the discussion of matters of
common interest, in the same way as the experts’ committees had been.
But it was also a voice for understanding across the divide between for-
mer enemies, and throughout the later 1920s, before the onset of the
world economic crisis undermined the fragile democracies of Germany
and the rest of Europe, CIAMAC pressed its campaign to ensure that
no future generation of young people would know the ravages of war.
Even before Germany was admitted to the League of Nations in 1926,
German delegates came to Geneva, to CIAMAC, to prepare the way for
their country’s re-entry into the community of nations.
CIAMAC met for a second time in Geneva on 30 September–2 Octo-
ber 1926: eighty delegates from ten nations and twenty organizations
attended. The hope was that Col. G. R. Crossfield, the British president
of FIDAC, could attend and open the meeting, but he was barred from
doing so by nationalists within his own organization.26 As before, the UF,
as an allied veterans’ group, participated in FIDAC; but FIDAC refused
to have anything to do with CIAMAC, ‘tainted’ by the presence of former
enemy soldiers. These tensions erupted within the French delegation as
well. Some who attended, Tixier learned, probably from Cassin, aimed
to disrupt the meeting and destroy the organization.27 They wanted to
force the German delegates to state publicly their acceptance of the war
guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles, article 231; this would have com-
promised them at home. Pichot got around this, by asking for a majority
vote, yes or no, on the matter within the French delegation. The noes
won the vote; the French delegation spoke with one voice. They did not
raise the issue, and the storm faded away. For Cassin, as much as for
Tixier, five years of slow and steady work had paid off. How moving it
was, Tixier told Albert Thomas, to stand together at this meeting, with
all these old soldiers, and feel the emotion of the moment of silence they
observed to pay their respects to the dead of the war.28 CIAMAC was
launched.
25 382AP10, Cassin, CIAMAC (1930), p. 4. 26 382AP10, Cassin, CIAMAC, p. 5.

27 BIT archive, MU/7/9/5/1, Tixier to Thomas, 5 Oct. 1925.
Cassin saw the association as reflecting the interests of a wide body

of veterans. In terms of membership, the French, German and Polish
associations predominated. The first service they offered was to bring
the experience of other veterans to the aid of individuals in different
countries dealing with laws and regulations concerning disability pay-
ments, services and pensions. In addition, its independence from all other
bodies – including, Cassin insisted a bit disingenuously, from the League
of Nations – enabled it better to work ‘towards a rapprochement of coun-
tries divided by war’.29
In 1927, CIAMAC’s annual congress was held in Vienna. Cassin was
there together with Paul Brousmiche, Léon Viala and the vicar Bernard
Secret. The last, a member of the Catholic social movement, was appar-
ently a particular favourite among Austrian Catholics. In Vienna there
were seventeen delegations in attendance, all, in Tixier’s opinion, ‘res-
olutely pacifist’. The absent organizations were the American Legion,
the British Legion, and the fascist association of Italian veterans. The
profile of CIAMAC was centre-left. Half were socialists, radical social-
ists or social democrats. What mattered most, Tixier wrote, was their
power to challenge ardent nationalists who claimed to speak for the war
generation.30 Here was the pacifist alternative.31
In the following year, 1928, CIAMAC met in Berlin, 9–11 August.
Now there were a hundred representatives in attendance, coming from
twenty-five delegations. Father Secret introduced a motion, passed by
acclamation, affirming that all disabled men had a right to reparation
for the wounds they had incurred in the service of their country. Once
more, their position was to demand justice, not charity. The one ticklish
moment in the meeting was a complaint by a Polish delegate about
certain ‘incessant aggressive demonstrations by German nationalists’.
This potential embarrassment was defused by Erich Rossmann who said
that ‘the acceptance of the principle of the renunciation of war and of
compulsory arbitration for all conflict applies to all countries including
Poland, and that the German people will never allow the use of force to
change the status quo in Europe today’.32
Unbeknownst to the delegates, the years of hope were coming to an
end. The economic crisis of 1929 put paid to the vision that CIAMAC
could help forge from soldiers’ solidarity a weapon to defend the peace.
Meetings in Warsaw in 1929 and in Paris in 1930 showed how braided
29 382AP10, Cassin, CIAMAC, p. 6.

31 382AP10, dossier 1, correspondence and papers on CIAMAC.
32 BIT archive, MU/7/9/5/4, Tixier to Thomas, 17 August 1928.
Cassin in Geneva 63
together in substance were the efforts of CIAMAC and the work of the
League of Nations. Its International Commission, established in 1929,
was in constant contact with Geneva, as well as with national commis-
sions of CIAMAC in each member state. In the annual meetings in Paris
in 1930 as well as in Prague in 1931, Cassin and Rossmann were joint
authors of the report on progress and impediments in the path towards
a system of arbitration, collective security and disarmament. But despite
all their efforts, the tide had turned. Just after the Prague meeting, in
September 1931, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria became the first of
the major shocks that were to undermine the foundations of the League,
and of CIAMAC as well.
Throughout its early years, CIAMAC’s leaders had hoped to preserve a
kind of peace in its dealings with FIDAC, the old Allied veterans’ organi-
zation. In 1932, the gap between them became unbridgeable. CIAMAC
met in Vienna on 1–3 September 1932; FIDAC chose precisely the same
day to hold its annual convention in Lisbon. The British veterans chose
FIDAC; then in 1933, the Nazis came to power, and promptly arrested a
number of men who had attended CIAMAC meetings. When the major
Italian veterans’ organizations refused to come, the entire raison d’être
of CIAMAC vanished rapidly. The vision Cassin and Tixier had had of a
powerful pacifist veterans’ association, bringing former enemies together,
had been a chimera. The group soldiered on until 1939, but it was – like
the peace itself – doomed to destruction.33
Cassin knew what had been lost, but he also enumerated what had
been gained, in particular in defence of the rights of disabled men and
their families to decent treatment and adequate pensions. In Danzig, the
work of CIAMAC had helped bring sightless veterans under the aegis of
the League of Nations, with a subsequent increase in their pensions. The
same had been true in Bulgaria. The centre for documentation on the
treatment of disabled men was a source of reference for those working on
behalf of disabled men everywhere. These were small gains, but real ones.
They established in microcosm what CIAMAC stood for in general: the
notion that veterans everywhere had rights.34
The League of Nations

The story of Cassin’s engagement with the League itself paralleled that of
his efforts on behalf of CIAMAC. In the mid 1920s, both prospered. After
the onset of the world economic crisis, both foundered and ultimately
33 BIT, MY/7/9/5/13–17, files on CIAMAC meetings in the 1930s.

34 382AP10, Cassin, CIAMAC, pp. 9–11.
failed. But in both facets of his inter-war career, Cassin developed ideas
and working relationships which were of great significance in later years.
In residence at the elegant Hôtel des Bergues in Geneva every autumn
between 1924 and 1938, Cassin came to know many of the leading
statesmen of the day. He was on cordial terms with prominent British
delegates, Lord Cecil of Chelwood, Anthony Eden and Arthur Hender-
son. The Norwegian Nobel laureate Christian Loos Lange became a
friend, as did the Chinese delegate Wellington Koo. In the corridors of
the League, he had the advice and assistance of Paul Mantoux, one of the
key members of the League’s secretariat. Mantoux had been translator
for Clemenceau in the Paris Peace Conference, and helped create and
serve the commissions on which Cassin and others handled the League’s
business. Mantoux also ran an Institute for International Law in Geneva,
which served as a meeting place for the wide group of people coming to
work in or observe the League.35 Cassin worked together with the Greek
jurist and diplomat Nikolas Politis, who had taught law in Paris before
the First World War, and who helped secure an invitation for Cassin to
lecture at the Hague Academy of International Law in 1930.36
At Geneva Cassin joined a network of men, internationalists in outlook,
most of whom were lawyers by training. They formed a jurists’ third force
in international affairs, an alternative to the narrow nationalism of the
right and the Third International on the left. Many survived the eclipse
of the League in the late 1930s and wound up in London with Cassin
after 1940. When Cassin came to England after the defeat of France
in 1940, a policeman processing newcomers at Plymouth asked him if
he had friends in England. He gave the name of Anthony Eden, the
British Secretary of War. When Cassin dealt with a number of other
British officials during the Blitz and after, he did so on the basis of earlier
relationships formed in Geneva. After the war, at the UN and in other
organizations, Cassin could call on many of the same men as veterans of
the years in both Geneva and London. Here is the social, political and
intellectual capital which Cassin accumulated in the League of Nations.
These years in Geneva were formative ones for Cassin. He represented
his country there, to be sure, but more precisely he represented the
men of 1914, the men who had gone to war and who had won the
victory at staggering cost of life and limb. In effect what Cassin did in
Geneva in the 1920s and 1930s was to braid together his work in trans-
national politics in the international veterans’ movement with efforts in
international politics in the French delegation to the League.
35 SDN archives, Geneva, Mantoux papers.

36 SDN archives, Geneva, Politis papers.
Cassin in Geneva 65
When Edouard Herriot came to power in 1924, he appointed René

Cassin to join the French delegation in Geneva. Cassin said later that
it was Léon Bourgeois, Nobel laureate and President of the Council of
the League, who initially suggested his name to Herriot.37 In fact it was
Brousmiche on behalf of the UF who wrote to Bourgeois asking him
to forward Cassin’s name to Herriot, an idea to which Bourgeois said
he was ‘entirely favourable’.38 This was the first of fourteen successive
nominations by different political leaders, covering the period through
the Munich crisis of 1938. After a few years, Cassin was the inevitable
nominee for this post, a man with experience, and the legal competence
to stand alongside the jurists of the world in Geneva.
Cassin saw the League at its apogee and at its nadir. His place in the
delegation was specifically to represent French veterans’ opinion in the
League. He was not there because he had won a seat in the Senate or the
Chamber of Deputies, like most of his other colleagues, but because he
spoke for a group outside of parliamentary politics. The veterans’ move-
ment was a considerable force within civil society, one which mattered
to Herriot. Cassin acted as an intermediary, informing public opinion in
France about Geneva, and informing Geneva about the veterans’ point
of view. Léon Jouhaux, the longtime head of the French trade union
confederation, the CGT, held a similar position. Jouhaux represented
labour; Cassin represented veterans. They were there to speak for differ-
ent constituencies, indeed important ones, but neither held an elected
post. Cassin, like Jouhaux, had strong ties to the ILO. Starting out in
1924 as a thirty-seven-year-old professor of law at the University of Lille,
Cassin lacked the authority within the French delegation which came
from holding elective political office. Not surprisingly, on two occasions,
in 1928 and in 1932, Cassin tried his hand at electoral politics, in part
to strengthen his hand in Geneva. On both occasions, he failed; we shall
return to that story below. Between 1930 and 1938, he remained what he
had always been: a spokesman for veterans in Geneva, and an emissary
of the League to the French veterans’ movement.
Intellectual cooperation
The first task he faced in the League, and indeed the first speech he gave
to the Assembly of the League, was on the subject of the creation of an
37 René Cassin, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Oslo 1968. We are grateful to Ann
Skjelling, the Librarian of the Nobel Institute, for having made a recording of this
speech available to us.
38 382AP12, Léon Bourgeois to Brousmiche, 16 Aug. 1924.
international institute of intellectual cooperation. The League had cre-

ated a commission on intellectual cooperation in 1921. Its title registered
the sensitivity of delegates to anything which would touch on the deli-
cate denominational problems associated with national education. From
the start, the French delegation to the League took a particular interest
in this issue, which they understood as a forum for the dissemination
of the core ideas of the League throughout the world. Cassin’s maiden
speech to the League was to announce that his country supported the
proposal of Sir Gilbert Murray, speaking on behalf of the Second Com-
mission on intellectual cooperation, that there should be established an
institute dedicated to this subject, and that this body would be housed in
Paris.
What is most striking is the way Cassin expressed his own personal
interest and that of his fellow veterans in the matter:
As a newcomer in this Assembly, let me bring to you the special support of

French soldiers and wounded veterans, whose associations are for the first time
represented here, as part of a national delegation. They have decided to join in
your efforts for profoundly powerful reasons, which need to be acknowledged
by the delegates of this Assembly, coming from nearly all the nations of the
world.
War victims and veterans feel a particular sympathy, and even a strong solidar-
ity, with intellectuals. They feel very close to them by virtue of the disinterested
character of their work, as disinterested as was their sacrifice, as well as by the
tragic situation they both faced after the war.
It is sad to note, but we must do so, that in those countries recovering slowly
from the terrible cataclysm unleashed ten years ago, the inestimable value of
human thought and human life is still depreciated, and that those who bore the
unmerited suffering which it caused directly to so many people, may be the last
to be healed, after all the other damage, and even then, it is possible such people
may never be fully healed.
However, from these shared hardships, a great hope has emerged. It seems
impossible the League founded to establish justice and law, and which owes its
very existence to the great thinkers who had planted the idea among the people
and to the humble heroes who baptized the League with their blood, it seems
impossible, I say, that this League will tolerate a situation in which so many
people suffer from persistent injustice.
In order to avoid ‘the worst evil of civilization’, the League had to rally
men and women ‘to defend learning’ and prevent the decline in the num-
ber of people doing intellectual work in Europe. That task was essential,
but could not be accomplished at the expense of the ‘pensions due to
disabled war veterans and to the families of the dead’. Here is the true
and heartfelt plea of wounded French veterans. This was not, Cassin,
went on, a matter of special pleading or egoism.
Cassin in Geneva 67
Raising their eyes to the future, these veterans, despite their suffering, and maybe
because of their suffering, these veterans pledge to continue their struggle until a
new world comes into being. So recently having laid down their arms, they tried
to fulfil the promises made to their brothers who fell for the right, and they have
worked in all sincerity to support the efforts of a great man, Woodrow Wilson,
and all the founders of the League of Nations.
They gave their whole-hearted support to researchers, teachers, edu-

cators, dedicated to passing on la flamme de l’esprit (the torch of the
spirit) to the new generation. That is why they spoke to the young, to
the orphans of the war, about the great work being done by the League,
which their fathers’ sacrifice had made possible. We the veterans, Cassin
went on, were the best ambassadors of the League. They spoke to gather-
ings small and large about ‘arbitration between states, sanctions against
those which violate pacts, disarmament through security’, indeed about
each and every means of avoiding the horrors of war through ‘a juridical
organization of Nations’ and ‘the improvement and the moral disarma-
ment of the people’. In this spirit, he conveyed the immense support of
those injured in the war, as well as those who served and avoided injury,
for the League and its work for peace. A huge task of education was at
hand, one which had to be world-wide in order to succeed, one which
entailed ‘an alliance of intellectual elites and the masses, an alliance of
the lost generation and the generation to come’.39
Throughout his years at Geneva, Cassin never spoke in the same man-
ner in the Assembly. He had made his point. He was a delegate ‘of those
who think, those who act, and those who suffer’ as a consequence of
war.40 The veterans’ movement was watching the League, in hopeful
expectation that it would forge immovable barriers against the return of
war. He was there on their behalf, and not as a political spokesman for a
party or a faction. Here as throughout his life, Cassin remained firmly a
soldier of the Great War, a man with a mission.
The particular task in hand was not as difficult as later tasks would be.
The Institute was indeed opened in Paris, and two-thirds of its budget was
paid by the French state.41 Its French character did not please everybody,
particularly some British observers, who felt it was an outpost of French
cultural imperialism. Having little financial support from the League
itself, the Institute took on an independent stance, holding meetings
39 SDN archive, Geneva, 1924, Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle;

382AP134, activité de l’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1924.
40 382AP12, dossier 5, n.d.
41 SDN archive, 5e Assemblée, dossier 3, letter of Herriot, 12 Aug. 1924, accepting spon-
sorship of Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle; letters of SDN confirming
arrangements, 9 and 23 Sept. 1924.
and publishing works on moral disarmament, on the content of school

textbooks, and the utility of film in League of Nations propaganda. It was
a focal point of intellectual debate, rather than a meeting point of elites
and masses, as Cassin had hoped. Its ultimate legacy was UNESCO,
itself a French creation, housed in Paris after the Second World War.42
L’Union Internationale de Secours (UIS)

The second task Cassin tackled as a delegate to the League of Nations
concerned disaster relief. In his second year at Geneva, he agreed to join
a commission presided over by Giovanni Ciraolo, Italian Senator and
President of the Italian Red Cross.43 This commission, set in motion by
the Assembly of the League on 27 September 1923, proposed to develop
plans to create ‘an international federation of states for the mutual assis-
tance of populations struck by calamities’, such as floods, earthquakes
and other natural disasters.44 Ciraolo argued that the Red Cross had
been stretched to breaking point by the war, thereby leaving unattended
victims of earthquakes, mining disasters, tidal waves, volcanoes, drought,
avalanches. Victims of these calamities had what Ciraolo termed ‘the right
to aid’, given ‘not by grace, but by justice’. ‘The moment has come’, he
said, ‘to substitute the idea of solidarity and mutual assistance between
peoples for charity.’45
Cassin’s work for disabled veterans made him a natural choice for this
assignment. Here was an opportunity to move the field of humanitarian
assistance closer to the field of rights. Those who were injured or dis-
placed by floods or earthquakes, he believed, had a right to assistance,
one which went beyond charity. He urged fellow delegates to appoint a
commission, including ‘men of action, of experience or great interna-
tional authority’. Evidently, he counted himself among such people, and
indeed he was appointed to the working committee chaired by Ciraolo
in 1925.46
There was considerable opposition initially to the project. The British
thought it would undermine the Red Cross; the Americans thought this
was a matter for private philanthropy, not for states. Indians thought
42 Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, la Société des Nations et la coopération intel-

lectuelle (1919–1946) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999).
43 SDN archive, Geneva, 1925, Box 667, 12/41445x/41377, appointment of Cassin to
Ciraolo commission, 6 Feb. 1925.
44 382AP19, Communiqué au Conseil aux membres de la société et aux délégués à
l’Assemblée, A/48/1924/IV.
45 SDN archive, Geneva, CUIS papers, Ciraolo remarks, 1 Sept. 1922.
46 CUIS papers, 28 June 1925, p. 37.
Cassin in Geneva 69
that states around the world were too far apart in terms of development
for such a project to work. The Greeks, the Norwegians and the South
Africans felt it could not be funded, especially at a time of international
financial crisis. Only the Italians and the Germans were enthusiastic
backers of the idea. To the German government, here was ‘a new field of
activity to reduce common suffering in peacetime’.47
Ciraolo proceeded cautiously, and gradually wore down the opposi-
tion, in particular from the Red Cross. In this stage of the project, Cassin
pressed the case, as he did time and again in his career, for the creation
of a documentation centre for the study of calamities. In the second ses-
sion of the working committee, held in Paris between 27 and 29 June
1925, Cassin successfully pressed his colleagues to define aid in time of
disaster as an ‘obligation of humanity’ rather than a simple obligation.
Their objective was to ‘put into practice the right of aid for all people in
times of calamity’.48 His earlier notion of veterans’ rights now extended
to civilians facing analogous catastrophes in peace time.
Slowly but surely the project gained ground, and became a matter of
nearly unanimous support within the League. In September 1925, Cassin
felt able, somewhat playfully, to pen a poem, entitled ‘Variations on the
Ciraolo Project’:
In the first years of this project

Nobody wanted to help it along
But when the worry
Over the risk of rejection,
Vanished,
Every delegate tenderly felt,
And worked for this project.
R.C. 21 September 192549
More accurate than elegant, these sentiments described the progress

made by Ciraolo and his colleagues. In 1926, the Council of the League
approved the drafting of statutes of the new organization to be named
the International Union of Aid (UIS).50 On 12 July 1927, the con-
vention was signed; it entered into force in December 1932.51 The
47 382AP19, A/48/1924/4, responses to Assembly’s letter asking for opinions on Ciraolo’s

project.
48 382AP19, 2e session, Commission d’étude du projet Ciraolo, 27–29 June 1925, p. 19;
SDN archive, Papers of CUIS, 21 Sept. 1925.
49 382AP19, Poème, R.C., 21 Sept. 1925. 50 382AP19, C.2.M.2 1926 II.
51 CUIS papers. The signatories were France, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Colombia,
Cuba, the free city of Danzig, Ecuador, Finland, Guatemala, Italy, Monaco, Poland,
Rumania, Spain, Turkey and Uruguay.
League was initially responsible for the control of the accounts of this
new organization.52
As in many other cases of steps taken by the League, the material
effects of this initiative were less important than the way it moved the
discussion of humanitarian aid closer to the domain of human rights.
After the Second World War, the UIS was absorbed by the International
Red Cross and by UNESCO.53
The Geneva Protocol

These early assignments in the League were followed by two much more
difficult ones. The first was the development and codification from 1925
on of the ‘Geneva Protocol’ for the peaceful resolution of national con-
flicts. The second, beginning in the 1920s, was the effort to initiate
multi-lateral disarmament. Both failed spectacularly in the 1930s, and
when they did, the League was doomed. Cassin witnessed that failure.
But he also came to see, as did others in Geneva, that the problems were
not just matters of timing or tactics. The essential flaw in the workings of
the League was its fundamental acceptance of the sacrosanct character
of the principle of national sovereignty.
The League was a federation of sovereign states, whose foreign poli-
cies were not designed or abridged by commitments to the League. The
United States Senate had turned down the League, and with it the Peace
Treaty of Versailles, because, in the view of a substantial minority, the
treaty threatened national sovereignty. The senators need not have wor-
ried. The League never escaped from the Westphalian system it was
supposed to regulate in a peaceful manner. In the mid-1920s, when eco-
nomic recovery was under way, and eminent statesmen like Briand and
Stresemann were committed to creating a more temperate climate in
European affairs, this contradiction between the aims of the League and
the structure of power remained below the surface. But after the eco-
nomic crisis of 1929, and the resurgence of military aggression, first in
Manchuria in 1931 and then in Ethiopia in 1935, these deadly fault lines
emerged in an unmistakable way. The international system was incapable
of generating and preserving a viable system of collective security, while
leaving intact the principle of unbridled state sovereignty.
52 CUIS papers, report of 17 Feb. 1928, list of signatories to Convention and statutes
establishing an International Relief Union, 12 July 1927.
53 Comité International de la Croix Rouge, Inventaire P UIS, Union Internationale de
Secours, 1920–90, pp. 3–4; see also Marc-Auguste Borgeaud, L’Union Internationale
de Secours (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1932); and John F. Hutchinson, ‘Disasters and the
international order’, International History Review, 22 (2000), pp. 1–36.
Cassin in Geneva 71
That principle, Cassin came to see, was what had to go. His time at
the League was both frustrating and liberating. He worked as hard as he
could, alongside dozens of like-minded men and women, to find a way to
make the recourse to war anathema, and to reduce the armaments which
in and of themselves made war at times inevitable. The Kellogg-Briand
Pact of 1928 was a step in the direction of containing international war;
but even though it committed states to renouncing war as an instrument
of foreign policy, it was incapable of containing the centrifugal forces
tearing Europe and the world apart.
The failure of these multiple efforts in the League and elsewhere in the
inter-war years to move from war to peace through international law was
palpable. And yet it was also the prelude to a fundamental rethinking of
the nature of and necessary limits to state power in international affairs.
It was in Geneva and in light of his experience in the League that Cassin
began the journey that led to a new way of thinking about the state, and
through it to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
In 1924 and 1925, acting as a member of the League Commission
delegated to elaborate the Geneva Protocol, Cassin found himself at the
heart of the juridical debate on the future of the League. The question
jurists like Beneš, Politis and Lord Robert Cecil confronted was how they
could implement the League’s Covenant in effective judicial and political
terms. Without such developments, the Covenant and the League were
unlikely to survive.
The outcome of their efforts was the Geneva Protocol of 1924, which
outlined an evolutionary strategy for the development of the League and
the international system as a whole. Cassin spent much of his early period
in the League helping to unfold this evolutionary doctrine. Step by step,
the resort to war had to be constrained and ultimately eliminated as a
legal option in international affairs.
In a speech in Warsaw in July 1925 to the International Union of
League of Nations Societies, Cassin summed up much of the technical
and political work he did as part of the commission drafting resolutions
to turn the Protocol into a reality. The Protocol was needed to avoid
‘the weakening of the Pact of 1919’, in the face of opposition from many
quarters. The 1925 document was no ‘brilliant and perishable improvi-
sation’, but rather ‘the product of a rather slow process of evolution’. The
Protocol was ‘an instrument for the practical realization of the aims of
the Pact’, through the implementation of measures aimed at strengthen-
ing arbitration, assuring security ‘through reciprocal general or regional
assistance’, and by arms reduction ‘to the minimum compatible with the
security of each nation and international obligations’. These three prin-
ciples were indivisible: they required action on the juridical, moral and
material levels, in order to create ‘general rules of public administration’,

which would control the explosive forces of international affairs without
war.54
The programme was ambitious, and full of difficulties. In 1927, a con-
flict between Hungary and Rumania exposed the problems imbedded in
enforcing the results of international arbitration.55 The matter in ques-
tion touched on the Hungarian minority living within the newly defined
borders of Rumania; since the defence of minority rights was one of the
responsibilities of the League, the matter became a subject for general
debate. The outcome, in favour of Rumania, left untouched the vexed
question of enforcement. In the 1930s, this question would return in an
even more lethal form.
In 1928, Cassin worked alongside Politis and other jurists on
the Assembly’s first (judicial) commission on revising the terms the
League adopted on ‘conventions of arbitration’ and ‘treaties of mutual
security’.56 Cassin’s line of argument affirmed the need ‘to develop con-
fidence towards the International Court of Justice among men of our
times and those people so tried by the war’. Nothing precipitate should
be done, since it was essential to avoid alienating American opinion which
was still hostile to the League.57 He also took a hand in the establishment
of a radio and cable service for the League, which would be independent
of the commercial carriers, and ensure its communications in times of
crisis.
A political interlude
In a sense the years 1924–28 form the high point of René Cassin’s engage-
ment with the League of Nations. He rode on the wave of optimism of
the middle years of the 1920s, and made his own contribution to the
development of the institution. Each year he reported to the annual con-
vention of the UF as to developments in Geneva, and made it clear that
having a representative in Geneva was in the interest of veterans. He was,
however, troubled by his subordinate position within the French delega-
tion. As we have noted, he was there to speak for his constituency, which
was outside the political arena. This was both his great advantage and his
great disadvantage. On 17 November 1928, he wrote to Paul-Boncour,
54 A/BIT, Cabinet Albert Thomas, Dossiers nominaux de correspondance, Congrès de

l’Union internationale des associations pour la SDN, Warsaw, 3–8 July 1925. Rapport
de M. Cassin, ‘Protocole de Genève présenté au nom de la commission politique’.
55 382AP13, C./47e Session/ P.V. 1. Cassin sided with the Rumanians, alongside Politis.
56 382AP14, A. I./6, 9th session of 1st Commission, 20 Sept. 1928.
57 382AP14, A. I./9, 22 Sept. 1928.
Cassin in Geneva 73
who had just resigned from the French delegation to Geneva, in light
of his recent electoral failure. Cassin regretted, but said he understood,
Paul-Boncour’s decision. Paul-Boncour had a political constituency at
home; in contrast, he wrote, ‘I represent veterans outside of all political
parties.’58
And yet that very aloofness from the domestic political arena severely
limited his standing and his freedom of action in Geneva. When Briand
asked him to serve as a delegate in the 1929 session of the League, he
accepted, but asked that his position as a representative of the veter-
ans’ movement not be used to justify his being marginalized within the
delegation.59 Here is how he put it to fellow delegate and career diplomat
René Massigli:
This is not a question of vanity but of principle: it is difficult to accept that the
only representative of the veterans has a place at the foot of the table and is
incapable a priori of achieving through his work a more important place in the
delegation . . . I know very well that a delegate like me cannot claim and assume
first-rank responsibilities, which belong to the heads of the delegation. However,
in arranging the way the delegation works, I have the right to avoid being stripped
of all useful tasks which I have been able to fulfil in the past and not to see them
given to newcomers whose choice is not my affair . . . I can understand that my
role in the third commission [on disarmament] may be modified, I will not even
think about continuing in the first commission, if I am not in charge of the work
on the revision of the statute.60
Cassin was reassured that his role was essential, and went ahead with his
work on disarmament, to which we shall turn in a moment. But before
doing so, it is important to place this sense of unease within Cassin’s
thinking in the period 1928–32 about a parliamentary political career.
He thought hard about putting forward his candidacy for the Conseil
Général, the departmental administration, at Antibes, near Nice. His
hope was that his holding elective office would strengthen his position
within the international arena he had made his own. And yet the costs
of doing so made him think hard about taking this path. He knew that
his marriage was under strain because of his commitments to the vet-
erans’ movement. How much harder would it be for Simone if he had
yet another set of responsibilities and meetings to attend to? How distant
from each other would they be? How isolated would she become? Per-
haps, that problem could be solved, he mused, by providing her with a
comfortable home with its attendant responsibilities in Antibes, and by
58 382AP14, Cassin to Paul-Boncour, 17 Nov. 1928.

59 382AP14, Cassin to Briand, 30 Aug. 1929.
60 382AP14, Cassin to Massigli, 30 Aug. 1929.
insisting that she drive an automobile. ‘She will then have the desire and
a kind of obligation to accompany me.’61
He ruminated too about his own character. Did he have the flair for
compromise or the tolerance of fools needed in politics? If he had failed
to get FIDAC and CIAMAC to come to an understanding, would he do
better facing similar impasses he was bound to confront in the political
world? Did he have the resources to afford the trappings of a political
life? Did he have the guidance of a patron, or the support of a trusted
secretary? The answer to all these questions was in the negative, and yet
still he decided to go forward and seek elected office. The reason was
simple. He felt that he had a duty to do so. No other leader of the UF or
in the veterans’ world had stood for election to the Chamber of Deputies
or the Senate, and hence someone had to speak especially to the young
about the values for which they had fought in the past and would fight in
the future. His cohort was perhaps too modest, or too timid, but someone
had to come forward. And not without some trepidation, that is precisely
what Cassin did.62
His electoral campaign in 1928 in the Maritime Alps was unsuccessful.
This was familiar terrain for Cassin; his family was well known and so
was his military record. But these credentials were not enough. He had
neither the personal charm nor the local connections to persuade voters in
Antibes that he was the man to represent them on the departmental level.
In his own constituency, he came second after another local figure.63 His
profile as a man of peace was admirable, but had clearly limited appeal.
In Antibes, he entered an election shaped by local rivalries, which turned
his candidacy into an irrelevance.64
Cassin’s ambivalence about the prospects he faced had he been suc-
cessful suggests that he may have returned home somewhat relieved by
his defeat. He had more than enough to do in his new post in the Law
Faculty in Paris and in the UF and the League. And yet three years
later, he enrolled as a member of the Radical party, within the branch
of the fifth arrondissement of Paris.65 In 1932, he took up the electoral
challenge once again; this time for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies as
representative of the constituency of Albertville-Moutiers in Savoie.
61 382AP8, Cassin handwritten personal reflections, 17 April 1928.

62 382AP8, Cassin handwritten personal reflections, 17 April 1928.
63 382AP8, dossier 1 on his candidacy.
64 382AP8, Le Progrès d’Antibes, 20 Oct. 1928. Cassin secured 578 votes; the winning
candidate had 1,353 votes. Consequently, Cassin withdrew his candidacy before the
second round of voting.
65 AN, C 15260, 94001/507, personal file of Cassin as member of the Provisional Consul-
tative Assembly. His work for the Radical party in 1944–45 is documented in 382AP74.
Cassin in Geneva 75
Cassin was prompted to stand by veterans in Savoie, who saw an oppor-

tunity for him to fill the seat vacated by the Deputy Antoine Borrel upon
his election to the Senate.66 Cassin wrote to Pierre Cot, Radical deputy
and party leader who represented Chambéry in Savoie, that ‘very strong
friends are keen to support me . . . If a local Radical candidate who is able
to succeed does not appear, it would be possible to make some discrete
soundings.’ Cassin then added that if, after these preliminary soundings,
he would stand for election, ‘I would only do so in total friendship and
loyalty towards you, but I would do so with all the conscientiousness, the
tenacity, and the spirit required.’67
Cassin acted out of loyalty not only to the Radical-Socialist party, but
also to its leader Herriot, who had nominated him eight years before to
be a member of the French delegation to the League. In his preliminary
work to generate local interest in his candidacy, he wrote to the mayor of
Chambéry that ‘Mr Herriot and the members of the Central Committee
of the Radical-Socialist party’ ‘are strongly encouraging me to enter the
political struggle’.68 How much of this is true and how much is formulaic
is unclear. Herriot wrote Cassin a letter of support on 3 September
1932. So did his UF comrade Viala, who wondered whether ‘mountain
peasants, rough and insular’ would find his campaign appealing.69
Cassin did try to generate support in the region; with the aid of the
regional veterans’ organization, he visited Savoie in December 1931.70
He spoke about disarmament, and his work for the League, and its link
with the ongoing effort to secure work and decent pensions for veterans.
The biographical note he himself wrote for distribution described him
as a modest worker, ‘a man who had been pressed since 1919 to enter
Parliament to better serve France and the cause of Peace’.71 None of this
worked. The Radical party chose another candidate, and Cassin never
again stood for political office. He would remain throughout the 1930s
what he had been before: the veterans’ delegate to the League, without
the political credentials to move to the first rank of the French delegation.
This brief flirtation with domestic electoral politics occurred in the
period when he moved from the Faculty of Law in Lille to that of Paris.
He now no longer had to divide his week between teaching in Lille on
Monday through Wednesday, and living in Paris the rest of the week. The
end of the 1920s was, therefore, a decisive turning point in Cassin’s life.
66 382AP8, draft of letter of Cassin to Pierre Cot, 1 Oct. 1931.

67 382AP8, draft of letter of Cassin to Pierre Cot, 1 Oct. 1931.
68 382AP8, letter of 30 Nov. 1931. 69 382AP8, Viala to Cassin, 5 Feb. 1932.
70 382AP8, Cassin to Leger, secretary general of the Association des Mutilés, Albertville,
20 Nov. 1931; Cassin to the deputy mayor of Albertville, 9 Dec. 1931.
71 382AP8.
It was the same with respect to the League, which he continued to serve
throughout the darker decade of the 1930s.
Disarmament: endgame
Cassin’s work on disarmament issues in the Third Commission of the
League spanned virtually the entire period of his service in Geneva. The
first steps to prepare an international conference on this subject were
taken in 1925; preparatory work accelerated at the end of the 1920s, work
in which Cassin played an active part.72 The conference itself opened in
Geneva in February 1932.
With Herriot back in power and with Paul-Boncour as his Minister of
War, Cassin was in entire sympathy with the political outlook of those
representing France at the conference. Paul-Boncour gave to Cassin as
his primary assignment responsibility for ‘legal aspects of the question of
chemical warfare’.73 Consequently, he helped draft the protocol concern-
ing the banning of the use of chemical or biological weapons in warfare,
and the protection of civilians in particular from being attacked from the
air with such weapons. In November 1932, he spoke out for the con-
demnation of the use of chemical weapons as the equivalent of piracy, a
crime to be punished by any and all civilized nations. The work still to be
done, he added, was in the sphere of the interdiction of the preparation
of chemical, biological or bacteriological weapons, in the proper modes
of investigation of claims as to their use, and the sanctions to be applied,
if indeed proof existed that such weapons had been deployed.74
In essence, these documents provided the framework within which the
post-1945 inspection of weapons of mass destruction would take place.
For Cassin, though, the effort to limit the category of weaponry to be
used in warfare was a secondary though crucial matter; the primary issue
was the banning of war itself. He worked as well in the commission on
moral rearmament, but had no illusions as to the limited effect of this
work.
The failure of the International Disarmament Conference had many
sources. Some of the key people behind the effort – Stresemann, Briand –
were gone. The world economic crisis had prepared the ground for
Hitler’s accession to power and his withdrawal from both the confer-
ence and the League itself. The effort, though, was in Cassin’s view ‘a
72 382AP15, reports of 3rd Commission, 1931.

73 382AP21, André Mayer to Cassin, 3 Nov. 1932.
74 382AP21, Cassin, ‘Observations sur le rapport de M. Pilotti concernant la prohibition
de la guerre chimique, incendiaire et bactériologique’, n.d.
Cassin in Geneva 77
missed opportunity’; the nationalists and the arms profiteers were too
numerous and too well connected. The old way of doing things, the bel-
licose path that led to the war of 1914–18, was too familiar, too easy, and
too profitable for some, to return to. ‘The further removed we are from
the war’, he wrote in 1929, ‘the harder it will be to lay the foundation
stone of a new international law on armaments.’75
At the heart of the problem, though, was the idea of the absolute
sovereignty of the state. Those who supported that idea found the rea-
son they needed to increase the production of armaments, which in turn
fuelled the politics of prestige, and inevitably led to war itself. In these
discouraging days, in the early 1930s, Cassin began to put together alter-
native notions of what should be the limits of state power in a lawless
world.76 We shall return to these thoughts in a later chapter.
The International Disarmament Conference was adjourned in 1934,
with all parties pointing to all other parties in assessing the blame for its
failure. The pace of world events, though, made it difficult to dwell on
what might have been. Fascism was in power in both Italy and Germany.
Democratic governments were withering under the strain of the economic
depression. Stalin’s crimes against his own people reached staggering
proportions, though world opinion was not fully formed on the matter at
that time.
In this very inclement environment, Cassin continued to do what he
had been doing for a decade. He remained in the French delegation in
Geneva, and continued to speak on behalf of the League at whatever
venue was at his disposal. But in the mid 1930s, he reached the end of a
major phase of his life, the end of the hopeful period in which, as an old
soldier, he had tried to help lead a crusade against war.
First came the fading of his position in the UF and in the veter-
ans’ world as a whole. From Geneva, Cassin perfectly well understood
the nature of the Nazi regime and the persecution of Jews and politi-
cal opponents which it launched. In 1933, the League was served with
a petition by a Silesian Jew, Franz Bernheim, who as a Jew had been
dismissed from his post, an act forbidden by the Treaty of 1922 protect-
ing the minorities in this region, under German authority. The League
upheld Bernheim’s claim, and Germany at that time restored him to his
job.77 But in September, Goebbels came to the General Assembly of
75 382AP14, draft, n.d., of Cassin’s remarks to the 3rd Commission on disarmament,

p. 10.
76 382AP22, Cassin text on collective security to London conference on that topic, 1935.
See pp. 49ff. ‘The day of absolute sovereignty is over’.
77 J. W. Brugel, ‘The Bernheim Petition: a challenge to Nazi Germany in 1933’, Patterns
of Prejudice, 17, 3 (1983), pp. 17–25; Ruth Bondy, ‘Elder of the Jews’. Jakob Edelstein of
the League and said that a man was master of his own castle, and that
thereby the way Germany treated ‘its’ Jews and ‘its’ communists was no
one’s business but its own. Germany’s withdrawal from the League and
its political brutality confirmed Cassin’s view that no possible reconcili-
ation would ever occur with Hitler. Some of his comrades thought they
had to continue their efforts in this way, even with Hitler. Pichot went to
Berchtesgaden to meet him in March 1934.
The next year, the UF went on a friendly visit to Rome from 30 March
to 7 April. In Italy 450 French veterans went on a pilgrimage to meet
their brethren who had bled on the Isonzo front for the same cause. The
high point of the visit was their meeting with Mussolini. Was he a man
with whom veterans could work for peace? Cassin thought not; others
took a different view.
Consider Father Bernard Secret’s report of the April 1935 meeting of
French and Italian veterans in Rome’s Palazzo Venezia, where the Duce’s
offices were situated. First the French delegation was escorted into the
building by Carlo Delcroix, the blind president of the Italian wounded
veterans’ movement. At the appointed time, Mussolini met the French ‘in
the attitude of a commander receiving comrades in arms’. Brousmiche,
then president of the UF, ‘in a few simple words, clear and direct’, saluted
Mussolini in the name of his fellow veterans. The Duce struck a pose in
order to respond in an informal manner. ‘Strong and simple, giving the
impression of physical strength and training of a manual worker and a
sporting man; moving lightly on his haunches like a runner impatient for
action, his thumbs in the pockets of his jacket, as if he had to constrain
his hands not to express a speech which he wanted to give fully sober,
the Duce spoke . . . His power lay in his gaze which was at one and the
same time conquering, ardent, imperious . . . He devoured the audience
with his eyes, and at times, the fire of his gaze glowed impressively.’78
Cassin managed conveniently to miss the meeting with the Duce, and
arrived in time for a papal audience and blessing. He said nothing, which
is hardly surprising.
As a French delegate to the League, he had watched as the Duce’s
designs on independent Abyssinia became more and more apparent. Both
Italy and Abyssinia were members of the League, which received from
Abyssinia repeated requests for arbitration following border skirmishes
with Italian forces in the Horn of Africa. The League’s response was
Theresienstadt, trans. Evelyn Abel (New York: Grove Press, 1989) pp. 44–5. The text
of the petition and the judgment may be found in the online archives of the American
Jewish Committee.
78 Bernard Secret ‘Le voyage de l’U.F. en Italie’, Cahiers de l’Union Fédérale (15 April
1935), pp. 6–15, esp. 10–12.
Cassin in Geneva 79
dilatory, in large part because France and Britain sought to find ways to
placate Mussolini, in hopes that he would act as a future counterweight
to Germany. That policy both stalled the League and did nothing to
stop Mussolini’s military build-up. After a year, a long and tortuous
process of arbitration managed to exonerate both Abyssinia and Italy
from responsibility for the border incidents. So much for the League.
Worse was to come.
4 From nightmare to reality, 1936–1940
At the end of 1935, the war in Ethiopia exposed the impotence of the
League of Nations. The first step the organization had taken in the 1920s
towards collective security remained precisely that: only a first step. When
Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, the League condemned this action.
Japan’s response was to withdraw from the League, and continue its
invasion. Soon after coming to power, Hitler withdrew the German del-
egation from the League. Even before doing so, he had challenged the
League’s claim to defend the rights of minorities within member states.1
In 1935, when Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia, the League had no
effective power to stop them. At this stage, what could Cassin point to
as the fruits of the decade of effort he and others had made in Geneva
and on behalf of the League and the international veterans’ movement?
Was the world of Geneva a chimera, a hall of empty mirrors and empty
people, as Albert Cohen famously described it?2
This lamentable failure in Geneva was made even more unpalatable
for Cassin by a deepening discord with his comrades in the UF, whom he
represented in the League. Some veterans did not share his sense that they
had to take a stand against Italy as much as against Nazi Germany. Some
suspected that what was most important to Cassin was Jewish solidarity.
Even without such suspicions, others wondered what had become of
Cassin the pacifist. He was, to be sure, a man of compromise to a certain
point, but no farther, and that point had already been reached. The
majority of the UF did not share his point of view and favoured continuing
a policy of rapprochement. They all hated war, but Cassin asked Pichot
the decisive question: do you not see where rapprochement is leading?
Would speaking directly with Hitler and Mussolini actually prevent war?
Cassin was right; but that mattered little, if at all, at the time. It was in
this sombre context of a darkening political horizon that at the beginning
1 382AP16, League of Nations, Sixth Commission on Minorities, minutes, 4 Oct. 1933.

2 Albert Cohen, Belle du Seigneur (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
80
From nightmare to reality, 1936–1940 81
of 1936 he was forced to face a personal crisis, one which opened the
darkest period of his life.
A personal reckoning
Doctors had found that Cassin had a gallstone, and that they had to
operate to remove it. Under the medical practice of the time, abdominal
surgery entailed substantial risks. Until the 1940s, and indeed thereafter,
many patients died of the secondary effects of such operations. Reliable
antibiotic drugs were still a few years away. Facing these circumstances,
Cassin knew that the time had come for a sort of reckoning, in case the
worst should come to pass.
He placed his handwritten reflections in an envelope, and, very much
the lawyer, wrote on it in clear, bold letters: ‘Only open in case of death.
This is not a last will and testament.’3 No echoes of Magritte here, simply
the workings of a man whose legal training led him to specify that the
document was personal, and had no legal standing.
This document was in part a stoic’s account of his life and in part the
cri du cœur of a man who felt that his life’s work had not amounted to
what he had hoped it could have been. These were thoughts difficult to
put into a letter to a mother or to a wife, who might misconstrue them.
Facing a blank piece of paper, very much like a diary entry, Cassin wrote:
‘Here I can shed that sense of propriety which restrains me in my letters’;
in this testament, ‘this bottle I hurl into the sea’, he could fully express
some of the strong emotions of the moment before his surgery.
What troubled him most was a sense of futility. When he had faced
death in 1914, near St Mihiel, it was for a cause, and in the company of
men willing – all too willing – to die for it. But to die on an operating table,
silently, under anaesthesia, that seemed somehow banal if not ignoble to
Cassin. Still, the prospect of surgery had its daunting aspects to him: ‘My
mind is drawn a bit to what will happen tomorrow, when my poor flesh
will be cut open (tailladée) and a long series of minor miseries await me.’
Should his life indeed be at its end, Cassin felt, he did not want to
give the appearance of bitterness or disappointment. And yet in this
unofficial testament, his words betrayed both. His thoughts turned first
to the Union Fédérale. He had given twenty years of his life to the
veterans’ movement, and where did he wind up at the end of it all? In his
struggles to open the eyes of his comrades to the war which was on the
horizon, he had abstained from attacking the UF’s leaders. ‘But in not
3 382AP1, ‘N’ouvrir qu’en cas de décès’, handwritten envelope containing the reflections
cited here and below, 1936.
standing apart from them, in not even naming them, I have been unable
to say how much Pichot’s attitude to me over several years has deeply
offended my dignity and my feelings.’
Was this a moment of self-pity, of injured amour propre? He thought
not, since: ‘I have publicly and without reservation left [Pichot] in the
first rank, because of his stronger ties with the masses.’ And yet, instead of
using Cassin’s talents back stage, as it were, ‘he had followed the impulses
of inferior advisors,4 who through jealousy and improper practices, had
led the UF into grave errors in its internal and external affairs. Lacking
a critical spirit, he [Pichot] has shown at certain moments a dangerous
credulity when faced with acts, the hidden motives of which completely
escape him.’ If he were to die, Cassin hoped Pichot would be told that
he, Cassin, ‘had felt deeply about these matters’, though he did not want
to publicize these differences, lest ‘he diminish Pichot’s authority’. He
hoped as well that Viala and several others would know that ‘if they had
not been there, he would not have had the courage to stay’ active in the
movement.
There was more: he had a profound and depressing sense of personal
failure:
I will die without having given my full measure. Without vanity, I believe I have
been one of the very few men in France who ‘saw’ the unique position of our
country in the aftermath of the war and ‘knew’ what had to be done to defend
the interests of our generations and peoples. Unfortunately, a certain degree of
self-doubt led me to shy away too much from claiming the position needed to
realize one’s ideas through one’s own efforts. Albert Thomas is truly the man
who knew how to do that. Faced with opposition, forgotten at home, he was with
Briand one of the few who knew how to see and to create.
Cassin knew that what he had achieved, however, was real enough:
In a too limited framework, and in confidential publications, I did things which

nevertheless will endure, even though they are unknown: the material interests
of war victims (war orphans) and their place in the nation; the mystique of
democracy under the law – and also the mystique of the League of Nations. In
spite of everything! Because the Communists have prevented us from having the
support of all the people at the right moment and the socialists for too long called
for disarmament without wanting to consider the need for a coercive organization.
Faced with the events of 1935 and the beginning of 1936, those at the
heart of the UF who had worked for peace had ‘nothing to disavow’.
‘The scandal is to see the pacifism of the masses exploited at home so
4 Cassin was thinking here of Georges Pineau, a journalist who had come from the UNC
and who had established himself more and more on Cahiers de l’UF.
that the dictators and warmongers have a free hand and prepare new
massacres.’ And perspicaciously, he mused: ‘I am very troubled and
wonder if our people, faced with clever intrigues, will not be led to
another Sadowa, announcing another Sedan.’5 The press too had a lot
to answer for. ‘More than ever, I detest the brain-washing of which our
press offers the saddest example.’ Cassin still retained a robust faith in the
people. ‘Without ignoring its defects, I have confidence in democracy,
in the good sense of the people; I so very much do not want to see my
country give in to the adoration of force!’ On the other hand, he distrusted
the politicians who ‘are perfectly capable of succeeding in the tactics of
“selling to the highest bidder”, and of throwing our people into the abyss
of the dictatorships’. We do not know to whom Cassin was referring
here, but it is difficult to imagine a better prediction of the career path of
Pierre Laval, whom Cassin had met in Geneva in the French delegation
to the League of Nations. So much for a life unfulfilled. What about the
half-filled part of the cup?
At least, I did not waste my life; because I found and kept to the profession I
love, transmitted faithfully to hearts and to minds a bit of the flame which drives
me on, and around the axis set by marriage and profession, I gave everything a
man could give; but I also received.
And yet, the mix of stoicism and sadness in his reflections is

unmistakable:
Facing the grave, I will not hide. I would have preferred that my death would
have served a useful purpose; at the front or in the midst of the political struggle.
Having been unable to die for my country or my loved one, I would like to have
lived usefully for both of them. But what great effort, and for such a meagre
result?
In part, Cassin’s meditation disclosed a sense of loneliness, or more pre-

cisely regret that ‘there had been no one with a strong personality who
provided me with true moral support’. Perhaps this kind of relationship is
what he had sought in his unsuccessful efforts to win a seat in the Assem-
bly or the Senate; there he might have found the man whose backing and
solidarity would have made the difference. And yet he had known such
men in the League of Nations in Geneva, without having found such a
patron or partner either there or in domestic political life.
Cassin acknowledged the comfort he had sought and found in his
marriage: ‘I owe a debt to my lifelong companion for having ceaselessly
5 The reference is to the Prussian victory of 1866 at Sadowa, near Königgrätz, preparing
the Prussian army’s path towards their crushing defeat of France in 1870 at Sedan,
ending the Second Empire in France and inaugurating the German Empire.
defended my [sic] marriage, our little home’, and modulating any notion
that he had been responsible for the condition which threatened his life,
he added: ‘I remain happy even if I die, since it would not be due to
overwork or to any other infirmity due to imprudence.’ His enemy was a
‘gallstone’, the arrival of which had come out of the blue sky. Stiffening
his resolve – which may have been the purpose of writing this testament
in the first place – he went on in his interior monologue, in a declamatory
style he would adopt later in his Second World War diaries:
So, René, it is time to face your destiny. After having done everything humanly
possible to assure success, do not weaken because you leave behind sweetness,
tenderness, material or moral satisfaction.
True grandeur, more than ever, is found, as Vigny put it, after having worked
hard, very, very hard, to wait firmly and to receive the blows of Destiny. If only
they can spare those I protect?
René
It appears that the surgery was postponed a day, since Cassin renewed his
reflections the following day, 20 January 1936. He picked up where he
had left off: with thoughts about those who would suffer through losing
him. His brother had a large family; his mother, his father had their own
lives to lead. But what about Simone? She was the most vulnerable of all.
‘Last night, I searched their faces’, near his bed: ‘Simone smiled at me,
she would lose almost everything, should I die. I have been able to give
her a degree of relative security: but she only has me.’ To protect her, he
would do whatever was in his power to do. His life was in the balance,
and of one thing he was sure: ‘I want to live.’6
This document is a remarkable statement of a man facing his own
death, and doing so with the sense that, during his life, he had left too
many things undone, unrealized. And yet, what he expressed is marked
by what we all share – the certainty that we are the last to know the shape
of our own lives while we are living them. The operation was a success,
and Cassin returned to his varied life. He had forty more years to live,
years full of failures, achievement and distinction, completely invisible in
his pre-operative hospital ward.
From collective security to the Leviathan state, 1935–40

The year 1935 was the turning point in Cassin’s thinking about the
League of Nations. Until then, his commitment to the League was based
6 382AP1, for all citations.

upon a hope that the security of sovereign states could be assured by

a policy of collective security. Thereafter, and then only slowly, Cassin
moved away from his faith in the League, whose foundations rested on
state sovereignty. The flaws within this system of maintaining the peace
became painfully evident in the 1930s. In that decade, and in the 1940s,
he sketched out an alternative approach to state sovereignty, one which
truncated it in order to secure the peace. In his thinking, state sovereignty
still remained intact, with one important exception: in future, no state
would have the unbridled power to violate the rights of its own citizens
or those of other countries. Such violations were outrageous in and of
themselves, but they also described an environment, he believed, in which
war was inevitable.
In the 1930s, Cassin moved from focusing on collective security to
focusing on Leviathan states and what could be done to limit their
destructive power. In opposing them, Cassin came to see the need to
move beyond collective security and towards a future universal commit-
ment to the defence of human rights. This shift in his thinking about the
state occurred before the Second World War, and it can be dated from
the dark years of the 1930s and the slow and inexorable descent into
war.
It is important to note the reluctance with which Cassin reached this
conclusion. He was one of many who saw war as an abomination. Its
recurrence was both unthinkable, and yet just around the corner. Here is
the ambivalent atmosphere of Giraudoux’s play La guerre de Troie n’aura
pas lieu (1935), and of Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937). Cassin’s clarity
of vision gave his writings in the last years of peace a certain nightmare
quality, the ambiance of someone who knows that something terrible
is about to happen, something no one wants, but which no one can
avoid.
In 1935, he wrote a long paper with a colleague in the Faculty of Law
of Paris, Georges Scelle.7 Together they sketched out the mixed history
of collective security, as an approach to preserve the peace. Here is a valu-
able document offering a profile of Cassin’s decade of work at the League,
reflecting the evolution of his thinking about war and peace. The venue
was a meeting of the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle
in London. To the assembled lawyers and diplomats, Cassin and Scelle
sketched out the struggle for public opinion in France between those who
supported individual state security as the sole defensive posture France
had to adopt, and those others – including the two authors – who rallied
7 382AP22, Georges Scelle and René Cassin, ‘Mémoire sur l’opinion française et le
problème de la sécurité collective’, April 1935.
to collective security, as a means of defining, controlling and proscribing

conflicts in post-war Europe.
The key to this second approach to international affairs was summa-
rized in the slogan: ‘Arbitration, disarmament, security’. They started,
sensibly enough, with a definition of security. It is ‘a state of mind, thus
an opinion: one has security when one believes it to be so’. National
security was thus the sentiment shared by a population that had no rea-
son to fear external aggression, or if such were to occur, it would have
very little chance to succeed.8 This subjectivist interpretation led them
to emphasize the importance of rallying public opinion in the fight for
the League.
Neither was under any illusion as to the difficulties such an effort
faced. There were substantial parts of the French population – the army
industrialists, the political right, parts of the veterans’ movement – who
never saw any hope in the League. They put their faith in strong armed
forces and garrisons. Facing this unilateralist bloc, though, was a wide
range of people whose revulsion as to the recurrence of war was such as
to persuade them to adopt a collective approach to ensuring the peace.
Supported by parties of the left, this group brought together:
Trade unionism, a large part of the victims of the war and the veterans’ movement
(whose associations, mostly rural, are often led by schoolteachers and priests),
the pacifist leagues, the associations for the League of Nations, a part of Catholic
opinion, especially among social Catholics, and a majority of intellectuals and
university professors. This bloc, less well organized, less homogenous, and less
well off than their opponents, above all with respect to the press, forms the
numerical majority in the country and in Parliament.
The history of the League was one of the shift of opinion from the
unilateralist to the collectivist approach in the 1920s, and then of the
erosion and eclipse of collective security as an approach to international
affairs in the first half of the 1930s.
Scelle and Cassin presented both the achievements of the League and
the structural sources of its weakness. French opinion was fully aware
of the ways most delegations in Geneva adopted a narrow definition ‘of
the binding powers of the Assembly’. Resolutions passed in 1921 left ‘to
each government to decide whether or not there had been a violation of
the Pact’. In effect the assembly had no power to take binding action –
what Cassin and Scelle termed ‘des résolutions organiques’; instead the
institution’s resolutions were advisory only and appeared to have had
little or no force.9
8 Scelle and Cassin, ‘La sécurité collective’, p. 2.
Successive French delegations to Geneva, in which Cassin had served,

worked to change this situation and to give the League of Nations ‘deci-
sive power’. Their primary objective was disarmament. Their work was
conducted on many levels. They operated within the Joint Temporary
Commissions on armaments, and sponsored Resolution XIV of the 3rd
Assembly ‘in which the French delegation, supported by a working major-
ity, laid out the necessary linkage between security and disarmament.
Security first; voluntary disarmament in exchange, in proportion to the
degree of security obtained.’10 This was an achievement of French del-
egates, Herriot, Paul-Boncour and Briand, whose work at Geneva lay
behind the protocols of 1924 and the Treaties of Locarno. These land-
marks triggered ‘a veritable wave of enthusiasm in favour of the League
of Nations’ in France.11
If the period 1919–28 was one of positive achievements in Geneva,
the following seven years, Scelle and Cassin showed, were meagre ones
indeed. The critical point was the loss of momentum, and the failure to
link the Kellogg-Briand pact with the disarmament conference sponsored
by the League. Kellogg-Briand was, they believed, a normative advance,
‘the equivalent of the suppression’ of what they termed in French ‘la
compétence de guerre’, the right of governments to wage war and ‘to
act justly’ in their own right, as they and only they saw it. And yet even
this achievement left undone two essential tasks: specifying modes of
enforcement and defining precisely the nature of aggression. Without
agreement on these matters, it would be impossible to complete ‘the
organic construction of peace’.12
The League had no difficulty in deciding on what constituted aggres-
sion with respect to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, but it
was incapable of turning its condemnation into effective action. Instead,
a pattern was set which ultimately destroyed the League. First came the
withdrawal of Japan, and then after Hitler came to power, the withdrawal
of Nazi Germany. Aggressors simply turned their backs on the League,
and assumed, correctly as it turned out, that bilateral diplomacy, state to
state, would remain at the heart of international relations. So much for
collective security.
There was, though, a flurry of activity to reach agreement on disar-
mament, even after Germany had left the League. The aim was not only
to restore the League’s credibility and to offer an alternative to height-
ened international tension, but to find a way to bring Germany back to
10 Scelle and Cassin, ‘La sécurité collective’, pp. 11–12.

Geneva. On 14 October 1933, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir John

Simon, presented a plan, agreed with France, Belgium, Italy, Greece
and Czechoslovakia. The first step was to abolish Part V of the Treaty
of Versailles. This change meant that German law no longer had to be
maintained in conformity with the Peace Treaty of 1919, a move towards
equality long demanded by German diplomats. More important for the
other powers was a two-step process of disarmament. In the first four
years, each signatory would consolidate its defensive forces at specified
levels, after which there would be no further arms acquisition. In the sec-
ond four-year period, armament levels would be reduced progressively
by all signatories. On the same day as Simon spoke, Germany sent a tele-
gram to say it was not going to comply with disarmament. Even though
Paul-Boncour pressed to have the convention put to the vote of all mem-
ber states of the League, nothing further came of it. Disarmament was
effectively dead.13
Cassin and Scelle tell this story dispassionately and precisely. It is hard
to see how anyone could still believe that the League could survive this
defeat, and yet looking it in the eye, Cassin retained a modicum of faith.
Yes, he knew that years of effort by dozens of delegates had not been
enough. But the verdict on Nazi Germany was still out, and despite
violence in Austria and elsewhere in 1934, the effort to revive the project
of ‘collective security’ had to go on.
On 25 June 1934, Cassin’s Greek colleague Nikolas Politis led the
way in establishing a basis for regional accords in the ‘Collective Treaty
of Mutual Assistance’ of the Committee on arbitration and security of
the League of Nations. Cassin had been part of the drafting committee
working on this document.14 There were other positive developments.
The USSR entered the League in 1934, and the US formally entered
the ILO the same year. Despite all, Scelle and Cassin insisted, French
public opinion refused to see war as ‘inevitable’. But peasants and work-
ers no longer believed that peace could be guaranteed by a signature
on a document prepared by the League. The Council had to agree to
‘the firm and reciprocal engagement in mutual assistance of peaceloving
nations against any attempt to disturb the European territorial order’.
‘In order to avoid a return to absolute sovereignty, of which the arms
race and economic autarky are the most characteristic signs, there
is only one way forward, the immediate reinforcement of collective
solidarity.’15
13 Scelle and Cassin, ‘La sécurité collective’, pp. 45–7.

14 Scelle and Cassin, ‘La sécurité collective’, p. 63, underlining in the text.
15 Scelle and Cassin, ‘La sécurité collective’, pp. 73–5, underlining in the text.
The UF, as we have seen, paid a fraternal visit to Italian veterans

in April 1935. To avoid compromising the chance for peace, however
fragile that was, Cassin had participated in this piece of theatre orches-
trated by the fascists, though he said nothing and managed to be absent
from a reception given by Mussolini. Cassin had good reason to think
the Duce wanted war. In September, the Italian army invaded Ethiopia.
The League of Nations declared Italy the aggressor and imposed eco-
nomic sanctions on her, but these measures did nothing to change the
course of the war. The embargo on oil was breached, and Britain did
nothing to block the passage of essential supplies which passed through
the Suez Canal en route to the Italian army in Ethiopia. The outcome
was inevitable: Addis Ababa fell on 5 May 1936, and so did any hope
that the League of Nations could play a major role in the prevention of
war.
Cassin supported sanctions, and he continued to argue in his articles
in the veterans’ press that those who accepted Italian aggression were
burying the League of Nations. But under his still firm convictions lay
a strain of disenchantment. Many others still believed as much as he
did in collective security, but they were clearly in the minority, and they
lacked sufficient popular support to defend the League’s approach to the
Ethiopian war. Both the League as a whole and Ethiopia, as a full member
of it, were sacrificed for diplomatic advantage in a Europe redefined by
the Nazi seizure of power.
Cassin still called for the veterans’ movement to regroup around the
League of Nations and to fight against the fatalism which reflected despair
over the chances of blocking the return to war, first in Africa and then in
Europe. His articles became more vigilant, more concerned with defend-
ing the authority and even the very existence of the League. He believed
he had the support of the executive committee of the UF, but when war
broke out first in Ethiopia and then in Spain, Cassin’s attachment to the
League of Nations sounded as hollow as did the rhetoric of Pichot, from
whose views he withdrew further and further.
At the end of 1935, Pichot had written in the Cahiers de l’UF: ‘Down
with war!’16 Cassin replied personally to him in a sharp note, written in
haste: ‘I am with you on the slogan. But your article said nothing about
the collective means which the UF supports to maintain the peace.’17 But
given his abandonment of the League, Cassin’s words about a collective
response offered only an illusory alternative, and he knew it. Publicly, he
refused to lose confidence in the League and called for others to support
it, but his rhetoric was undercut by his clarity of thought. He had not
16 Cahiers de l’UF, 15 Oct. 1935. 17 382AP23, manuscript note, n.d. (1935?).

yet arrived at the point of admitting that there was no other way than to
prepare for the war they had tried to avoid. It was still impossible for him
to join those who subscribed to the Latin tag, if you want peace, then
prepare for war.
Cassin’s network of connections was sufficiently well developed to
enable him to try to coordinate international efforts to prevent the League
from falling apart completely. He reached out to British public figures
he had met in Geneva to forge a common front to persuade their two
governments to act in tandem. Lord Robert Cecil wrote to Cassin that
he agreed that the moment was critical. One had to choose, Cecil said,
between Italy and the League, since Mussolini had said that the League
had no right to intervene in the conflict. It was ‘now or never’, he told
Cassin, and though he admitted that he and his government had been
too cautious in responding to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, he
still had hope that a strong common stand could be taken against Italian
aggression.18 Cassin wrote as well to Hugh Dalton, a Labour party figure,
who was critical both of his own government and of the French. Just at
the moment, he noted, when ‘by our own propaganda and by the Peace
Ballot, we have forced our reluctant Government to stand firm against
Mussolini’s aggression, France seems to run away . . . We have had a hard
fight to make our view prevail. And it is a terrible disillusionment to find
out in so clear and simple and brutal an aggression, we cannot count on
France’ to honour its pledges to impose economic and financial sanctions
on Italy.19 We do not have Cassin’s reply, but it was probably in line with
his view that no nation could remain neutral in the crisis, and that the
League’s future was at stake.20
The same notion of urgency lay behind many statements by League of
Nations activists. Emile Borel warned on 15 October 1935 that should
the League fail to act, ‘any Government preparing aggression would be
encouraged to do so’.21 The annual convention of CIAMAC, held in
Yugoslavia in October 1935, reached the same conclusion. ‘Assembled
in Belgrade, city of suffering, the victim in August 1914 of unjust aggres-
sion, today reborn through the sacrifice of millions of people, CIAMAC
reaffirms the irrepressible force arising from the consciousness of the
repugnant violation of the law.’22 The UF took the same view; it told the
18 382AP10, Cecil to Cassin, 16 Oct. 1935.

19 382AP 12, Dalton to Cassin, 17 Oct. 1935.
20 382AP12, Cassin to Monsieur Mallet of Petit Journal, n.d.
21 382AP23, Fédération Française des Associations pour la SDN, ‘Le conflit Italo-
Ethiopien’, 15 Oct. 1935. Emile Borel, mathematician and Radical-Socialist deputy, was
associated with several international organizations supporting the League of Nations.
22 382AP10, Belgrade Conference of CIAMAC, 24 Sept. 1935.
Italian veterans’ association that no one could countenance ‘the ruin of

the entire organization of collective security, painfully erected through
immense sacrifices’.23 Cassin echoed these views in the veterans’ press.
The stark choice was, he said, between living in an international society
or in a jungle. The consequences for France were grave, should interna-
tional condemnation lead nowhere.24 If the principle of collective security
were thrown aside, there would be no shelter for the people of France in
a future storm.25
The only resource left lay in the strength of its people to keep the
faith and continue to fight against the slide towards war. That is what
Cassin clung on to in the bitter years between 1936 and 1940. He was
not alone in this Quixotic position. In February 1934, he had joined
Pierre Cot and Lord Cecil in creating a popular front against war: the
Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix (Universal Rally for Peace, or
RUP). In it were gathered together unlikely bedfellows, conservative
activists for peace like Cecil, with French Radical socialists like Cot
and Cassin himself, alongside civic or religious organizations, veterans
groups, and socialists and communists in France and elsewhere.26 It
presented anti-war sentiment at a time when war spread around the
globe – to Spain in 1936, then to China in 1937. The RUP constructed a
peace column at the entrance to the International Expo in Paris. Someone
set it afire on the eve of the official opening of the expo, capturing the
futility of its mission.27
Separated from public life at the beginning of 1936 by his operation,
Cassin attended the annual congress of the UF in April, to warn his com-
rades of the risk of becoming ‘the agents of foreign propaganda hostile
to our domestic institutions and to our external security’.28 In June, at
the very moment the Popular Front came to power, his position became
more radical still. As always, he saw no other option than to support the
League of Nations, despite everything. ‘The League of Nations is in a
23 382AP12, ‘Réponse de l’Union Fédérale au message des anciens combattants italiens’,

n.d.
24 382AP23, ‘Société ou jungle?’, Cahiers de l’UF, Sept. 1935.
25 382AP10, Cassin, manuscript of ‘Lettre à un ami français’, p. 14. The draft is undated.
The letter was published facing a letter to an English friend in the special number of
Cahiers de l’UF, 15 Oct. 1935.
26 Rachel Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix (1931–1939): une organisa-
tion de masse?’, Matériaux pour l’Histoire de Notre Temps, 30 (1993), pp. 40–4. Biography,
Conseil d’Etat I, p. 14 (CAC, 20040382/65).
27 Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale University Press), chapter 3.
28 ‘La France combattante et la paix’, Cahiers de l’UF, 20 April 1936.
bad state, to be sure, but what do we have to replace it?’, he asked.29 But
he began to see one alternative:
The bluff of the menace of war has too often served in the last months, to work
to the detriment of our influence and our interests. This bluff only became reality
due to the frenetic demagoguery of fear which certain fervent admirers of violence
internal or external spread throughout our country over the last few months.
We have to convince ourselves fully that every point of view contains dangers, the
country which refuses to consider risks will undoubtedly suffer the consequences
of them one day.30
Without enthusiasm, through realism and clarity, Cassin came to support

the rearmament programme of the government of Léon Blum: ‘Whoever
wants the ends must have the means. There is no national defence without
money.’31 Here is the end of more than a decade of Cassin’s work for
disarmament.
In early 1938, Cassin reflected that the previous year had left ‘a trail of
blood, of suffering, and as a legacy for the future, a chaotic and extremely
precarious situation’. ‘The formula of collective security through the
League of Nations . . . is discredited.’32 The arms industry was boom-
ing. Within a few months, the Czech crisis foretold even worse news.
The German claim was that the residents of the Sudetenland deserved
self-determination, so that they could join the Reich. And even though
the dismemberment of France’s ally Czechoslovakia, and the betrayal of
her long friendship with Eduard Beneš, the Czech Foreign Minister, was
unthinkable to Cassin, it was very thinkable to Daladier and Chamber-
lain. In August 1938 Cassin wrote that if France and Britain give Hitler
a victory, it will be a new Sadowa leading in short order to a general
war. Thus 1866 led to 1870 in Prussia; 1938 in Munich just as assuredly
would lead to war soon enough.33
When the Munich agreement was published, Cassin reflected on the
sources of the French capitulation. He saw in this disaster the outcome
of the political weakness exposed in the riots of 6 February 1934. A
divided nation was incapable of standing firm; consequently, France had
betrayed not only Czechoslovakia but the League as well. And without
French leadership, ‘The League of Nations has become a great machine
29 ‘Echéances accumulées’, Cahiers de l’UF, 10 June 1936.

30 ‘La peur – ennemie de la paix’, Cahiers de l’UF, 20 June 1936.
31 Cahiers de l’UF, 10 March 1937.
32 Cassin, ‘Au seuil d’une phase décisive’, Cahiers de l’UF, 10 Jan. 1938, p. 5.
33 Cassin, ‘Devant les portes de l’enfer: 1914–1938’, Cahiers de l’UF, Aug.–Sept. 1938,
pp. 5–6.
without a motor.’34 Yes, the peace was saved, but only for a moment, and
at what a price. At Munich, the League received the ‘coup de grâce’.35
He told a meeting of representative organizations of the UF on 9 October
1938 that he hoped to see a reconstructed League someday, but now was
not the time for such work.36
He had many reasons for bitterness. His fourteen years of work in
Geneva had come to an end. He was named once more a member of the
French delegation to the League, and he had been in Geneva during the
Munich crisis. ‘A Frenchman who lived through the most alarming days
of September in Geneva must condemn those domestic political currents
which, during a decisive period, as Hitler had predicted, had sapped the
international authority of our country.’37
The Munich crisis indirectly led to a personal tragedy for his family.
From Geneva, he telephoned his brother Fédia that it was dangerous for
his family to remain near the port, which probably would be bombed
in the event of war. The family went to the mountains, and then, on 30
September, René phoned his brother to say that they could go home; the
war crisis was over. Near Aix, the family car had a head-on collision with
a motorcyclist. Fédia’s wife was killed, and everyone in the family was
injured.38 Thus even though war was averted, for the Cassin family, the
war crisis had claimed its victims.
After Munich, Cassin did not resign from the French delegation to
the League, but he refused to return to Geneva after September 1938.
The League of Nations had been abandoned not only by the dictators,
but also by France and Britain. After Munich, the League was effectively
dead.
When war was declared in September 1939, it was no cause for comfort
that Cassin’s predictions had come true. In January 1940, he wrote a draft
letter, apparently never sent, to L’Epoque, a journal founded by Henri
de Kérillis after his break with L’Echo de Paris, the conservative pub-
lication, whose international position he contested. In this manuscript
letter, Cassin summarized his thoughts about what had happened since
1935.
Recovering slowly from a serious illness that confined me to my bed during the
sad period from December 1935 to April 1936, I still did my patriotic duty in
denouncing the peril . . . During the years from 1933 until the opening of the war,
34 Cassin, ‘L’effondrement d’une politique’, Cahiers de l’UF, Oct. 1938, pp. 7–8.
35 Cassin, ‘Dure alerte, terrible leçon’, Notre France (Oct. 1938), p. 4.
36 ‘Le comité fédéral du 9 octobre’, Notre France (Nov. 1938), p. 2.
37 ‘S’adapter ou subir’, Cahiers de l’UF, 20 Oct. 1938, pp. 5–6.
38 Interview with Josette Cassin, 1 Aug. 2011.
I did everything in my power to fight against propaganda all the more dangerous
in that it exploited Pacifism for ends completely contrary to peace . . .
The truth is that all those true veterans of Geneva worthy of the name, Eden,
Paul-Boncour and other less celebrated men among whom I stand, all of us from
at the latest 14 October 1933, the day Germany affirmed its liberty of action, did
everything possible to make French public opinion aware of the gravity of the
peril it faced . . .
Cassin, veteran of ‘the left’, was treated like a warmonger by all those of
the left or the right whose tranquillity he troubled; the Nazis added: he
is a Jew.
The great majority – if not everyone – who went to see Hitler, Ribbentrop etc.,
were men of good faith and pure intentions. They were ‘duped’ . . . That is a
fact.39
The last reference is unmistakably to his friend and colleague Henri

Pichot. Their parting of the ways was more painful still.
Growing isolation in the veterans’ movement

For Cassin, the UF was a large family. Years of work together, congresses,
speeches in the provinces, articles in the Cahiers de l’UF had marked
the rhythms of his daily life since the war. He continued to attend the
majority of meetings of the UF on the executive, national and federal
levels.40 It was in this work that he had put into effect ‘his complete
faith in democratic legality and also in the League of Nations. In spite
of everything!’, to cite his ‘non-testament’ of 1936. In the movement, he
could count many friends.
Certainly, many activists, determined above all to avoid war through
appeasement and concessions to the dictators, did not understand that
his aim was to try to convince them that this policy on the contrary
made war unavoidable. For these men, Cassin still remained a guiding
figure, one of the fathers of the veterans’ movement, the central artisan
of policies exemplary in their number and in their legal foundations.
Cassin’s surgery was the occasion for an expression of real sympathy.
The Cahiers de l’UF reported improvements in his health, including a
photograph of Cassin in his hospital bed. In the next UF Congress, he
39 382AP10, Draft letter of Cassin to editor of L’Epoque, on an article published on 6

Jan. 1940 by H. de Kérillis, ‘L’Allemagne paralyse et neutralise le mouvement anciens
combattants’. We do not know if the letter was sent.
40 During the years 1936–37, he attended six of seven meetings of the executive, six
meetings of the administrative council, and three meetings of the Federal Committee.
Cahiers de l’UF, 20 April 1937.
was re-elected to the executive committee by near unanimity: 915,000

out of 915,500 voting. Around the convalescent, the extended family
grew closer still. In addition, he managed to attend the Congress to
which he presented an oral report on peace. He apologized for having
been unable to complete a text due to his condition, and he thanked the
Congress for their unanimous vote for him, a gesture which evidently
moved him.41
From this point, however, a fault line emerged, notably between Cassin
and Pichot. We have seen traces of it already in Cassin’s reflections before
his surgery. But Pichot was not alone; the majority of the leadership of the
UF followed his lead and were happy to leave the organization effectively
in his hands. Whereas in earlier years presidents of the UF served terms
of only one or two years – Pichot himself had stepped down after 1921–
22, 1923–24 and 1930–31– from 1934 until the outbreak of war, Pichot
retained the presidency of the UF.
His honesty and his patriotism were incontestable, but he remained
unmovable in his view that to avoid war, it was essential to talk to the
Italians and the Germans, to tell them of the pacific resolve of the French
people. Together the people will stop their governments from going to
war. Paradoxically, the greater the danger, the greater the need for rap-
prochement. He failed to realize that his German interlocutors were no
longer the Germans of the Weimar Republic. Rossmann was in a concen-
tration camp; the existing veterans’ organizations had been dissolved and
replaced by the Nazi War Victims Association (NSKOV). The German
ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, encouraged dialogue. Pichot, who had
agreed to see Hitler in 1934, joined the new Franco-German Committee,
created in October 1935, and became its secretary-general, alongside the
president of the UNC, Jean Goy. Pichot published articles in the review
of this group.42 Together with the NSKOV and Italian veterans, he orga-
nized a grand demonstration on 12 July 1936 at Fort Douaumont, at
Verdun, where all swore to defend the peace.
Furthermore, he contributed to the formation of a new organization,
the International Permanent Committee (CIP), whose very existence
constituted a rejection of CIAMAC and the political line of Cassin and
Viala. The Germans had refused to return to CIAMAC, infested in
their view with a Marxist spirit, and they were not welcome in FIDAC.
Carlo Delcroix, the acting president of the CIP, took the initiative in
41 Report to the UF Congress of Rheims, 12–19 April 1936, pp. 323–36.

42 Claire Moreau-Trichet, ‘La propagande nazie à l’égard des associations françaises des
anciens combattants de 1934 à 1939’, Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains, 205
(2002), pp. 55–70.
opening discussions with the NSKOV, and together they called a meeting
in Berlin in February 1937 to be attended by three representatives of each
nation. Goy and Pichot were there among the French representatives. It
took a year before the French delegation recognized they were being
manipulated, and left the CIP. Even this episode was insufficient to open
Pichot’s eyes, and he went to Munich at the end of September 1938 to
encourage Daladier to conclude an accord. It was only in January 1939
that he resigned from the Franco-German Committee.
What could Cassin do in this context? Break with Pichot? Criticize him?
That would divide the UF irrevocably, since it was unanimously behind
Pichot. Since Cassin still had a platform, he insisted on expressing his
own opinions; he wrote articles in the veterans’ press on the evolution of
international affairs, a domain in which no one contested his authority,
but in his articles he always condemned the policy of appeasing the
dictators, criticized pacifist illusions, and pled for realism. ‘It would be to
turn our backs on peace if all we do is persist in radio dialogues and run
after the other side.’43 Without ever mentioning Pichot by name, Cassin
denounced laxity and blindness; he showed that the moves of Hitler and
Mussolini pointed to a war for which it would be prudent to prepare. He
repeated his warnings: ‘It is unacceptable to exploit liberty and the ideal
of peace in order to kill both of them off.’44
Did this tenacious campaign bear fruit? It is difficult to say. Doubtless
it made some pacifists think twice and lay the groundwork for their
ultimate return to realism. But others reacted with incomprehension,
suspicion, even outright rejection. Despite Cassin’s past and his stature,
his position within the veterans’ movement eroded. The creation of a
National Commission for all war victims and veterans in 1938 ended his
decisive role in the ONP, which became a section of this new commission.
This was an unwelcome marginalization. In early 1938, Cassin attended
some meetings of the executive committee of the National Commission,
while no longer being a member of it.45
Though he was re-elected time and again to the executive committee
of the UF, his share of the vote declined, from 94.1 per cent in 1937, to
92.4 in 1938 and 90.6 in 1939. At the time of the Munich crisis, he wrote
of ‘certain hurtful letters, almost always anonymous’, mixing ‘criticism
worthy of consideration’ with phrases having anti-Semitic connotations.
43 ‘Après les discours, les actes’, Cahiers de l’UF, 10 Feb. 1937.

44 ‘Après les discours, les actes’.
45 He participated in several meetings of the permanent section of the administrative
council of the Office, without speaking. His name was added to the list of those in
attendance (CAC, 20050206/27, 16 and 27 Jan. and 2 June 1938).
‘What is this!’, say or write certain comrades, ‘we no longer recognize Cassin
the pacifist who, from 1919 on, was the pioneer of the boldest efforts for inter-
national reconstruction . . . In his case, the jurist displaced the realist, the ardent
adversary of war. Is this a result of his disappointment about being misled about
the effectiveness of “the League of Nations” and collective security? Or rather is
it that the anti-Semitic persecution of Germany and Italy, under the pressure of
sentimental reactions, has altered his faculty of reason?’
Cassin responded vigorously:
As soon as he came to power, Hitler deployed openly his terrorist method of

dealing with the Jews. I would have been the last of the last, during this period
of misery prolonged so cruelly, if I had feigned to forget my origins, which over
centuries has associated my family with the destiny of France.46
He had nonetheless called for a ‘rapprochement of Italy and France and

the integration of the Third Reich in a well-ordered Europe’. He drew
attention to all his previous efforts to bring France, Germany and Italy
together. ‘Did I not go to Rome and, with CIAMAC, work to bring
closer together our old Italian allies and the Little Entente? And did I
not withdraw without a fuss in order not to disturb the meetings between
French and German veterans?’ Nevertheless, the Reich had plunged into
the arms race:
Thus arrived the dramatic turning point at which – at the risk of misunderstanding
– I had to speak in harsher terms, recalling the fulfilment of the highest duties,
binding us as they bind others, to safeguard the laws of France and of peace,
at the least possible cost, at the least possible risk, with the highest degree of
effectiveness . . . I claim it as a perilous honour, more perilous for certain ties
of affection than for my health, to have sounded the alarm against war, even
before her despicable return to Africa, without the slightest hostility to the Italian
people, and of having, that autumn, when the Ethiopians were faced with an
entirely unjustified invasion, predicted expressly that a failure of the League
of Nations would lead after a brief delay to the violation of the demilitarized
zone in the Rhineland. What a sad prediction, which since 7 March 1936 has
been evidently overtaken by events . . . Once the floodgates are open, the tide of
violence and blackmail towards war rises more and more powerfully. One after
the other, the blacks of Africa, the yellow people of China, the ‘Reds’ of Spain, the
Catholics of the Basque country have been slandered, isolated, starved, tortured
under the falsely pitiable gaze of the great pacific and indifferent nations. Pious
Austria and democratic Czechoslovakia are accused of not hearing ‘the call of
race and blood’, but they are guilty in reality of having an independent existence,
and have come to join the Jews and Marxists in the terrorists’ cemeteries.
46 ‘Salutaires avertissements’, Cahiers de l’UF, 10 Dec. 1938. Cassin reproduced this text
in his collection La pensée et l’action, indicating the importance he accorded to it.
There are those who, in the face of these bloody realities and the onward march
of slavery, want me to continue to formulate abstract hopes, to sing the praises
of equality among veterans still free and those who, without wanting war, are the
devoted servants of the great liars.47
It is probable that these arguments helped shift opinion from the spring
of 1939 towards a renewed effort to resist Hitler. But mobilization and
the outbreak of war precipitated a major crisis in the heart of the veterans’
movement, a crisis which Cassin could do little to avert or resolve.
Pichot believed that the coordination of the veterans’ war effort
required a new, stronger organization. On 5 September 1939, he pre-
sented to the executive committee of the Confederation a proposal to
create departmental groups along the lines of that which he had created
in Orléans, in which the UNC and the UF merged their efforts.48 Irri-
tated by the impotence of the Confederation, which these many small
associations paralysed, Pichot joined the effort of the UNC to modify
the whole structure, taking into account that the Confederation would
not exist without the UF (with 695,000 members) and the UNC (with
363,000 members).49 On 20 September 1939, he proposed to the execu-
tive of the Confederation that it agree to the creation of a war committee,
composed of himself representing the UF, Goy representing the UNC,
and Rivollet representing other associations.50 On 4 October, he renewed
his proposal and claimed the presidency of the new war committee for
himself. In the face of opposition, Pichot left the meeting with Goy. The
next day he wrote to the general secretary of the Confederation that the
UF was withdrawing from active participation in its various bodies. Nei-
ther Pichot nor Goy attended the Confederation’s executive committee
meeting of 22 October. Despite several efforts at conciliation, the rup-
ture was complete. On 23 October, the UF wrote to all its departmental
federations to break off any contacts with the Confederation and to cease
paying membership fees in it. Consequently, the outcome of the crisis
was the creation of two rival veterans’ legions.51
Cassin was against this rupture, and told his correspondents that he
had done whatever he could to avoid it.52 It troubled the rank and file,
47 ‘Salutaires avertissements’. 48 382AP11.

49 382AP10, Pichot to Rivollet, 13 Sept. 1939. An annex to a UF document (382AP11)
indicated that 550,000 members of the UF and UNC left the Confederation.
50 ‘Confédération nationale, 11 Sept.–26 Oct. 1939’, 24 Oct. 1939, with an annex includ-
ing copies of circulars and letters of Goy and Pichot. The documents found in 382AP11
enable us to follow this crisis in detail.
51 On 12 November, at a joint meeting of the UNC and the UF, the Légion des Com-
battants Français was formed. Later the Confederation responded by calling itself the
Légion Française des Combattants.
52 382AP11, Cassin to Rogé, 5 March 1940.
as Gaston Rogé of Nancy, one of the first presidents of the UF, wrote to
him.53 Similarly, the president of the UF in Deux-Sèvres, told Cassin:
I know perfectly well that Pichot is not acting out of personal ambition. But not
everyone thinks as I do, and despite all arguments I provide, it is rather difficult to
convince them. Furthermore, the isolated grouping of the UF and UNC surprises
and displeases them . . . The effect of the split is deplorable . . . Do tell Pichot that
if I do not approve of everything he has done over the last two years (is he not
too impulsive?), I retain my confidence in him and my friendship.
It was clear that Pichot had chosen to force through his policy, by taking
care at each step to get the approval of the UF’s executive, which cut
short any argument. Pichot’s methods did not please Cassin, and the
tension between them worsened. Without even asking for his approval,
Pichot named Cassin member of his ‘war committee’. Cassin sensed a
trap:
I am ready to accept out of solidarity with you and all those who put before
anything else the victorious conduct of the war. To avoid all equivocation, all
contradiction, all splits within the UF, I ask you to seize the first occasion to give
to the various members of our Committee of Action a friendly assurance that
they will always be consulted before decisions of principle or important public
initiatives concerning the UF will be taken.54
To Pichot, Cassin had become a troublemaker. Pichot no longer had need

of him, and had no intention of sharing with him the political direction of
the periodical he was about to launch, Les Heures de la Guerre (Wartime).
He took liberties with Cassin’s articles: he shortened one, and placed the
next in a manner which made Cassin ‘miserable’. ‘My work is ruined’, he
added.55 Having been unable to discuss these matters with Pichot aside
from a lunch which ended abruptly, Cassin returned to his demands in
a letter of 5 January 1940. Cassin did not speak of his rights, though he
was not opposed occasionally to signing an editorial he would write. But
he insisted on having the right to publish his own original articles, which
he believed only he was able to write in the press of the period. And in
conclusion he added:
Of all my work for the UF, all that remains is to be a commentator: I understand
and shall stick to that with dignity or hold my peace henceforth. That is why I
have come to say to you if once a month . . . If you do not allow me to publish
an article which is more than a formulaic statement of denunciations or of hope
53 382AP11, Cassin to Rogé, 24 Feb. 1940.

54 382AP11, Cassin to Pichot, 6 Nov. 1939. The underlinings are in the original text.
55 281AP11, draft letter of Cassin to Pichot, dated by Pichot’s response of 8 Jan. 1940.
and in a place and presentation it merits, I will no longer write for Les Heures de
la Guerre.
Pichot responded to him rapidly and at length – five single-spaced typed

pages – which shows a certain degree of affection for Cassin, but Pichot
offered no real concessions. He sheltered behind arguments about the
constraints of layout, and the responsibilities of real journalists, like
Georges Pineau. He defended himself at length, recalling everything he
had done so that the UF would have its press, and took pride in his role: if
the UF feels that it is a sort of group in which ‘no single person must take
as his role that of the leader, then this needs to be said. Every time one of
you was president of the UF, I always . . . stood in the ranks behind him.
I have perhaps the right to hope that you will do the same when I hold
the baton.’ And he intended to hold it until the end of the war. In sum,
though it was not said in such a brutal manner, Cassin could do nothing
but obey. And that is precisely what he did. Despite this disappointing
response, he did not carry through his threat: he wrote six articles for Les
Heures de la Guerre in 1940.
The final and abrupt rupture of this friendship of more than twenty
years, which Pichot evoked in his letter, came six months later. Cassin
was already in London, and probably asked his brother Fédia to transmit
a message to his friends in the UF. Fédia was also a veteran of the Great
War, having served throughout the conflict. He was active in veterans’
affairs in the Marseilles region, and had more conservative political incli-
nations than did his brother. Fédia’s daughter, Josette Cassin, recalls that
he was more of a nationalist than René and was much more worried about
the Bolshevik menace. He was therefore closer to centrist and right-wing
opinion in the veterans’ movement, and could act as a middleman trusted
by all.56
Fédia wrote to Pichot on 25 July. He explained that René’s decision
to leave France was an expression of his commitment to a principle he
had affirmed and reaffirmed over twenty-five years: ‘Force cannot prevail
over the Right.’ He had left so as not to see his country in shackles, to
continue to fight, and absolutely not ‘as a deserter, as some will try to
make us believe’. His friends in the UF can testify to the fact that he was
devoted to his country body and soul.
Could it be possible that his country, France, would want to disown the best of
her sons? I believe still that you will not permit that to happen.

René has twice sacrificed his life for France and for his comrades of the World
War.57 For the third time, he is making the same sacrifice – René must live or die
FRENCH.58
This is evidently a request that the UF protest against the prosecution,

then under way, which aimed at (and succeeded in) stripping Cassin of
his French citizenship.
Pichot at that time was still intent on his efforts to persuade Vichy
to support his idea of forming a Veterans’ Legion. He circulated Fédia’s
letter, since it evidently concerned others in the UF too. Pichot’s response
was a total condemnation.
The place for leaders is on the soil of France, it is there where one struggles,
there where one suffers for France among Frenchmen . . .
If he [René] left France without authorization, without an officially sanctioned

mission, he could not have done so without full knowledge of the facts, taking
into account all the facts, and weighing the risks he would run.
He could not ignore the inconceivable behaviour of Mr Churchill with regard to
France, nor the warnings issued by the French government to Frenchmen leaving
for London.
At the Union Fédérale, our rule has always been that, at a time of national danger,
no one can permit indiscipline with respect to the government which represents
the country . . .
His duty must be to root himself in the soil of France and not elsewhere. It is in
France that he must serve France.
I see only one solution in his case: that he makes known to the French government
without delay that he intends by any and all means to return to his country, to
put himself at her service, body and soul.59
Here we reach the irrevocable parting of the ways of two veterans, both
severely wounded in 1914, both having served together for decades in the
veterans’ movement. Their friendship had eroded, from 1934 on, as a
result of their growing disagreement over how to deal with the dictators,
and by the way Pichot’s authoritarian style had injured Cassin’s pride.
After Munich, and after the outbreak of war, all that was left between
them was a tense collaboration. The collapse of France put an end to
57 Fédia probably included his dangerous surgery of 1936 as the second such sacrifice,
alongside the first, on active service in 1914.
58 AN, 43AS3, Fonds Pichot, letter written by Fédia from Marseilles, 25 July 1940. The
capitalization is in the original document.
59 43AS3, letter of Pichot to Fédia Cassin, from Montluçon, 3 Aug. 1940. On 5 August,
Pichot circulated to all members of the executive committee of the UF both Fédia’s
letter and his response.
it. Cassin and Pichot had nothing left in common. The choice of Free
France by Cassin and of the French state by Pichot turned the increas-
ingly sharp differences between the two into implacable opposition. For
Cassin, to be rejected by his colleagues was a failure and the end of
decades of strenuous effort in the veterans’ movement.
The end of a world

This sense of failure helps explain Cassin’s decision to leave France: he
had already burned his bridges behind him. But we must move back in
time to gain a full sense of the disaster which transformed the ‘phoney
war’ into catastrophic defeat.
In July 1939, René Cassin returned to Paris after a two-month visit to
China and to Indochina where he had inspected the law school of Hanoi
University.60 He had been invited by Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime to view
the devastation Japan’s invasion had brought to China. While there, he
saw first-hand the effects of Japanese attacks on Chinese universities. He
formed the view that should war break out in Europe, it would quickly
become a world conflict.61
The European war came in September 1939. Too old for military
service in 1939, and still receiving a war pension for a 60 per cent inva-
lidity arising from his wounds of 1914, Cassin sought to be of use to the
new Conseil Supérieur de l’Information, headed by the playwright Jean
Giraudoux. Cassin’s work was formally as legal counsel, and he drafted
papers on legal matters ranging from the blockade to neutrality. He also
brought into play his British contacts, arising from meetings between his
veterans’ organization and the British Legion, as well as his work with
former colleagues and supporters of the League of Nations. From the
start of the war in September 1939, his view was that the Allies were
engaged in a ‘Croisade des droits de l’Homme’ against the most severe
threat to the notion of human rights the world had ever seen.
Giraudoux’s organization was hamstrung from the start. Undermined
by the hostility of former colleagues in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, his
commissariat was an unfunded and basically useless repository for men
over the age for military service. It was, in essence, a place for men of
learning with little better to do, men who had hoped to be of service, but
who came to see how little they really were able to contribute.62 It was
60 382AP10, Cassin to M. Moussat, 17 July 1939; Agi, René Cassin, p. 98, on the basis of
an interview with Cassin.
61 Personal dossier of Cassin, Conseil d’Etat , I, p. 16, dossier personnel du Conseil d’Etat
(CAC, 20040382/65).
62 392AP27, Cassin Diary, 7 June 1940. Hereafter cited as ‘Diary’.
for Cassin, a time of sadness and frustration, and yet the worst was still
to come.
Cassin’s primary public role at this time was not within national pol-
itics, but within civil society. There also, there was total disarray. The
veterans’ movement was sundered into two ‘Legions’ at odds with each
other. In each, there were those who more or less openly were preparing
for combat and those who were resigned to defeat. For Cassin, the meet-
ings of the executive committee of the UF were moments of great sadness.
The climate in the Faculty of Law in Paris was no better. Some of his
colleagues heaped criticism on the government; others, still more vehe-
ment, expressed their disgust with the Republic, about to be overthrown
by the German army. Cassin was particularly caustic about the defeatism
of the Dean of the Law Faculty, Georges Ripert, who a few months later
would go on to serve Vichy as Minister of Public Instruction and Youth.
When Cassin told the Dean of his appointment in Giraudoux’s conseil, the
Dean replied officiously that he had yet to receive a formal letter about
this from Giraudoux. At the end of May, he shocked Cassin when he
‘condemned in my presence the “madness” of the Poles in letting their
capital city be destroyed. He was already for capitulation.’63 Pettiness
flourished in dangerous times; among others there was a malicious glee
in the demise of a Republic, the contempt for which they scarcely hid.64
On 7 June Cassin travelled by train with his wife to Bordeaux, and then
visited with her sites of his childhood around Bayonne and his beloved
Rachel Cottage, where he had spent happy summers with his family. He
then returned to Paris on 10 June to await developments, at peace at least
with the fact that his wife was far from the front.
He was struck by the ‘febrile atmosphere’ in the city. He met his
cousin Suzanne Rosenfeld, and stayed with her and her husband, Albert
Montag. Cassin then went to the Faculty of Law: it was deserted. So was
the Commissariat de l’Information. He conferred with the two men still
at their posts, who told him that the government had fled to Tours. That
was where he would go, fortified by his priority as a government official
in securing scarce supplies of petrol. He left a letter for his mother, to
mark her eightieth birthday, stowed his lectures in the basement of his
flat, and paid his taxes in advance. He then took his car, and as night fell,
he collected the Montags, and together they joined the chaotic exodus
of traffic of all kinds from Paris south, moving at a snail’s pace towards
Orléans, where he briefly visited Madame Pichot, and then Tours. He
noted in his diary, in an entry probably written a month later, that ‘An
entire people are on the road, on foot, on bike, in wagons.’ ‘It makes me
63 Diary, 10 June 1940. 64 Cassin, Les hommes partis de rien, pp. 20–1.
sick to flee’, he admitted to himself. ‘But I feel strongly that it is not here
that I could fight.’65
Arriving at Tours in the rain, Cassin tried to get his bearings. ‘The
station is packed with refugees. I make inquiries at the Ministry: already
one sees the heads of men who have nothing to do here.’ The atmosphere
was sombre. The president of the UF in the department put him up for
the night in his son’s room. The son had been called up. Cassin tried
to cheer up his hosts, but even he had a sinking sensation: ‘One wants
to believe . . . and suddenly, one realizes that it is not only the external
enemy, but an inner collapse which will lead to surrender!’66 The next
day he sat on the banks of the Loire, and was struck by its beauty. ‘What
an admirable spectacle I see, with the premonition that I who have never
enjoyed this view, will never see it again.’ On 14 June, finding his way
to some government officials, he read defeat in their eyes. ‘There was no
need to make a nuisance of myself to discover the truth.’67 He continued
on the road to Bordeaux.
Here he finds complete disorder. No one at the Ministry of Pensions.
He decides to go to Bayonne by train. After seemingly interminable
delays, he arrives after midnight. Two hours later, he finds a sofa on the
ground floor of a hotel to rest for the night. The next day he finds the
Montags, and tells them that Simone was well enough, though terribly
worried about him. Going back to Bordeaux, he learns of the capitulation
from his old friend Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, whose son has just been killed at
Dunkirk. ‘Here consternation rules: one son lost at D.[unkerque], defeat
and sombre prospects for the Jews, old or young’.68 Cassin begins to
think that perhaps England is the place for him to carry on the fight.
His thoughts are deepened by the somewhat surrealist atmosphere in
Bordeaux among the well-to-do. At the Hôtel Normandie, where he
dines alone on 17 June, he finds a degrading atmosphere:
The most indecent joy was shamelessly displayed. Merry or mean faces, bursting
with the most nonsensical comments. They not only disowned ‘this mad war’,
but they rejoiced in the hiding the English were getting. Defeat was only the just
punishment for the men of the Popular Front. It was as if they thought that Hitler
was all powerful and that the German occupation would not hit all French people.
65 Diary, 11 June 1940. This text could not have been written at the time. It was written
in a full-size diary entitled ‘Diary 1940’, published by HM Stationery Service, stamped
‘supplied for the public service’. As it contains continuous entries between 7 June and 3
July 1940, then an interruption until 29 July, it was probably written or edited by Cassin
in July, when the negotiations with Churchill were at a standstill after Mers-el-Kebir.
66 Diary, 12 June 1940. 67 Diary, 14 June 1940. 68 Diary, June 1940.
Never have I seen a more dishonorable spectacle . . . The immense disgust I felt
that evening contributed not a little to my decision.69
Within a few days Cassin saw clearly the path he had to take. ‘This time
with Simone we talk over the question: what to do, she, to be safe, I, to
fight! We decide to prepare our departure. Diplomatic passports await us
in Bordeaux. I will go there: I need to withdraw money. We can see the
boats leaving.’70 The only question was how and when to leave. While
waiting, the news only got worse. Paris fell. The German army advanced
towards Lyons. ‘Here is the logical outcome of 6 February 1934’,71 wrote
Cassin in his diary: ‘riots in the streets, promoted by the enemy’.
Cassin made his preparations as fast as he could. He put his and
Simone’s possessions in two gas canisters buried at Rachel Cottage, and
tried unsuccessfully to reach his mother by telephone.72 He found a way
to obtain a Spanish visa,73 and, more importantly, received from Paris a
document giving him standing as a government official, ironically enough
in a government that no longer existed. His status was that he was to be
given ‘After British subjects Preference’.74
On Sunday the 23rd, they boarded the Australian troop carrier the
Ettrick. Cassin wrote in his diary: ‘I am very moved and grit my teeth. We
leave France perhaps forever.’ They were among 2,000 others who had
chosen to leave and to fight another day: Poles, Palestinians, Frenchmen
with British wives. On board they met Raymond Aron, whom they would
get to know better, before they found makeshift bedding on deck. The
next day, in a convoy of three boats, they set sail.
Leaving was a difficult matter, but what choice did he have? ‘I have to
fight. And if I stay, I will be in danger, and will not be able to teach . . . It
is cruel to leave in France our things, our family, and our friends.’75 Why
did Cassin not board the Massilia to continue the fight in North Africa,
like Jean Zay and Georges Huisman, whom he met in Bordeaux on
20 June? On the same evening, since there was no train for Le Verdon,
where the Massilia was docked, he drove to this boat with a former deputy
who boarded the boat.76 Cassin noted simply and without explanation:
69 Cassin, Les hommes partis de rien, p. 38. 70 Diary, 18 June 1940.

71 Here the reference is to a bloody confrontation between right-wing leagues and police
in Paris.
72 Diary, 21 June 1940.
73 The Spanish option was open due to the presence there of his cousin Max.
74 Diary, 22 June 1940. 75 Diary, 22 June 1940.
76 Diary, 20 June 1940. Léo Hamon met him on the jetty (Hamon, Vivre ses choix (Paris:
R. Laffont, 1991), p. 88).
‘I have decided to eliminate the Massilia.’ Perhaps the presence in Lon-

don of his former colleagues from Geneva, exiled in London, like Beneš,
helped Cassin’s decision to travel north, not south.
In his diary, in any event, there is no mention at all of the appeal of
General de Gaulle from London, during the days in which he made up
his mind to go there. In an autobiographical essay he wrote in the period
when he was being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize, he wrote: ‘René
Cassin decided to respond to the appeal of General de Gaulle (which he
had not heard himself) at the moment when the Government and public
authorities decided not to leave for North Africa. He flatly refused the
invitation of Colonel Herbette to help draft the terms of the Armistice
sought from Hitler by the Pétain government on 17 June.’77 His diary,
however, confirms that Herbette spoke to him about the Armistice on
20 June, and a few lines later he writes that he was going to obtain
visas for Spain, Portugal, England and the United States. We do not
know, therefore, what role the appeal of General de Gaulle played in his
decision. But on several points, we can be sure: he refused the Armistice,
and he refused to remain in a defeated country, one accepting submission
to Hitler and where the Jews would be persecuted. All of his previous
efforts had collapsed in failure. And still, not yet knowing how, he wanted
to fight on. He left with his wife for England, without knowing what he
would do there and without knowing a word of English. He leapt into
the unknown, without hope of a return.
77 Personal dossier, Conseil d’Etat, II, p. 2. Dossier personnel du Conseil d’Etat (CAC,
20040382/65). In Les hommes partis de rien, pp. 18–19, Cassin says he heard talk of the
appeal on 19 June when he was still in Bayonne.
Part II
The jurist of Free France

5 Free France, 1940–1941
René Cassin’s life in 1940 mirrored that of millions of other Frenchmen.

First came the shock of the catastrophe; then the response. Most accepted
the new situation as it then was; a small minority rejected passivity and
accommodation. An even smaller minority – initially no more than a few
hundred men and women – fled to England to start the fight again. René
Cassin was one of them.
It is difficult today to put ourselves in their shoes. Those who left
France to carry on the struggle arrived in Britain in a difficult state:
sickened by defeat, disoriented, without family and friends; most were
penniless and homeless. And, like René and Simone Cassin, most had
absolutely no spoken English. Despite stirring talk of having lost a battle
but not a war, how many of these people felt that they were living in a
recurrent nightmare?
In the following year, René Cassin emerged from the shadow of this
calamity. He knew periods of doubt and depression, periods of question-
ing as to whether both the cause and his life were lost. What is remarkable
is not the anxiety of exile in a city under heavy aerial bombardment, but
his ability, alongside an eclectic group of refugees, to weather the ini-
tial storm of German attacks from the air and official collaboration at
home. By doing so, they managed to create what was to become de facto
and then de jure a French Republican government in exile. In this effort
Cassin played a major role.
Within the inner circle of Free France Cassin was both administratively
essential and politically weak. For decades, he had represented French
veterans of the Great War, but had never been elected to political office.
His military career had been cut short ten weeks after the outbreak of
the First World War. He was a Jew in a world not at all immune from
anti-Semitism. He was fifty-three years old, surrounded by men younger
and more ruthless than he. His real role was as a symbol of Republican
rectitude, of judicial integrity, of disinterested service to his nation, and
of uncompromising loyalty to de Gaulle. He simply could not and would
not join the intrigues of colleagues whose commitment to the cause was
109
not the same as a commitment to its leader. Consequently, he was given

by de Gaulle the task of constructing the architecture of the resistance
organization in London, and then later he was progressively marginalized
by de Gaulle within it.
But just as his initial role came to an end, Cassin emerged as a major
international figure within the Allied camp. The new form of wartime
inter-Allied politics suited his talents perfectly. In the darkest period of
the Blitz, Cassin and other exiles in London began to examine Allied war
aims, in an effort to present a democratic ‘new international order’ to
emerge from the conflict. It was at this unlikely moment, when victory
was a remote dream, that Cassin’s important contribution to wartime and
post-war thinking on human rights began to unfold. The pacifist ancien
combattant, the professor of law, the veteran of the League of Nations,
had found his voice and his métier. It was a turning point of which at the
time he was unaware, but it was a turning point nonetheless.
The Churchill–de Gaulle accords:

negotiations and outcomes
On 26 June 1940, the troop-carrier Ettrick and its passengers reached
the coast of southern Britain, near the port of Plymouth. Simone won-
dered what would become of them ‘in an unknown country, the language
of which they both’ did not command.1 A very good question indeed.
On arrival, they were greeted by news of the French armistice. Cassin
found a bit of distraction from this shocking turn of events in the quaint
comportment of some of his fellow travellers. In particular a Swedish
woman writer wearing a ridiculous hat and speaking in a commanding
voice shifted Cassin’s attention away from dark events. They boarded a
train to London, with a police guard. Why the security? Perhaps some
fifth columnists were on board?
On arrival in London at 3 a.m. on 28 June they were taken by bus
to Empress Hall in Earl’s Court for processing. They were fed well and
actually were able to sleep on mattresses. They were given a cursory
medical examination. The French consulate passed on his official doc-
uments and then Cassin was asked by the British police to name those
who could vouch for him. He gave them the following: Anthony Eden,
British Secretary of State for War, whom he had met in Geneva, Colonel
G. R. Crosfield, vice-chairman of the British Legion, and A. E. Zim-
mern, Warden of New College, Oxford. Doors opened. René Cassin and
his wife Simone began their lives in England.
1 Diary, 26 June 1940.

Free France, 1940–1941 111
Instead of going to a hotel or lodgings, they were welcomed to the

Institut Français in the fashionable South Kensington district of London,
where many French exiles were in residence. The director, Denis Saurat,
gave them rooms nearby on Queensborough Terrace, and they enjoyed
the luxury of a hot bath. Refreshed, Cassin received word from Saurat
that he had an appointment the next day with de Gaulle.
The meeting took place on Saturday, 29 June at 10 a.m. at St Stephen’s
House, a building near Westminster in which the British government
had set aside three rooms for de Gaulle. When Cassin entered, he found
the General accompanied by three or four officers, much younger than
Cassin, who palpably felt the difference in his profile: ‘I must have looked
wizened and terribly thin.’ De Gaulle was cordial: ‘You have arrived just
in the nick of time to help me.’2
In fact, by an extraordinary coincidence, the night before this meet-
ing, an official communiqué announced that the British government had
recognized General de Gaulle as commander of the Free French. Until
that moment, he had represented only himself, and Churchill had hoped
that another more prominent soldier, perhaps General Noguès, Resi-
dent General in Morocco, would come forward, but his approaches had
been rebuffed. ‘You are entirely alone’, Churchill said to de Gaulle, ‘I
recognize you alone’.3
Cassin understood some hours later what de Gaulle had in mind.
The same day, at 2:30 p.m., he received a telephone call asking him to
come immediately to St Stephen’s House: de Gaulle was to ask him to
prepare documents outlining relations between those rallying around de
Gaulle and the British government for discussion with Churchill.
What mattered now was to establish this recognition in writing and to find the
juridical bases for a treaty. It was for this work that de Gaulle counted on me.
In effect, I had come at the right moment! I started thinking aloud in front of
him:
It is not possible to sign a treaty if you do not represent a government. There
is no precedent for such a course of action. The Anglo-Czech Treaty, the
Anglo-Polish accords were signed by the British government alongside states-
men representing their countries . . . Well, we will proceed as if in ignorance
of diplomatic conventions. I will prepare a draft document which will not be
admissible technically. We cede the form to have the content.4
2 This narrative has been drawn from the Diary of Cassin for 1940, in the Fonds Cassin in
the Archives Nationales, 382AP27. The precise words of de Gaulle were: ‘Vous tombez
à pic.’
3 Cassin, Les hommes partis de rien, p. 76.
4 Cassin’s remarks, as cited in André Gillois, Histoire secrète des Français à Londres, de 1940
à 1944 (Paris: Hachette-Littérature, 1973), p. 70.
The principal objectives were to give judicial status to the troops who
recognized the General’s authority at the same time as assuring British
funding of Free France. At the end of the meeting, Cassin said:
Before leaving, there is only one point I want to clarify. I understand totally that
we are not a foreign legion in the British army. We are the French army. And it
is here that he corrected me by stating the historic phrase: ‘We are France.’5
Cassin, who evidently had no idea where this first assignment would lead,
returned to Queensborough Terrace, on a beautiful afternoon, ‘almost
elated to see that there was useful work to do’.6 He had forty-eight hours
to frame the draft document. In effect his life had taken a fundamental
turn. The professor in exile living in a country whose language remained
largely a mystery found himself thrust into the heart of a political and
national venture which changed his life.
Why had de Gaulle entrusted him with this task? Certainly, Cassin
came at an opportune moment, and de Gaulle recognized his talents
as a jurist. In fact, he only had three or four officers in his circle, but
one of them, Pierre Tissier, former chef de cabinet of Laval, who had
served as an intelligence officer in the Narvik campaign, had similar legal
training and experience. He had served in a high position in the Conseil
d’Etat, which his father had headed. The choice of Cassin, therefore, to
negotiate the accords with Churchill was not simply a matter of profes-
sional competence. Instead of a young and impetuous officer devoid of
much experience, de Gaulle’s preference was for a sensible man, pru-
dent, firm on principles but supple on practice. Above all, Cassin had
been French delegate to the League of Nations for fourteen years, and
he had taken part in many international negotiations. He had steadfastly
opposed appeasement and the Nazis, and was well known to the British
government for these views; that was his trump card.
Cassin went to work. He spent the whole of Sunday on it: ‘I edited this
provisional draft from which the desired accords of 7 August will come.
It has three articles: political, command of the forces, status of the vol-
unteers . . . The details will be detached.’7 On Monday morning, 1 July,
he presented to de Gaulle a document whose three articles constituted
the core elements of the final text. De Gaulle made minor amendments,
and the document was returned to Churchill. ‘The matter is launched’,
Cassin wrote in his diary. But the drama of Mers-el-Kebir on 3 July
interrupted negotiations, which were renewed only after 14 July. In this
incident, nearly 1,300 French servicemen lost their lives in a British
5 Gillois, Histoire secrète, p. 70. 6 Diary, 29 June 1940. 7 Diary, 30 June 1940.
Free France, 1940–1941 113
attack on the French fleet under Vichy command stationed on the coast
of Algeria.
Churchill designated as negotiator Sir William Strang, Assistant
Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign Office in charge of the Europe
desk. He had been in the Foreign Office in the 1930s and had been
responsible for League of Nations affairs. Attending the discussions was
Sir Edward Spears, with whom de Gaulle had left France for Britain on
17 June, and who had brought him to see Churchill in London. Eden
joined in the discussions too. Alongside Cassin was Paul-Olivier Lapie, a
former Socialist deputy.
Their central concern was the independence of Free France. This was
a matter of capital importance for the standing of the movement both
in Britain and in France. For Cassin, French soldiers under the orders
of General de Gaulle were accountable only to him: he had to remain
commander in chief of all French forces, even when they were operating
under British military directives.
The pace of negotiations accelerated at the beginning of August. On
the 6th, in late afternoon, de Gaulle called Cassin to Downing Street
for the decisive discussion with Churchill. An accord had been reached,
Cassin said, ‘thanks to a prudent formula which I inserted’, but it is
not clear which formula this was.8 Strang and Cassin were charged with
preparing the final documents. Churchill fixed the formal signing for the
next day, and invited all to dine with him. That dinner never happened,
because he came back too late from the north of England. Returning
from Downing Street, de Gaulle and Cassin had a serious debate on two
sensitive points, and the following morning ‘relentless work . . . I read the
documents to the General line by line, in order to bring them to Strang
by midday.’ The accords were signed that evening.
In fact, these documents were not accords in the strict sense of the
term, as a text co-signed by two equal partners, but rather a memoran-
dum, affirmed by the British government, addressed by Churchill to de
Gaulle in letter form, to which de Gaulle replied by letter as well. Unlike
the French, the British played down the event, and the press was not
invited to witness the signatures.
Formally, this memorandum aimed at the organization of a French
volunteer force. The critical point was recognition of the national char-
acter of this force. This was not a set of French regiments in the British
army, but an allied French army, fighting alongside the British against
the common enemy, though without the power to fight against other
Frenchmen. General de Gaulle held supreme command of this force.
8 Diary, 6 Aug. 1940.

On the other hand, and here we recognize the marks of Cassin, accepting
compromise on details once the principle had been secured, de Gaulle
pledged to accept the general directives of the Allied governments, and
agreed that French forces might in part be placed under the direct com-
mand of British officers. The national element was preserved with respect
to personnel, uniforms, discipline, language, rules of promotion and pay.
These accords enabled Free France to organize its military arm on
a solid foundation. The British government agreed to equip and arm
French forces. A special paragraph regulated the navy, since it was of
capital importance to Britain to make use of ships seized but whose sailors
had not joined Free France. The document also explicitly recognized that
the General had the right to recruit scientific and technical personnel, and
above all to create the administrative services necessary to organize this
force, that is a military staff, supported by a civilian staff, constituting the
embryo of a political organization. Finally the British accepted financial
responsibility for the expenses of Free France, subject to accounting and
review procedures, and that this funding would be made in a special
account, in the form of an advance. In agreeing to reimbursement, Free
France moved to preserve its independence. But the General was, in this
context, only a military commander.9
The exchange of letters which accompanied the accords, however, was
entirely political. Churchill promised to restore ‘the independence and
grandeur of France’. This did not fully satisfy de Gaulle, since the text
as originally drafted by Cassin had added: ‘and of the French Empire
as it existed at the declaration of the war’. Churchill struck out these
words. In addition, de Gaulle explicitly stated in his response that French
forces would participate in the defence of all French territories and all
territories under French mandate. In a secret exchange following the
agreed language of the pact, Churchill said that he had not made such
assurances to any other ally, but would do his best to realize them.10
Despite these soothing words, the fact remained that the French Empire
was not mentioned at all in the published Churchill–de Gaulle accords.11
The urgency born of the disaster in France accounts for the extraor-
dinary measures the British government were prepared to take. All the
participants in these high-level talks had fought in the Great War, and
had seen the worst of it. But 1940 was different: defeat stared them in
9 The text of the accords and the exchange of letters between de Gaulle and Churchill
may be found in issue 1 of Journal Officiel de la France Libre, dated 20 Jan. 1941, and
the official British version may be found in the de Gaulle archives, 3AG1/294.
10 La France Libre, p. 68, citing de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, vol. 1, L’appel (Paris: Plon,
Livre de Poche, 1958), pp. 282–3.
11 Diary, 7 Aug. 1940.
Free France, 1940–1941 115
the face in a way it had never done in 1914–18. The British did not
give these assurances and powers to de Gaulle out of sentiment, but
out of necessity. On 23 June Churchill had refused to accept Pétain’s
betrayal of France’s commitment not to seek a separate peace with
Germany. Churchill had been in office a mere seven weeks, and faced the
most severe military threat Britain had ever known. To expand the Navy
and create a French army were non-trivial steps to take. For de Gaulle
the stakes were higher still: without the caution and support of Churchill,
his mission would have collapsed.
In speaking of ‘accords’, the Free French masked their own weakness.
There is no doubt that financial control meant some degree of political
control, no matter what the wording of the document said. Free France
was a creature of the British Treasury, and the French had to account
to it for every penny they spent. It was inevitable that whenever there
would be tension between British and French interests or attitudes, this
structural imbalance would tell. Tempers would flare and resentments
harden. This friction was built into the situation. If Churchill did indeed
believe that the hardest cross he had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine,
then he had only himself to blame. He had paid for the cross himself.
As for de Gaulle and the small but growing team around him, there
were dangers in his financial dependence on Churchill too. If de Gaulle
acted as a completely independent leader, he was both entitled to do
so, and somewhat hampered by his material dependence on the British.
Pride and rhetoric could cover this weakness, but never fully eliminate
it. De Gaulle’s political mission was to rekindle hope in a France reborn,
a France restored to the first rank of free nations, but in his view that
required the defence not only of the homeland but also of the Empire.
That is why he was irascible at times to the point of petulance on matters
touching the honour of France as it was reflected in colonial affairs. But
everyone knew that taking British cash had to mean, at some point down
the line, taking British orders about tactics or strategy or war aims or
other matters. One of de Gaulle’s political achievements was to reduce
these costs of dependency to the absolute minimum.
Neither Cassin nor de Gaulle had ever held elected political office. But
they would be joined in short order by men who did, and by those who
were prepared to fight for the restoration of the Republic and the Empire.
The Churchill–de Gaulle accords transformed a man on horseback into
a political leader, with the means to lead both an army and a political
movement in the long fight ahead.
Cassin was shrewd enough to realize that he had entered history by
accident. His path to Free France was a circuitous one. He was a lawyer
who found a client who needed him precisely at the moment he had
presented himself for service. But he also knew that he was a potential
political liability in the campaign to rally France. He was a Jew, and
Free France was dedicated not to fighting for the Jews, but to liberating
France. Here is how Cassin recalled his first and last exchange with de
Gaulle on the subject. This took place on 30 June, early in the course of
these decisive drafting sessions. Cassin noted in his diary:
I did not hesitate on Sunday morning to say to de Gaulle that I was a Jew and
leader of the veterans’ movement . . . He said, I know it. Later, I learned that he
had been informed about me by his son, my student in his first year of studies,
and by de Courcel, his aide-de-camp, who with Boislambert and St-André had
been the first (and at one time, the only) people with him.12
There was room for Cassin among these happy few, and he was sensitive
not to push his presence too far. ‘At this moment’, he wrote on 30 June,
‘because I was a Jew and I had no English, I made the sacrifice of not
dealing directly with foreign affairs. First of all, to do no harm. Then to
serve positively.’13
At the end of the negotiations, Cassin knew that there were loose
ends Free France would only be able to tie up over time. There was
above all the matter of pre-war imperial boundaries not at all secured
by these agreements. But the text Cassin read to de Gaulle line by line
on Wednesday, 7 August 1940 was the best that they could achieve.
Signatures secured, the response of the press was very positive. The next
day, ‘I draw up laboriously an Official commentary which will serve as the
basis for all of de Gaulle’s propaganda.’ On balance, Cassin thought, a
job well done. And not without a touch of insecurity, he noted in his diary
on Thursday, 8 August, ‘My impression is that, in this establishment, I
have truly earned the esteem of everyone, at least apparently.’14 One
could never be sure.
The Defence Council of the Empire

Within a few weeks, Cassin had moved from an advisory post in a pen-
niless and a pointless commissariat of information in Paris, doomed by
rivalries within the French Foreign Ministry itself, to a seat at the table
in London at which Free France was born and recognized as the newest
member of the anti-Nazi alliance. This reversal was all the more remark-
able given the fact that Cassin held no elective office and was a stranger
12 Diary, 30 June 1940. Cassin referred to ‘Courcelles’.

13 Diary, 30 June 1940. 14 Diary, 8 Aug. 1940.
Free France, 1940–1941 117
to the language of his British hosts. Necessity was the mother of very
rapid invention, here and later on in the war.
The group gathered around de Gaulle was not numerous. Several thou-
sand men were under his orders, but in London there were only about
125 people working in Free France’s offices and services. About seventy
dealt with military affairs, and the rest with political and administrative
matters, though the boundary between the two was porous.15 In June
1940, Admiral Emile Muselier had arrived in London, and was named
by de Gaulle commander of the naval and air arms of Free France.
René Pleven arrived in London at the same time. Cassin had known him
for twenty years, and had great respect for him. Muselier, on the other
hand, was always referred to as ‘The Admiral’ in Cassin’s diaries, with
an unstated supercilious and hostile inflection. You had to be blind to
miss the ambition in the man, whose loyalty to de Gaulle was in no sense
unqualified.
Pierre Tissier was another central figure who rallied to the cause at
the same time. He was a man of considerable legal talent. Though he
was sixteen years younger than Cassin, Tissier showed no deference to
his senior colleague. There was also a certain degree of tension between
Cassin and another jurist who came somewhat later to join the inner circle
of Free France. Jean Escarra, like Cassin, was on the Faculty of Law in
Paris. He was a man of many parts – traveller, explorer, mountaineer,
a man who helped establish the civil code in China. Later he chaired
an influential commission on intellectual property. Closest to Cassin’s
outlook were Pierre-Olivier Lapie and Pierre Cot. The first had been
a deputy elected in 1936 as a Socialist Republican. This political party
(USR) was one whose views Cassin supported over the years. Lapie was
the first deputy to rally to de Gaulle, and was named director of the office
of Foreign and Colonial Affairs on 14 July 1940, but from September
1940, he served as governor of Chad. The second, former minister in the
Popular Front, arrived in June, but went to Washington in the summer
of 1940 to plead the cause of Free France.
In this first group, Cassin was not only the oldest.16 He was also the
only one to defend Republican principles. He ‘made it his business to
give to Free France in the making the forms of Republican legality and
it was he who denounced on the radio the abuse of rights of the Vichy
regime. It was he, and he alone, who, in the name of Free France, took
the initiative to condemn on the waves of the BBC the first restriction
15 J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac, La France Libre (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 117.

16 J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac, Georges Boris. Trente ans d’influence: Blum, de Gaulle, Mendès
France (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), p. 121.
on Jews and to affirm that those who despoiled would be forced to dis-
gorge their ill-gotten gains without compensation.’17
Those military men, including Larminat and Leclerc who brought to
Free France the support of French Equatorial Africa (AEF) at the end of
August 1940, detested the parliamentary regime and the Popular Front
which they held responsible for the defeat. Larminat complained to de
Gaulle over the fact that the revue La France Libre put on its cover the
Republican motto ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’.18 To everyone, Cassin
embodied the Third Republic. A young right-wing radical like Daniel
Cordier, in the military camp at Camberley, was particularly sensitive
on this point. ‘The 3rd of August [1940], René Cassin had exclaimed:
“Just because the general staff was ill-prepared for several years and
the generals got it wrong, it does not follow that the Republic got it
wrong for 70 years”. In whose name does he speak? I did not leave
everything for the Republic nor to save the lost honour of democracy: I
left for France, and France alone.’19 Cassin’s attachment to the Republic
left him open ‘to ridicule under the title Bécassin by the wastrels of
Camberley’.20 ‘Bécassine’ was the name of a well-meaning but dim-
witted Breton servant in a contemporary comic book series. Later, in
1942, Leclerc told de Gaulle ‘that in 1936 we saw your jurist René
Cassin giving the clenched fist salute [of the Popular Front]’ – which was
a pure invention – and he begged de Gaulle not ‘to re-establish the bad
old ways responsible for our defeat’, but instead to proclaim ‘that the aim
of Free France is to win the war, and thereafter, to carry out a national
revolution’.21
Cassin was not only a Republican; he was also a Jew, and he attracted
the traces of anti-Semitism in various corners of Free France. Tissier
was a man of the political right, someone who though not anti-Semitic
nevertheless had ‘some reservations with respect to the place of Jews in
the French elite’.22 Escarra apparently felt that there was an imbalance
17 Crémieux-Brilhac, Georges Boris, p. 145.

18 Crémieux-Brilhac, Georges Boris, pp. 138ff.
19 Daniel Cordier, Alias Caracalla (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), p. 159.
20 Crémieux-Brilhac, Georges Boris, p. 144.
21 Telegram of Leclerc to de Gaulle, 12 May 1942, Mémorial Leclerc, GL 42/004, cited
by Crémieux-Brilhac, Georges Boris, p. 138.
22 Patrick Weil, ‘Pierre Tissier’, in Claire Andrieu, Philippe Braud and Guillaume Piketty
(eds.), Dictionnaire de Gaulle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2006), pp. 1112–13. Cassin noted
in his diary on 19 February 1941 that Tissier had accepted the racial laws ‘in an
attenuated form’ (382AP27). Reading his works – Le gouvernement de Vichy (London:
Harrap, 1942), La Nazification de la France de Vichy (Oxford University Press, 1942), Le
‘gouvernement’ de Vichy (New Delhi: Bureau d’Information de la France Combattante,
n.d.) – refutes this suspicion. See Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? Histoire de
la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (Paris: Grasset, 2002), and his ‘Racisme et
Free France, 1940–1941 119
in the movement due to the presence of Cassin and the circle of young
Jewish lawyers who worked with him. He apparently raised this matter
with Pleven, who asked if this made it difficult for him to do his job.
Escarra said yes, to which Pleven replied, ‘Then I take it I will have your
resignation.’23 Nothing more was said of the incident at the time, but
Cassin was well aware of the distaste some of his colleagues felt for ‘the
Jew I am’.24
The men with these common prejudices were certainly within the
minority within Free France, and at no time did they find an echo in
anything de Gaulle said or did. Cassin’s manifest attachment to the par-
liamentary Republic was more troublesome for de Gaulle, who took
account of the opinion of those military men around him, and who
tended more towards the view in 1940–41 that the French despised the
parliamentary regime, which they blamed for the defeat. As late as July
1941, he asked Cassin and Dejean not to speak about democracy.25 But
he retained his confidence in Cassin. He knew Cassin was immovably
loyal to him and to the cause, which is something that could not be said
for the others. Exile politics always mean intrigue, and Free France was
no exception. In none of these cabals did Cassin play the slightest part.
By late August 1940, Cassin began to assume the role he would occupy
for the following year. In discussions with the coordinator (then director)
of the civil service of Free France, Antoine Aristide, who went by the
nom de guerre of Fontaine, Cassin learned that ‘I will be Minister of
Home Affairs and Foreign Affairs above all.’ He would participate in all
meetings and would share responsibilities with others.26 He would also be
sent on missions to shore up those parts of the French overseas territories
either sympathetic to or committed to Free France. In effect, Cassin
had the responsibility to manage the key committees of the movement
and its routine communications on a day-to-day basis, when de Gaulle
left London on 1 September, to launch an African campaign on behalf
of Free France. This was to be in two parts: one military, the other
political. The first came to ruin in the disastrous Anglo-Dutch-French
discrimination dans la politique française de l’immigration 1938–1945/1974–1995’,

Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire, 47 (July–Sept. 1995), pp. 77–102. But the relationship
between the two men was conflictual from the outset. Cassin noted on 22 August 1940
that he had had a dispute with Tissier on the subject of a document which Tissier had
kept but not sent, as agreed (382AP27, Diary 1940).
23 Gérard Israël, René Cassin. La guerre hors-la-loi. Avec de Gaulle. Les droits de l’homme
(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1990), pp. 137–8.
24 Diary, 10 March 1941.
25 Charles de Gaulle, Lettres, notes et carnets, vol. 3, Juin 1940–juillet 1941 (Paris: Plon,
1981), p. 385.
26 Diary, 25 Aug. 1940.
naval expedition against Dakar, whose garrison retained its loyalty to

Vichy. The second came to fruition in the creation of the Conseil de
Défense de l’Empire Français.27
That relatively few political and military leaders had rallied to de
Gaulle’s side tended to undermine his standing with the British gov-
ernment. To boost his profile, he needed the support of French colonies.
In French Equatorial Africa, the position was clouded. At the beginning
of August, de Gaulle sent Leclerc, Boislambert and Pleven, who, in con-
junction with Eboué and Larminat, succeeded in forcing the hands of
those who were hesitant and in rallying to Free France the Cameroons,
Chad, the French Congo and Oubangui-Chari.28 This was for de Gaulle
a great gain: the authority of Free France was confirmed in a strategically
important region, the human and material resources of which were not
negligible for the Allied Coalition. But this African policy was important
in another respect. Why would it not be possible to follow the success at
Brazzaville with one in Dakar?
With Churchill’s approval, de Gaulle set off for Senegal on 31 August.
With him were 6,000 French and British soldiers and sailors, on board
an impressive naval force, in which British ships were the heaviest and
the most numerous. The aim was to use this naval force to impress upon
the French garrison in Dakar the wisdom of rallying to the cause of Free
France. The governor of French West Africa, Pierre Boisson, who had at
his disposal an even larger land garrison and naval muscle as well, would
have none of it. De Gaulle had hoped in the best case that he could gain
the important sea and air base of Dakar without bloodshed, but when
it became clear that Dakar would fight, a series of confused landings
and sea engagements produced the worst-case outcome. The Allied fleet
had to withdraw, on 25 September, after taking serious losses, and the
military and political stock of de Gaulle sank like a stone.29
If the responsibility for the failure of September 1940 had to be shared,
the British would have to take the bulk of the blame. By a massive engage-
ment, they had transformed an effort to rally support into an invasion,
drawing forth a natural response to defend Senegal against an aggressor,
a sentiment which the memory of the attack on Mers-el-Kebir rein-
forced. Around the Dakar expedition, the whiff of the Dardanelles could
be scented. Churchill, in 1915 First Lord of the Admiralty, had sent a
Franco-British naval expedition to attack the Straits of the Dardanelles in
Turkey, forcing her out of the war. The result was a disaster, followed by
27 Diary, 25 Aug. 1940.

28 Gabon completed the ensemble rallying to Free France at the beginning of November.
29 See Crémieux-Brilhac, La France Libre, pp. 116–23.
Free France, 1940–1941 121
an amphibious landing at Gallipoli, which was another disaster. Twenty-

five years later, Churchill had to admit his error to the British cabinet:
once again he had tried unsuccessfully to use British naval power against
another ally of Germany, Vichy France. Happily, Churchill and de Gaulle
abandoned the operation without trying a landing, the chances of success
of which were slim and the risks of which were huge. No Gallipoli this
time, just a major reversal which did not seriously weaken Churchill. For
de Gaulle, though, this was much more serious, since it demonstrated
the limits of his power.
When Cassin got the news, he was shocked. His first reaction was
anger that Boisson and others ‘accepted the orders of German officers’.
‘This is a terrible blow against the rise of our movement in Syria and
North Africa.’ ‘This evening my spirits were low . . . impossible to read,
write or speak.’30 But his determination returned, just as it had done at
many other dark moments of his life. He found solace in work: ‘Above
all I must work: I have decided to organize a documentation centre on
general questions: Colonies – foreign affairs. We have made too few
political preparations – speaking too much about operations, not enough
about the general framework in which they must be put.’31 The war was
indeed for Cassin a matter of endurance, of tenacity, of hard work, a
steadfast belief in the future. And of organization.
In London, in effect, confusion reigned. De Gaulle had taken with
him a part of his general staff. ‘For over a month’, Cassin wrote on
3 October, ‘no common policy has been agreed.’32 He had to insist that
the principal figures, Admiral Muselier and Major Fontaine, responsible
for military command and administration respectively, meet him once a
week. The effort to rally the support of other colonies was at a standstill.
‘We must consolidate our position as it is, and prepare a civil organization,
strengthening our ties with the British [government] as well.’
He saw matters clearly, since the standing of Free France in British
eyes had diminished in the wake of the Dakar fiasco. At the same time,
this turn of affairs pushed Britain towards avoiding further steps which
could lead Vichy formally to enter the war on the side of the Germans and
with the fleet under its command. This was not the moment to irritate
Pétain, especially in light of rumours that he was seeking a rapproche-
ment with Britain. Louis Rougier, who presented himself to the British
government as having come with a mission from Pétain, brought a concil-
iatory message to Lord Halifax, British Foreign Secretary, and champion
of appeasement, on 24 October, precisely at the moment Pétain was
shaking hands with Hitler at Montoire. Which way was Britain leaning?
30 Diary, 24 Sept. 1940. 31 Diary, 25 Sept. 1940. 32 Diary, 3 Oct. 1940.

In this uncertain moment, the position of Free France within the Allied
camp was anything but fixed.
Free France was, in effect, an unidentified political object. It was not
a government in exile, nor even a National Committee with a recognized
mandate to represent France. Churchill would have been happy to pro-
vide such recognition, had a sufficient number of political personalities
of the first rank joined him in London. In June 1940, without such an
entourage, and without an alternative in sight, Churchill had recognized
de Gaulle alone. This gave him standing, but not his movement. We are a
long way from the creation of a provisional government, which de Gaulle
succeeded in forming only in 1943. The question three years earlier was
what steps to take towards that ultimate destination?
A first step, albeit a negative one, was to deny legitimacy to the Vichy
regime. This was all the more important since, with the exception of
Britain, most states, including the United States, Canada, the Soviet
Union, as well as the Vatican, officially recognized the government of
Pétain. Cassin played a particularly important role in this effort, in light
of his legal authority, his international experience, and the reputation he
had acquired in Geneva. He developed a simple line of argument, but a
decisive one for the future of Free France. His central point was that de
Gaulle and his movement had acted within the framework of legality, in
effect filling the legal vacuum created by Pétain and his circle. They had
seized power by a coup d’état, which no vote of the National Assembly
could ever justify, since this Assembly had precisely the duty to defend the
Republic itself, destroyed by its vote of 10 July 1940. Cassin’s argument
was a strong one, and it is now commonly accepted by contemporary
jurists.33
Illegal under the law, the government of Vichy was equally illegal in its
actions. They had capitulated to the Nazis, in violation of solemn com-
mitments made to Britain not to sign a separate peace. They had aban-
doned the role as the shield of the people and renounced the commitment
to oppose Germany in a war in which France’s colonies and overseas
territories were engaged. Pétain and his entourage, Cassin argued, had
accepted the rule of the Nazis or of those who, throughout the world,
deployed their forces against Britain and her allies, including the colonies
and territories administered by France. Other countries had been crushed
by superior military force, but only in France had a government turned
defeat into an alliance with the occupier. The Poles, the Dutch, the
Czechs had not done so.
33 René Cassin, ‘Un coup d’état. La soi-disant Constitution de Vichy’, La France Libre,
1, no. 2 (16 Dec. 1940), pp. 162–76. A manuscript of this article may be found in
382AP47.
Free France, 1940–1941 123
Making this juridical case on behalf of Free France was a major con-
tribution to the movement. That is why, at this early phase of its history,
Cassin’s position was at its height. He embodied the political integrity
and personal courage of millions of French veterans of the Great War,
and their support for the Republic. What is most striking is the con-
trast between the resignation of Vichy and the resolution of Free France.
‘What I cannot describe, though it is essential’, Cassin noted, ‘is the fever
in which we sent telegrams to the “resistance” of the different territo-
ries of the French Empire.’ That fever was the antidote to despair, what
Cassin had termed the ‘immense deflation of the leaders’ of France after
June 1940. ‘All that is lamentable: we must hope’, he concluded.34 This
hot defiance fed the will to fight on and made hope possible.
The rallying to de Gaulle of French Equatorial Africa, then New Cale-
donia, changed the political map, both in terms of territories and in terms
of personnel. Henceforth, experienced and recognized military men ral-
lied to de Gaulle, whose movement now had outside of France a base
in which to exercise its authority. The question which immediately arose
was how to structure it.
Cassin intervened in this debate by drafting a long note dated 22 Octo-
ber 1940, ‘on the conditions necessary for the formation of a government
of Free France capable of being recognized by the British and American
governments’.35 Cassin’s discussion of a programme of action opens with
a legal argument. There is no government without territory. The question
of the recognition of Free France could not be posed without the rallying
to it of important colonies. That precondition had been met. Secondly,
since it is impossible to recognize simultaneously two governments claim-
ing authority over a single country, the next step is to disqualify the then
recognized government, that of Vichy. Here Cassin repeated his familiar
argument, developed along two lines. In law, Vichy’s authority rested on
a judicial coup d’état: it had created an illegal constitution, promulgated
without the consent of the people. In fact, it was incapable of resisting
German demands.
This negative argument, though, was simply a preamble to Cassin’s
positive recommendations:
A government implies the existence of a consistent and representative author-
ity which exercises the attributes of sovereignty: armed forces, finance, justice,
economic production, administration, external representation, organized public
services.
On this level, Free France had a long way to go. Certainly, it had had an
army since 7 August. But it could not make payments, since there was
34 Diary, 3 July 1940. 35 Fonds de Gaulle, 3AG1/254.

no autonomous bank in French Equatorial Africa. Therefore it must as

soon as possible create such a bank in Africa, even though its principal
headquarters would be in London. Some of the instruments of justice
were in place, but they lacked a Court of Appeals, the creation of which
was also a matter of urgency for Free France in London. There had to
be foreign representation, even before recognition, in order to negotiate
with foreign powers and to protect French nationals.
These conditions were necessary but not sufficient for the achievement
of recognition by Britain and the United States. Cassin here developed
arguments about the logic of governance. He insisted that Free France
had to define its mission in terms absolutely different from those of Vichy.
The core of that difference was the central place accorded to the notion
of liberty: ‘Liberty for the people of France and of the Empire to organize
the way of life of Greater France and to determine the nature of the
domestic regime’. Although he believed in a parliamentary regime, and
considered that the Constitution of 1875 had much to recommend it,
he separated ‘democracy’ from ‘parliamentary regime’. The government
was under no obligation to restore a parliamentary regime, but it did
need to preserve democracy, a word he underlined, to gain the support
of British opinion, as well as to appeal to American opinion, which
supported a system, no less democratic, in which the President is elected
by the people, through a separate electoral college, and not through
parliament.
The intention to combat the conservative, even reactionary, tendencies
among those in French Equatorial Africa who rallied to Free France is
evident here. Cassin’s aim was a defence of the Republic, which was for
him inseparable from the defence of France.
We do not know if this note influenced de Gaulle. He was then
in Brazzaville, flying the French flag, and Tissier, who accompanied
him, prepared the manifesto of 27 October which gave political form to
Free France. It was time for de Gaulle, in effect, to affirm that France
had, if not a government in exile, then a political force and an army
which rejected capitulation to the Nazis. On this point, as well as in
terms of the arguments he used, the manifesto follows Cassin’s line. It
declared:
there is but one government worthy of the name French. In effect, the organism
at Vichy, which pretends to take that name, is unconstitutional and under the
heel of the invader. In its state of servitude, this organism can be, and is in effect,
but an instrument utilized by the enemies of France against the honour and
interests of the country. It is therefore necessary that a new power assume the
responsibility of directing the French war effort. Events have imposed on me this
sacred duty. I will not fail in it.
Free France, 1940–1941 125
It is evident, though, that Cassin had not convinced de Gaulle to affirm

his position as a partisan of democracy. The General sidestepped this
word, as well as the word ‘Republic’, but he did make a commitment
fundamental for the future of Free France. The manifesto went on:
I exercise my powers in the name of France and uniquely do so to defend her, and I
make the solemn undertaking to account for my actions before the representatives
of the French people, as soon as it will be possible for the French people to elect
them.
To assist me in this task, I constitute today a Council for the Defence of the
Empire. This Council, composed of men who currently exercise their authority
on French territory or who symbolize the highest intellectual and moral values
of the nation, represents the country and the empire which is fighting for their
existence.36
Who better than Cassin could represent ‘the highest intellectual and
moral values’ of France?
At the same time, de Gaulle reassured both French and international
audiences as to his political commitment. He recognized unconditionally
the principle of popular sovereignty.
We declare that the voice of those Frenchmen, which even the enemy or the
organism of Vichy, which depends on the enemy, has been unable to reduce to
silence, is the voice of the Nation, and that we have, in consequence, the sacred
duty to assume the charge imposed on us;
We declare that we will accomplish this mission with full respect for the insti-
tutions of France and that we will make a full accounting of all our acts to the
representatives of the French nation as soon as it will be possible to do so freely
and normally.37
In 1941, each territory rallying to Free France already had its own
bureaucratic structure. Still there was evidently a need to provide a cen-
tral authority capable of exercising control and providing impetus. This
task was both indispensable and achievable over a relatively short period
of time, as Cassin underscored in his note of 22 October. He was partic-
ularly sensitive to the need for urgency, since in London, with de Gaulle
absent, disorder reigned, as we have seen.
In fact, the ordinance which set up the Council for the Defence of the
Empire and named its members was promulgated two days after the
Brazzaville Manifesto. Cassin was, alongside two colonial governors,
the only civilian in this Defence Council. He had to await the return
36 ‘Manifeste du 27 octobre 1940’, Journal Officiel de la France Libre, 1.

37 ‘Déclaration officielle complétant le manifeste du 27 octobre 1940’, Journal Officiel de
la France Libre, 1.
to London of de Gaulle on 29 January 1941 for this new structure to

hold its first meeting. The night before, he wrote in his diary:
The General has signed a series of papers organizing the administration of Free
France. There will be a committee of four, an administrative council, and a
military committee. He wanted to give me the title of ‘Chancellor’: but I refused,
just as I had refused to be a member of the Council of the Order of the Liberation,
even though I do this work in the absence of Argenlieu. I will be the permanent
secretary of the Council of Defence, and having made on 2 July the sacrifice of
‘foreign affairs’ for the cause, I keep control over the judicial service, international
conventions, and the documentation, study and liaison service, in which we will
develop the part France will play in the general conduct of the war and the
organization of the victorious peace.38
Whatever the title he held, the position gave him a great degree of freedom
as well as the responsibility to organize the daily activities of all members
of the movement. Under these circumstances, Cassin faced a daunting
task.
The first task was to create what could be termed a virtual civil admin-
istration for France. They took the initiative in publishing an Official Jour-
nal of Free France using the same typography as the old Official Journal,
thereby affirming the continuity of the French Republic. Cassin created a
juridical service which provided arguments for advocates of Free France.
When de Gaulle had other obligations, it was either Cassin or Muselier
who presided over the regular administration meetings of section heads,
usually on Mondays and Wednesdays. De Gaulle recognized this service,
when he wrote in his memoirs: ‘Professor Cassin was my collaborator –
and how valuable he was – in the promulgations of all the acts and
documents on which, from virtually nothing, we built our internal and
external structure.’39
Cassin’s work had two other facets which emerged as time went on.
In Britain he had a whole series of contacts of great value to Free
France. His reputation was well known among veterans and in the press.
He spent time in August 1940 with Harold Nicolson, one of the pil-
lars of the Foreign Office. He knew well Lord Robert Cecil, winner
of the Nobel Peace Prize, and saw him frequently. He was cordially
received at Chatham House, the home of the Royal Institute of Inter-
national Affairs, which furnished his documentation service with their
review of the French and foreign press, and in New College, Oxford,
whose Warden, A. E. Zimmern, was an old friend from the League of
Nations.
38 Décret du 29 et arrêté du 30 janv. 1941; Diary, de Gaulle, 30 Jan. 1941.

39 L’appel, p. 107.
Free France, 1940–1941 127
In addition, Cassin was adept at propaganda and he enjoyed writing

and recording broadcasts for the BBC. One of his talks was sent out on 8
September 1940, to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Marne. It
was indelibly marked by his profound love for France, which in 1940, he
said, was engaged in the same battle she fought in 1914 and which she
won, thanks to the indomitable spirit of the men of the Marne, of which
he was one. It was this text which Cassin asked thirty-five years later to
be placed in his casket with him.40
Cassin attached real importance to these radio speeches. When in 1951
the Revue d’Histoire de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale published an article
on the French broadcasts on the BBC, without citing his name, Cassin
wrote to the author reminding him that he had broadcast 130 talks,
and twenty in 1940 alone: ‘As far as I am concerned, the nation knows
nothing of what I did in London. But, throughout France, I am “the
man who spoke on the BBC from 1940 on”.’ The author apologized.41
Several letters in Cassin’s possession attested to the real importance of
his radio work. Herriot noted in his diary on 28 September 1940 that
he had heard Cassin on the radio the day before ‘giving an admirable
patriotic exhortation to French students’.42
The role of Cassin in legal matters was equally important. It was he
who conducted the discussions with British ministers as to the jurisdic-
tion of Free France on disciplinary or penal questions concerning French
soldiers stationed in Britain.43 He helped edit the document on ‘Disci-
plinary Commissions’, always ensuring that de Gaulle was informed and
approved of his positions.44 He wrote the circular on the registration of
marriages of French volunteers in Britain.45
The maintenance of morale was also of importance, even for the rela-
tively small number of people who had joined the fight. Cassin noted in
his journal on 16 August 1940, ‘The news from France is worrying: either
inertia or platitudes about “the Master” or Anglophobic hatred.’ The
company of other resistance groups in exile helped fortify his courage, in
particular that of the Czechs, whose Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eduard
Beneš, was an old friend. On 17 August he wrote:
In an interview with Mr Beneš, very optimistic. It lasted one hour. It was five
years since I had seen him, since my visit to Prague, on the eve of his election to
40 See chapter 2.
41 Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘Les émissions françaises à la BBC pendant la guerre’,
Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 1 (Nov. 1950), pp. 73–95. Letter of
Cassin to Crémieux-Brilhac, and his response, dated 18 Dec. 1951 and 13 Jan. 1952,
382AP105.
42 Michel Soulié, La vie politique d’Edouard Herriot (Paris: A. Colin, 1962), p. 54.
43 Diary, 14 Aug. 1940. 44 Diary, 22, 24 Aug. 1940. 45 Diary, 21, 28 Aug. 1940.
the Presidency. We talked over the crushing responsibilities of the ruling classes
in France and Britain which had made them give in to counter-revolution.
The views of Beneš on human rights were very close to his own.
It was clear that Cassin occupied a privileged place in Free France.
And yet he did not seize the moment and impose himself as a leader.
Was it his modesty, his scruples, his unwillingness to put himself ahead
of others? In part, yes. He was well aware of a certain ‘timidity’, with
which he reproached himself after not having asked to be received by
Eden alongside de Gaulle.46 One part of this relatively reticent attitude
was his wish to do nothing to damage the movement. For that reason
alone, it might be better if Jews and old-fashioned Republicans did not
occupy the centre of the stage.47 He had accomplished much that was
essential: he had been the stalwart worker in the Council for the Defence
of the Empire, though few had taken notice of that.
In his notebooks, the future General Diégo Brosset described the key
personalities he met at Carlton Gardens in February 1941. He began
his account with Fontaine and Pleven. Cassin is sketched later, without
much sympathy: ‘Cassin, who passes like a rat but who still hopes not
to be forgotten, plays a hidden but important role.’48 And yet it was
to Cassin that de Gaulle, before leaving Britain for the Middle East,
gave the authority to sign international conventions in the name of Free
France and to convoke the Council for the Defence of the Empire should
anything happen to him.49
In order to take the measure of the considerable work Cassin did in
this period, we have to put it all into context. Cassin was not a high civil
servant who was practising his profession in familiar circumstances, but
rather a professor in exile who made himself useful, through improvisa-
tion after improvisation, in an extraordinary venture under extraordinary
circumstances.
Living under the Blitz

Among those circumstances was the Blitz. The absolutely essential pre-
requisite for the revival of the French Republic was the failure of the
German offensive against Britain. Had there been an invasion of Eng-
land in September 1940, it would have been very difficult for British
46 Diary, 1 July 1940. 47 We will return to this point in chapter 11.

48 Carnet of Diégo Brosset, 10 Feb. 1941, in Guillaume Piketty (ed.), Français en résistance.
Carnets de guerre, correspondances, journaux personnels (Paris: Robert Laffont, Bouquins,
2009), p. 169.
Free France, 1940–1941 129
forces to resist. The catastrophe of Dunkirk meant that the forces res-
cued, however heroically, were without their weapons and equipment.
Let us not forget that Churchill had been in office only five months,
and he had secured a list of those who were prepared to play the role
of Pétain and Laval should worse come to worst. Among them was the
former king, Edward VIII, who had abdicated four years before.
September 1940 was the low point of the war for Britain as it was for
Free France. Anyone with eyes to see could tell that the prelude to the
invasion was being played out in the skies. The Luftwaffe shifted away
from very damaging early raids on airfields and installations to conduct
a massive bombing campaign on centres of population, and in particular
on London.
René and Simone Cassin lived through the worst of it. A week after the
signing of the 7 August accords, Dover, Portsmouth and Southampton
were hit. London’s turn would come next, but even before the bombs
fell on the capital, almost daily alerts interrupted whatever calm or peace
of mind Cassin could muster. And frequently, he applied his mind to
calming the fears of his wife Simone, whose demeanour clearly showed
signs of strain as the summer unfolded. On 22 August he tried to stiffen
her resolve, but was himself hampered by a new orthopaedic belt to
protect his hip and abdomen injured in 1914. Because of his chronic
condition, he was hardly ever without pain. ‘I feel, not disabled, but
enslaved’, he noted sardonically.50
The RAF could not prevent the bombardment, but it took its toll on
the Luftwaffe. On 25 August, Cassin noted five alerts in a single day.51
The next day, the alert lasted for six hours, and for Cassin the night was
marked by ‘the enchanting spectacle of searchlights crossing the skies’.52
Each such night meant a descent to the basement of their lodgings. On 28
August, Cassin was at a luncheon for General Spears given by de Gaulle
at the Savoy; that too was interrupted by an alert. There was talk of the
RAF raids on Berlin, which presented the air war as a war of attrition,
something to endure, rather than as a prelude to invasion. Saturday,
7 September was both a splendid day and to Cassin:
the most terrible since our arrival in London. Towards 5 p.m., before the alert,
a very heavy bombardment spread death and fire in the docklands. It seemed
that a furious fire storm flared up in the midst of a calm. The building of C.G.
[Carlton Gardens] was really shaken for the first time. From afar, one sees
the columns of smoke and some people have even seen German planes which
penetrated London’s defences . . . This is a harsh ordeal . . . opening a new phase
in the preliminary battle of the future invasion . . . Here we have to say with what
50 Diary, 22 Aug. 1940. 51 Diary, 25 Aug. 1940. 52 Diary, 26 Aug. 1940.

courage the people of London have stood up to the incessant storm: the stage
of attrition, the destruction of things, people and economic or familial life has
begun.53
The rest of September was punctuated by attacks of varying intensity. On

Sunday 8 September, Cassin noted that ‘Several bombs have fallen on
Earl’s Court’, which was a few miles west of his lodgings.54 The following
night was much worse:
The night was very bad: bombs shook the house especially between 4 and 5 a.m.
Coming up, we saw an immense fire on the other side of the street from our
home. The inferno was devouring the roof of the Museum: poorly combatted,
heightened by the wind, it raged . . . I work all day long, a bit preoccupied by
the worsening situation: in fact, the inhabitants of our building are concerned.
Soon the bombardment starts again: the planes are on the prowl, sowing fear
among those they menace. One moment, Simone and Mme Michaud huddled
together under the piano. We laugh nervously at the silliness fear provokes . . . The
explosions shake the house to such an extent that we go down into the basement.
Two hours go by, we are seated uncomfortably. I see, close to the door to the
street, the sky death-laden. I feel very calm.55
On 10 September, huddled together in the basement, Cassin thought that

after one particular explosion, ‘it seemed that the interior wall swayed’.
The sounds of bombardment brought him back to 1914. ‘The whistling
reminded me of the other war and I have the impression of being able to
calm and reassure people’, throughout the pounding which they endured.
Even when morning came, the danger was not over. Two unexploded
bombs across the street were identified, and circumnavigated.56
Sleepless, nerves taut, Cassin had his work to distract him. But from
what could Simone draw strength? Her husband had to find her a place
outside of London. The nights were getting to them both. René knew
that ‘At night fear disfigures even the men.’ They set out for Marlow, a
picturesque village between Oxford and London, an unlikely target for
the Luftwaffe. There they found some lodgings which would be Simone’s
alternative home for the coming year. Laconically, Cassin noted: ‘Here
we separated in a foreign country, in the midst of war, for the first time.’57
Alone, the following night, he descended to the shelter of the Institut
Français. He had a decent bed, and fell asleep at once. Then came the
bombs:
The cannons thundered furiously. I had to make my way around the cellar without
a lamp. One isn’t very proud of oneself, when one doesn’t know one’s way around.
I couldn’t find the stairs . . . Awakened early I went back to sleep and then awoke
53 Diary, 7 Sept. 1940. 54 Diary, 8 Sept. 1940. 55 Diary, 9 Sept. 1940.

56 Diary, 10 Sept. 1940. 57 Diary, 12 Sept. 1940.
Free France, 1940–1941 131
to a terrible sadness. For the first time since the Armistice, I felt my morale
weaken.58
The next day he worked in the British Museum, and recovered some of
his composure. And yet he joined the crowd, panicked and ran to the
shelter as soon as an alert sounded. Visiting Simone in Marlow a few
days later, he found her still in a troubled state. His own morale was
variable too. On 16 September he noted: ‘The invasion is expected at
one moment or another. It would have come on Sunday, if the RAF had
been defeated.’59
The combination of worry about a German invasion of England and
uncertainty about the naval expedition off the coast of Africa wore Cassin
down. ‘The departure of the General’, he wrote on 20 September, before
getting the bad news from Africa, ‘but above all the bombardment of
London and the need to sleep away from home, completely transformed
one’s inner working and destroyed normal life’.60 That night he was
caught at the BBC while recording a radio broadcast, and spent the night
in the BBC shelter. The following morning he traversed the city, surveyed
the damage, and then returned to his work – his rock and his salvation.
Without a sense of purpose, without a cause, he might have buckled
under the pressure, as so many others did. Free France was his lifeline.
Overall, Cassin’s life under the Blitz of 1940 was spent under enormous
pressure. He was engaged in an unprecedented enterprise, with very
uncertain chances of success, and with colleagues not of his choosing.
He had to present a staunch Republican façade to the world, even when
military reversals seemed to play right into the hands of Vichy. After
twenty-three years of marriage, he had to live a solitary, transitory life,
from shelter to shelter, without sufficient sleep, and with hardly any word
about the well-being of his family in France. A cable saying everyone was
well arrived for him the day after he had heard the full story of Dakar.
That lifted his spirits, though occasional visits to Marlow made him aware
of how fragile his wife was.61
Although Cassin could not know it, for Londoners the worst was over
by November 1940. The successful defence of the skies above London
had put a damper on Hitler’s invasion plans, and his eyes turned increas-
ingly eastward, towards the racial and ideological enemy whose destruc-
tion was the next assignment he gave his armies. London – and Free
France – had survived, though we should bear in mind that in early 1941
Hitler controlled virtually the entire land mass of Continental Europe.
58 Diary, 12 Sept. 1940. 59 Diary, 16 Sept. 1940.

60 Diary, 20 Sept. 1940. 61 Diary, 25 Sept., 28 Sept. 1940.
In April of that year, he completed his conquest of Europe by crushing

resistance in Greece and in Yugoslavia. With Vichy still holding on to
North and West Africa, with Italian forces in Libya, and with the Ger-
man Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel threatening Egypt and the Suez
Canal, you would have had to be clairvoyant to know that the tide had
turned. And yet it had.
Surveying the catastrophic year he had endured, Cassin was able to
take some distance from the rush of events, and measure himself against
the moment. Before he had come to London, he had felt at a loss, unable
to make any difference, when: ‘Among the veterans, at the Ministry of
Information, at the Law Faculty, I found ignorance and the cruel needs
of the times and the means to realize them – it seemed that it must
have been my fault – that I must have misconstrued it – or that I was
seized by a terrible feeling of powerlessness.’ And now, despite death and
destruction meted out on a daily basis in wartime, his sense of purpose
was much clearer. This is how he put it: ‘And so it is, that in the terrible
times endured by this country, while one feels torn apart from everything
one has left there, one feels too a kind of joy, which comes over me when
I realize that I have been destined to contribute to a sublime mission.’
This spirit of defiance emerged out of the war and the role he had
come to play in it. Cassin could not explain it rationally, but he still felt
deeply:
That over the years destiny slowly forges the arms she prepares to place in our
hands. That obsession which, since my childhood, fixed my attention on the
fate of France confronting her neighbours – my varied work over 30 years –
this relative inactivity in the midst of war: all this silently prepared me for the
irrevocable decision taken in June, and for this real effort in the struggle for the
deliverance of our country!
I have always thought that a life is incomplete, if, to a great love, a man was
incapable of adding a great work: children, scientific work, industrial creativity or
artistic or political work, which would survive us. Not having had children, not
having had the good fortune to exercise power, having sacrificed my scholarly life,
though not my teaching – to a kind of philanthropic pipe dream dedicated to the
generation of veterans, orphans, and to the prevention of the war of 1939 . . . Then
suddenly the fog lifts! . . . I was destined for my modest role to be the first civilian
who came from France in response to the appeal of General de Gaulle!
Even if after victory, disappointments and worse await you – René, do not forget
this. You had the unique privilege to revive France, at death’s door. We shall
win!62
62 Diary, 25 Dec. 1940.

Free France, 1940–1941 133
This meditation tells us much about René Cassin in 1940. There is

bitterness in his reflections. Imagine the taste as of ashes when he refers
to the ‘chimera’ of his work on behalf of veterans, and orphans, and of
the price he had paid for his public work, in terms of his own career in the
law. It had all come to nothing. And yet, the turn that his life had taken
was at one and the same time bitter, stunning and filled with possibilities.
We should also note that in this passage he is talking to himself, remind-
ing himself that he must not in future forget how lucky he was to be where
he was and who he was in the summer of 1940 and beyond. He knew he
had entered into history, and his pride in that fact shows just a bit too
much. But alongside ego and achievement, there is much anxiety. People
grit their teeth and repeatedly say ‘we shall win’ precisely at the moment
when their doubts trouble them most. Vanity, a sober appreciation of the
dangers ahead, and determination: all are evident in the man. This is
hardly surprising; he was no paragon of virtue, but an ambitious man
with much still to give to his country. And to the world.
6 World War, 1941–1943
In 1941, the European war became a world war. This was already the
case in part, due to the continuation of the Sino-Japanese war, and to
the involvement of the British, French, Belgian and Dutch empires in the
conflict. Formally, the Nazis had left Vichy in control of French overseas
territories, but some of them joined Free France, then struggling for
political recognition and a place in the anti-Hitler alliance. This was
no metaphor, since in June 1941 Free France was seated formally as
a delegation attending the first St James’s Conference. There Churchill
asked the members of the alliance to reconstruct a ‘new Europe’ radically
different from that the Nazis had in mind. At this first meeting, Cassin
represented de Gaulle and Free France.
He represented them again at the second St James’s Conference on
24 September 1941. On 22 June, Germany had invaded the Soviet
Union, and thereafter its army had occupied a large part of European
Russia. Furthermore, there had been a major change in US foreign policy:
on 14 August, Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the Atlantic Charter,
which stated that a new world order had to emerge after the Nazis’ defeat.
In effect, though not formally, the Americans had entered the European
war. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on 7 December, finally sealed
a political turn which had already taken place. The war was now indeed
global, and spectacularly so.
During this extraordinary period, Cassin’s career had two facets. His
international profile grew, while, surprisingly, his political profile within
Free France diminished. We can date this difficult period in his life
precisely to 24 September, the date of the second St James’s Conference.
On that same day, de Gaulle announced the formation of the French
National Committee, the nascent government in exile of the French
Republic. Within this body, Cassin received only a second-rank portfolio,
that of Justice and Public Instruction. He had hoped for more, but he
had to be satisfied with what he was given.
Consider the irony of this day for Cassin. In the heart of London, he
sat as an equal among the leaders of the anti-Nazi alliance. He spoke of
134
World War, 1941–1943 135
France’s adherence to the Atlantic Charter as the foundation stone of

both the war and the post-war order to come. On the very same day Free
France made public its new political structure, one in which his role was
diminished from what it had been in his first year in London.
What Cassin did not know was that this bitter-sweet day closed one set
of doors in his life, but opened another. For it was from this point on, that
Cassin entered the inter-Allied circle which framed war aims not only in
terms of punishing the Nazi criminals, but also in terms of enacting a
new human rights regime which would attempt to make anything like the
Hitler regime impossible in the post-war world. From war talk to rights
talk in a global war is a good summary of the trajectory Cassin’s wartime
career described between 1941 and 1943.
Permanent secretary of the Defence Council

In the first eight months of 1941, René Cassin was at the centre of the
political network of Free France. In the Carlton Gardens offices, he was
effectively head of its civil service, coordinating administrative meetings
and chairing them in de Gaulle’s absence. In 1941 his responsibilities
grew. Effectively, he was the coordinator of Free France’s international
activity, its military and civil committees, and its liaison with leaders of
the French overseas territories who had rallied to the cause. He was in
constant contact with de Gaulle, who sought his advice daily on interna-
tional questions, alongside that of other key individuals – Pleven, Tissier,
as well as Escarra and Dejean. There was nothing Free France did at
this time of which Cassin was unaware or in which he was not involved.
In particular, he conducted negotiations with the British over financial
matters, without a resolution of which everything else would have ground
to a halt.
De Gaulle wanted Cassin at the centre of this new structure, which
gave a political form the movement had lacked in 1940. On the eve of
his departure for the Middle East, de Gaulle told him on two occasions:
‘Should I not return, it is you who will convoke a meeting of the Defence
Council to choose my successor.’1 The next day, Cassin presided
for the first time over the administrative committee of Free France.
After the departure of Pleven for the United States in June 1941, the
General asked Cassin, ‘to the great displeasure of Muselier’, to take
on the mission of coordinating all aspects of the work of the London
office, which needed a strong hand to control: ‘Oppositions, rivalries,
chicaneries should be beneath your dignity. If something of this kind will

appear, on whatever subject, you must act energetically and inform me

immediately, if necessary.’2
Cassin found the work he had to do as permanent secretary of the
Defence Council crushing. This council had powers to deal with other
countries on matters related to the defence of French possessions and
interests.3 It would also ‘launch the formation of bodies which would
play the juridical role normally played by the Conseil d’Etat, the Court
of Appeals, and eventually the High Court of Justice’. Since its members
were scattered throughout Africa and Oceania, Cassin found himself at
the centre of a worldwide political network.
Being dispersed, the Defence Council never met in plenary session,
and its influence was modest. De Gaulle consulted it only twice. On 18
January 1941, he asked its members what policy to adopt should Vichy
come to North Africa determined to renew the war against Hitler. On
3 March, he posed the problem as to what line to take should either
Britain or Turkey occupy French territories in the Middle East. Cassin
gathered the replies and sent him a synthesis of the views expressed.4 He
conducted a kind of political correspondence in which those responsible
for Free France discussed its strategy and tactics, by letter, cable or
telephone. This was the only way to coordinate the work of men who, in
London or overseas, acknowledged de Gaulle’s authority. The meetings
of the Council in London concerned only the members who were in the
city, notably Muselier, d’Argenlieu and Cassin.5
The Council was more a political symbol than an executive board
which determined the policy of Free France. De Gaulle could brandish
it, when he spoke in the name of Free France, and other members also
could refer to it. De Gaulle used it not to test his views, but to reinforce
his legitimacy. The Council was more a beacon than a port; more a
signpost than a destination. It provided a means whereby Free France
could answer two hostile arguments. The first was that de Gaulle was
only a single individual, who had no authority to speak for anyone else.
The second was that he was a placeman of the British, whose empire had
grown over centuries through the cooptation of allies who were discarded
as soon as their usefulness was at an end. The British went along with
the idea of the Council grudgingly, and felt de Gaulle’s pretensions were
more fully developed than were his military forces.6 They did not realize
2 Crémieux-Brilhac, La France Libre, p. 183.

3 Ordonnance 1, of 27 Oct. 1940, Journal Officiel de la France Libre, 1.
4 AN, Fonds de Gaulle, 3AG/1 151, dossier 1, answers and note of 25 Feb. 1941.
5 Minutes of a meeting of these three, 4 July 1941, AN, Fonds de Gaulle, 3AG/1 151,
dossier 1.
6 Crémieux-Brilhac, La France Libre, p. 137.
World War, 1941–1943 137
how crucial this initiative was to the restoration of French Republican

sovereignty. That was not their problem.
The Council was in and of itself evidence that the first argument was
false. De Gaulle had a constituency around the world. On the committee
were men of standing. The military men were better known. There was
Admiral Muselier, and General Catroux, commander of French forces
in the Middle East; both outranked de Gaulle but accepted his authority.
There was Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, Carmelite monk, and Philippe
Leclerc de Hautcloque, Captain of the 4th Infantry Division, who had
escaped France by cycling to the Spanish border and, after a brief period
in a Spanish jail, by making his way to Portugal and then to London.
There was Edgar de Larminat, who served in 1940 as chief of staff of
Vichy troops in the Middle East. He was arrested, escaped from prison
in Damascus, and found his way to the Congo, where he became com-
mander of Free French troops in the AEF. There was Adolphe Sicé, a
physician who was director of medical services of the AEF.
On the political side, there was the governor of Chad, Félix Eboué, the
first black governor of a French colony. There was Henri Sautot, who
had assured the adherence to Free France of New Caledonia. And there
was René Cassin.
From 19 February on, Cassin held regular meetings with the members
of the Council resident in London: d’Argenlieu, Muselier and de Gaulle.
These men did not always see eye to eye. There was a tendency, Cassin
felt, to speak constantly of the Liberation of France and not at all of
the liberties of Frenchmen.7 These were, after all, professional soldiers,
with whom he had to deal. But this matter could be left for later; other
business was pressing. After all Free France had armed forces to recruit,
train, arm and maintain, and could call on her allies for material needed
in this effort.8
To this end the structure of the hauts-commissariats was revised and
renewed. Africa was Sicé’s responsibility; the Middle East was Catroux’s;
the Pacific was the domain of d’Argenlieu. Reporting to each was a
military commander. From 20 May, a London secretariat coordinated the
business of these high commissioners. The finance and social services of
French Equatorial Africa were also streamlined, in line with the purposes
they were created to fulfil. And Cassin pressed ahead with plans for a
Central Overseas Bank, which took another year to construct.9 But the
foundations were laid then and there by the Council.10
7 Diary, 19 Feb. 1941.

8 Cassin, Les hommes partis de rien, pp. 367–9; Diary, 21 Feb. 1941.
9 Law of 2 Dec. 1941. 10 Cassin, Les hommes partis de rien, pp. 394–7.
As permanent secretary of the Conseil de Défense, he attended many

meetings of the military wing of Free France. He heard about a peace
proposal inspired by Germany and transmitted to London through Tokyo
with ‘a curious offer to talk to Free France about the minerals of New
Caledonia’.11 The Conseil would hear none of it, and basked in the
robust support of Churchill. De Gaulle told Cassin on 20 February that
Churchill had given him this ringing endorsement: ‘We have not done
enough for de Gaulle, who is “the only robust man”. Give him what he
asked for!’12
This honeymoon was not to last, and the proximate cause of the trou-
ble was the Middle East. For Free France the problem of the Levant was
particularly troubling. Nowhere was this more evident than in Syria in
1941, where pro-Vichy and pro-German forces threatened British posi-
tions in Palestine and Egypt, facing Rommel’s advance from the west.
Then a pro-German coup in Iraq destabilized the situation further. Ger-
man and Italian aircraft were allowed by Vichy to land at Aleppo en
route to Baghdad in support; so much for Vichy neutrality.13 Neither
Churchill nor de Gaulle could tolerate this situation. The Baghdad coup
was overthrown. By late April, against objections from General Wavell,
the British commander in Egypt, and after strong remonstrances from
General Louis Spears, Churchill backed a joint Franco-British invasion
of Syria.
After de Gaulle left London for Brazzaville in March, Cassin and
other key members of Free France kept in constant contact with him
on the situation in Syria, and on the complex political repercussions
of events there. They were well aware of different opinions within the
British cabinet, some leaning more towards Churchill’s view that British
interests trumped French interests in the Middle East, on account of
Pétain’s capitulation, and others sharing Eden’s preference for maintain-
ing French claims to influence in the region. Cassin clearly hoped to
cultivate Eden’s support, particularly since the financial future of Free
France depended on British largesse. On 9 May Cassin signed the finan-
cial agreement governing further funds to be disbursed by the British
Treasury to Free France.14 He also agreed to stand in for Pleven, whom
de Gaulle had sent to represent him in the United States.15 This meant
that Cassin was effectively in charge of Free France in London at this
11 Diary, 20 Feb. 1941. 12 Diary, 20 Feb. 1941. 13 Diary, 16 May 1941.

14 Cassin, Les hommes partis de rien, p. 373. Cassin had done the same earlier, on 19 March.
See Diary, 19 March 1941.
15 Diary, 7 June 1941; Crémieux-Brilhac, La France Libre, p. 267.
World War, 1941–1943 139
delicate moment, with all its headaches as his responsibility. ‘Cassin will
take care of it’, he noted sardonically in his diary.16
So far it seemed that Britain and France were working in tandem. On
8 June 1941, General Catroux, with de Gaulle’s backing, proclaimed
that Free France was committed to the liberation of Syria and Lebanon,
and an end to the mandate. When the British wanted to issue a joint
declaration to this effect, de Gaulle vigorously objected; the British, in
his view, had no standing on the matter. The British issued a proclamation
supporting Catroux anyway.
The same day, 8 June, British, Free French and Australian troops
invaded Syria and Lebanon. After substantial resistance, Damascus fell
on 21 June, and on 12 July, the pro-Vichy authorities asked for an
armistice. This led to a major British error. On 14 July they signed an
armistice in Acre with Henri Dentz, the pro-Vichy High Commissioner,
who was prepared to deal only with the British. Catroux was physically
present, but he had no standing in the discussions.
Cassin was outraged by this high-handedness. Before then, he had
discussed terms with the Foreign Office, and he thought a compromise
was in the works.17 That was not the case. Still Catroux was not allowed
by the British to sign the document. What was worse, in a secret adjunct,
the British agreed to repatriate Dentz’s men to France, thereby enabling
them not to deal at all with Catroux or Free France.
Cassin was stunned. ‘The conditions of the Syrian armistice look
strange, stupefying’, he wrote in his diary. ‘There is no limit to British
generosity to Vichy, while we are refused the right to rally to our side
white troops, professionals and reserves.’18 De Gaulle was furious, both
with Catroux and with Churchill, who did not repudiate this move.
This was the last straw for de Gaulle, who saw it all as a carefully
orchestrated plot. Much more likely, it was the result of confusion and
incompetence on the part of the British, and insufficient obstinacy on
the part of Catroux, who should never have agreed to the terms of the
Acre accord in the first place.
De Gaulle came to Cairo on 20 July and exploded. If the terms of
the Acre accords were not rescinded, he threatened to withdraw French
troops from British command, which would mean the end of the alliance.
Immediately, the British Minister of State for the Middle East, Oliver
Lyttleton, offered de Gaulle a document recognizing French sovereignty
16 Diary, 9 June 1941. Pleven only left on 11 June, but Cassin was in charge of office
business from 9 June.
17 Diary, 5 July 1941. 18 Diary, 16 July 1941.
in the mandatory territories of Syria and Lebanon. This was enough for
de Gaulle, and ended the immediate crisis.
But there was a price to pay. His intransigence completely alienated
one of his most important British allies, General Spears, who broke with
de Gaulle at this point, once and for all. And this incident cast a shadow
over Free French–British dealings for the rest of the war.19
This episode is revealing because it shows the way the war was run
within Free France. On these crucial questions of imperial defence,
Cassin and his Conseil were in constant contact with de Gaulle, almost
always to receive his instructions. In July 1941, when the Churchill–de
Gaulle quarrel came to a head, Cassin, as permanent secretary of the
Council, tried to lower the temperature of the conflict with Britain. De
Gaulle rightfully claimed the authority which came from acting as its
head, but did he not have a responsibility to apprise members of the
Council of crucial matters concerning his policy on Syria and Lebanon?
He specified Catroux’s mission in the name of the Council, without
informing them of it. And they learned of de Gaulle’s threat to with-
draw from the Franco-British alliance also after the fact.20 Cassin put
the point to de Gaulle, and asked him to consider whether ‘we would
risk endangering the essential by acts of rupture’. De Gaulle was not in
the least pleased by such a communication, and responded to Cassin in a
form which many popes would have admired: ‘These are the instructions
which I ask you to follow.’21 And that is precisely what Cassin did: end
of matter.
By referring at this delicate time to the need to protect the Franco-
British alliance, Cassin exposed one of his political weaknesses. He
offered what to de Gaulle may have appeared to be a too ready and
eager embrace of the British point of view. Cassin was as outraged as
de Gaulle was by the Acre accords, but believed the matter could be
resolved without endangering the alliance. By challenging de Gaulle’s
absolute authority and by questioning to a degree his judgment in the
Syrian crisis of June and July 1941, Cassin probably compromised his
chances for a high-ranking post in the French National Committee, the
formation of which de Gaulle was then contemplating. Cassin had served
19 For a balanced view, see A. B. Gaunson, ‘Churchill, de Gaulle, Spears, and the Levant
affair 1941’, Historical Journal, 27, 3 (1984), pp. 697–713. For the Vichy-German side
of the story, see Jafna L. Cox, ‘The background to the Syrian campaign, May–June
1941: a study in Franco-German wartime relations’, History, 52 (2007), pp. 432–52.
See Crémieux-Brilhac, La France Libre, pp. 156ff.
20 Alan Sharpe and Glyn Stone, Anglo-French Relations in the Twentieth Century (London:
Routledge, 2006), pp. 236–7.
21 The story is told with precision and verve in Crémieux-Brilhac, La France Libre, p. 199.
World War, 1941–1943 141
faithfully as permanent secretary of the Defence Council, but though he

did not know it at the time, his action during the spring and early summer
of 1941 helped ensure his political marginalization within Free France
later that year.
Exiles
Cassin was not only close to many British leaders and influential figures.
He was also part of a rich and complex exile world in London in 1941.
Here is the origin of much of his later work on human rights, which
emerged in what was probably for the Allies the darkest phase of the war.
Elsewhere we have meditated on the paradox that when victory was
most remote, there emerged among those under Nazi rule and among
those still carrying on the struggle the most far-seeking projects for politi-
cal reform and social transformation.22 In a way, since the present was so
oppressive, the space of freedom was inevitably consigned to the future.
At times, though, many in exile came close to losing the will to go on.
They were under no illusion as to what would happen to them in the
event of a Nazi invasion of Britain. Cassin like de Gaulle was sentenced
to death in absentia for treason. His property and assets were seized.
He received word on 4 May that he had been stripped of his nationality.
His family in France sent him telegrams that ‘they shared his affliction’.
On the contrary, Cassin wrote in his diary, he considered that it was an
honour ‘to be soiled by those guys’. He wrote back to his family: ‘No
sadness, but pride and hope for all.’23
The words were brave, but they could not hide completely the fraying
of nerves in spring 1941. The Blitz resumed in March. On one such
occasion, he was away from London giving a talk in Cambridge.
On my return, I had confirmation that London had been ‘buzzed!’ . . . Since

29 December, no night had been more tragic. A cinema and a restaurant had
been crushed. Many victims. Buckingham Palace has been hit; the Albert Victoria
Museum [sic], near us, had its roof on fire – Happily Sim[one] does not go out
at night and slept in the shelter. Since the morning, I have been reassured as to
her wisdom. For once, it came in handy.24
Here was one dimension of anxiety for these exiles. They had their work,
but their wives had little on which to draw. These women did not speak
English, and therefore had to rely on other exiles, who were sometimes
22 Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom. 23 Diary, 7 May 1941.

trying individuals. They did not have political work to give them pur-
pose, and the sheer volume of the work their husbands faced meant
they were often unavailable. They were cut off from family and friends
at home, whose fate was uncertain and whose family ties to prominent
exiles put them in even greater danger than others under occupation.
Earlier, Cassin had found a safe haven for Simone in a boarding house in
the idyllic Buckinghamshire village of Marlow, removed from the flight
path of the Luftwaffe over London. Cassin could reach it from central
London in an hour and a half by car. Later, he thought his wife would
benefit from living by the sea, in the Dorset village of Bridport. This
helped to calm her, though it was much harder for Cassin to make the
six-hour journey from London to visit his wife.25
On 4 March, Cassin noted that ‘This evening Simone was less
depressed than yesterday.’ A few weeks later they passed what Cassin
termed a ‘Very bad night: for the last week, I have sensed that Simone is
unravelling emotionally and a bit physically too . . . I urged her to leave
for Bridport, but her morale is very bad.’26
Then came the worst news of all. By 8 April it was clear that the
German army had broken Allied resistance in the Balkans. Yugoslavia and
Greece were lost. The spirits of both Simone and René Cassin sank like
a stone. ‘Her morale is very fragile and she has returned to pessimism.’27
The next day Cassin tried to work on a radio address for the BBC. He
could not continue: ‘To what end ? Sim[one] is in a state of distress
and terrible pessimism.’28 He mused about better days in Antibes on the
Mediterranean before the war, ‘But it is not very easy . . . In the evening
I did not even have the taste to read anything.’29 Particularly galling was
the way Vichy and those hoping for German victory crowed about the
news from the Balkans.30
These were the hardest days of the war, and they ground down even
an inveterate optimist like Cassin. And yet what choice did they or the
other exiled men and women in London have? They were all sentenced
to death by the Nazis, with execution postponed until an unknown date.
When all else failed, what they had to offer was their defiance.
This small band of exiles in London all shared the same fate. Along-
side the Free French were other exile groups, similarly besieged and
similarly dependent on their hosts for their survival. The Norwegian,
Polish and Dutch governments in exile benefited from official recogni-
tion. The French, Belgian and Czech communities had to work harder
to gain a seat at the table of the alliance, since in different ways each had
25 Diary, 5 April 1941. 26 Diary, 26 March 1941. 27Diary, 8 April 1941.

28 Diary, 8 April 1941. 29 Diary, 9 April 1941. 30 Diary, 11 April 1941.
World War, 1941–1943 143
to fight against a constituted authority engaged in active collaboration

with the Nazis.
Cassin was well aware of the problem. In his days as a delegate to
the League of Nations, he had befriended many of these fellow exiles.
He had met Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian socialist leader, in Brussels
in 1935. A year later, he had met Eduard Beneš, the Czech President,
who – like Cassin – had called for armed resistance to the Nazis at the
time of the Munich crisis. In 1941 they were all in London under the
Blitz, and with a black future staring them in the face.
At the same time, Cassin met others who were planning a post-war
future at the moment the very idea of a post-war future without the
Nazis appeared to be an illusion. Dining with William Beveridge on
3 March 1941, he heard about plans for the construction of a new welfare
system in Britain.31 Nine months later, Beveridge’s famous report would
come to capture the imagination of Allied populations as to the way the
warfare state could in time give birth to the welfare state.
It was in this very unfavourable environment that Allied delegations
came together under Churchill’s leadership to present a vision of the
future for which they were fighting. Hitler had his plan for a ‘new order’,
now that virtually the whole of Europe was under his control. It was
time for the Allies to construct their own blueprint for the future, and in
framing that vision, men in exile like Cassin and Beneš had a significant
role to play.
Cassin among the Allies

On 9 June 1941, Cassin heard from Pleven that the British were in favour
of convening an inter-Allied committee at which all governments in
exile or those claiming such a status would meet. Initially Free France
was offered observer status only, which Pleven, Cassin and de Gaulle not
surprisingly rejected out of hand.32 The next day Free France got what
it wanted. They would be at the proposed inter-Allied conference as full
delegates, though they would be designated as representing General de
Gaulle and Free France.33 They could not have hoped for more.
Who would speak for Free France? De Gaulle was in Africa, and had
instructed Pleven to go on a mission to the United States, then still
committed to maintaining diplomatic relations with Vichy. The British
wanted this meeting to be one of civilian leaders, which eliminated most
of the rest of the Defence Council. The two men chosen were Maurice
Dejean, responsible for political affairs, and Cassin.
31 Diary, 3 March 1941. 32 Diary, 9 June 1941. 33 Diary, 9 and 10 June 1941.
The first day in Cassin’s new international career was 12 June 1941. At
St James’s Palace, the governments in exile from Nazi-occupied Europe
were present. General Sikorski represented Poland; Masaryk, Czechoslo-
vakia; Trygvie Lie, Norway; and Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgium. With the
exception of Sikorski, probably murdered in 1943, all the others would
become important post-war leaders. The Dominions were represented
too. Winston Churchill presided over the meeting, and said that it was in
England that the new European order would be born.
The presence of the French delegation marked a new stage in the
diplomatic recognition of Free France. Cassin’s speech to the confer-
ence confirmed Free France’s continuing commitments to her treaties
with Poland and Britain. Alongside the other governments in exile, Free
France shared the general outrage over the crimes committed by the
Nazis against occupied populations. There would be a new order, to be
sure, but it would be a democratic order based on liberty and economic
and social security.
This wording was aimed at attracting American support, in the period
when the United States still had diplomatic relations with Vichy. Cassin
was sensitive to the shift in British public opinion towards the ideas
expressed in the Beveridge report of 1942. Changes were necessary both
on the international and the internal level of each country.34 The ferment
of ideas about the post-war world was evident even during this critical
moment when defeat was more probable than victory.35
Here is the way Cassin himself reported in his diary this gratifying
moment:
Meeting at the old Palace of St James; the Free French were welcomed warmly:
Churchill, Eden, Cranbourne etc. I offered my apologies for not having visited
them. Evidently it was either a happy return for Free France or the first of its
kind. If only the General had been there, he would have been royally welcomed.
Churchill was in splendid form; he rips the Huns and places Darlan among
the Quislings . . . At lunch I was seated two places away from Churchill, at the
table for heads of state. (Dejean was seated at Vansittart’s table.) . . . After the
Royal toast and those to heads of state, I suggested to Sikorski to offer a toast
to Churchill, the great leader. It was received to great acclaim. Then at midday
it was Churchill’s turn: the Boches, the Bulgarians, the Hungarians and their
dictatorships are denounced for a sad quarter of an hour. I read my declaration
in a clear voice, without gestures. Its brevity and its conclusions worked, since
Norton, Strang and others congratulated me. Dejean made a good impression
too. Finally the King visited each delegation, and paused in front of us, the Free
34 Paul Addison, The Road to 1945. British Politics and the Second World War (London:
Quarto Books, 1975).
35 382AP68, Cassin’s text, 18 June 1941.
World War, 1941–1943 145
French: he spoke simply and in plain French. He wore the medal of the Legion
of Honour and the Croix de Guerre of 1914–18.
Press comments on Friday are favourable to us. So is cinema. The first battle
won in the absence of the Boss de Gaulle.36
Cassin had taken a major step both for himself and for Free France. Here
he began his path which led him from London in 1941 to Paris and the
Universal Declaration in 1948.
Everything, though, was turned upside down ten days later by the
German invasion and the speed of her blitzkrieg in Russia. The Ger-
man breakthrough precipitated a diplomatic breakthrough in relations
between the Allies and the Americans. On 9 August 1941, Churchill and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt met on board USS Augusta at Naval Station
Argentia in Placentia Bay, on the southern coast of Newfoundland, then
still a British colony. FDR let it be known that he was going to New Eng-
land on a fishing trip. Instead he met his Chiefs of Staff and Churchill
for their first, but by no means their last, council of war. It was Churchill
who landed the biggest fish of all.
In Newfoundland, they signed the Atlantic Charter. There could be
no doubt as to the American position, formulated in the document they
released on 14 August. Here is the sixth point:
after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a
peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their
own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may
live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.37
Here, four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United
States effectively declared war on Nazi Germany. When Hitler received
a cable with this text attached, he exploded. In his grandiose role of
prophet, he had warned that should the European war be converted into
a world war, the Jews would pay the price. That moment had arrived.
According to one interpretation, this was the day that Hitler set in motion
the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.38
The second time René Cassin joined an inter-Allied conference in St
James’s Palace six weeks later, the entire political landscape had changed.
The war was now one of left versus right on a global scale. In September
1941, it was time to bring the Atlantic Charter to bear on Allied war aims
36 Diary, 12 June 1941.

37 The Atlantic Charter. The Roosevelt–Churchill Declaration (London: National Peace Coun-
cil, 1941).
38 Tobias Jersak, ‘Die Interaktion von Kriegsverlauf und Judenvernichtung’, Historische
Zeitschrift, 268 (1999), pp. 311–49.
and on preparations for the world after the war and for the war crime trials
which would ensue. All the governments in exile had abundant evidence
of Nazi war crimes against subject peoples. To announce to their citizens
suffering under Nazi occupation that retribution would come one day,
they provided both hope to the oppressed and a warning to the Nazis that
justice would be done. Here is the first clear sign of Allied willingness to
hold war crimes trials after the war. Anthony Eden, the Foreign Minister,
presided at this second inter-Allied conference. Churchill was reluctant
to preside himself, because he wanted to leave his options open on how
to deal with war crimes. Eden, who had served like Cassin in the Great
War, spoke reasonable French and admired de Gaulle. The other major
newcomer to the meeting was Ivan Maisky, representative of the Soviet
Union, whom Cassin had known in Geneva at the League of Nations a
decade before.39
In his address to the conference, Cassin linked the bloody dreams of
Hitler with Kaiser Wilhelm’s dream of world domination. He added these
words: ‘We the French believe that in order to establish a real peace it is
essential to ratify and to put into practice fundamental human rights.’40
Here we see the central elements of his vision of the post-war world.
From September 1941 on, Cassin affirmed that the establishment of this
new order was at the heart of Allied war aims. In London, at a time when
the military position of the Allies was at its most critical, he began his
work to help construct an international human rights regime.
The ferocity of Nazi occupation intensified in the autumn of 1941.
Both Churchill and Roosevelt issued statements condemning the execu-
tion of hostages. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 Decem-
ber 1941, and the German declaration of war on the United States a day
later, they joined with twenty-three other nations in signing the United
Nations Declaration on 1 January 1942, affirming their commitment to
the destruction of the Nazi regime.
The evolution of Allied thinking on the post-war world reveals a strong
division between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, who
ran the war, and governments in exile representing occupied populations.
The Great Powers wanted to postpone any precise commitments on how
judicial proceedings on Nazi atrocities would operate. Governments in
exile had no such luxury. They needed to show captive populations that
their national sovereignty was still intact, and that after the war there
would be a national reckoning on war crimes. Such proceedings did not
at all preclude the establishment of an international tribunal, planning
39 382AP68, 24 Sept. 1941, verbatim account.

40 Cassin to the inter-Allied conference, 24 Sept. 1941, 382AP63.
World War, 1941–1943 147
for which developed in the second half of the war. Justice would operate
on two levels – the international and the national.
The first step to this end was the third St James’s Conference of 13
January 1942. Eden again welcomed the delegates, but stood aside from
its deliberations, which were chaired by General Sikorski. Cassin could
not attend this conference since he was already on a mission in Syria. De
Gaulle himself spoke for Free France and supported the commitment of
the Allies to place among the principal war aims the punishment of those
guilty of and responsible for war crimes, those who ordered, perpetrated
or participated in one way or another in them.
The central task was not only to punish war criminals ‘but to take
measures to ensure that a renewal of such crimes should be made
impossible’.41 The Allied strategy was twofold in character. Its first aim
was Liberation and the punishment of war criminals and their collabora-
tors. The second aim was the affirmation of positive principles on which
peace would rest. At their root were human rights. This was a turning
point. Everyone in Free France wanted to see the punishment of war
criminals; the idea of constructing a new international order, based on
human rights, went beyond the political vision of most of the French
resistance in London, including General de Gaulle.
Initially, the Allies were committed to re-establishing the territorial
integrity of states occupied and humiliated by the Nazis. But the war
crimes they perpetrated against their own nationals as well as against mil-
lions of other victims throughout Europe, made it impossible to defend
the principles of the absolute sovereignty of states in matters concerning
its own citizens. Here we find the political impulse needed to go beyond
the League of Nations. In future, no statesman could follow Goebbels
and say that each state was a law unto itself.
Cassin fully understood the need to begin by restoring the dignity
and the integrity of the political regimes in formerly occupied countries.
But there was by the middle of the war a consensus on the need to
limit the sovereignty of states in the new international order. Here are
the origins of the Charter of the United Nations of 1945 and of the
Universal Declaration of 1948. Cassin was at the heart of this juridical
movement.
If the Allies thought that their warnings would prevent Nazi crimes,
they were mistaken. The period between the third St James’s Conference
and the formation of an inter-Allied commission on war crimes was the
time when the Holocaust was at its height. The Nazis denied the very
existence of international law. They thought that even were they to lose
41 ‘Allies in Conference’, The Times, 14 Jan. 1942, p. 5.

the war, their crimes would so weaken their neighbours that they would
retain their stronger position.
But it was the death of one man, and the retribution it brought in
its wake, that moved the Allies into action. On 27 May 1942, a group
of Czech parachutists, trained in Britain, fatally wounded SS General
Reinhard Heydrich, head of all security police. In revenge, the Nazis
exterminated all the inhabitants of one village – Lidice – near the site of
the assassination. Czechs in London demanded that the British formally
associate themselves with the January 1942 St James’s declaration on
punishing war criminals. This they were unprepared to do, though they
did issue a formal repudiation of the Munich agreement, hardly an answer
to Czech demands for justice.
In Washington in June 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt accepted the
formation of a war crimes commission, in order to compile evidence and
to indict those accused of war crimes. On 6 July, the British government
approved this initiative, in order to respond to public pressure to punish
war criminals, a current that grew with reports of Japanese atrocities
against British soldiers in the Pacific theatre. But the British government
still preferred the restoration of national tribunals rather than the creation
of an international court.
On 20 October 1943, de Gaulle appointed Cassin as French delegate
to the inter-Allied commission on war crimes. He sat with colleagues
from those governments in exile which had signed the third St James’s
declaration. At this time he came into contact with eminent British jurists.
Among them was the Cambridge jurist Hersch Lauterpacht, who helped
develop the legal theory of crimes against humanity.42
The Allied political leadership did not want to try thousands of Nazis;
their targets were the leaders of the regime. On 18 January 1944, Sir Cecil
Hurst, the President of the Permanent Court of Justice in The Hague,
as chair, convened the Commission, even though the Soviet Union had
not named a delegate. With new American backing from Herbert Pell,
formerly US ambassador to Portugal and Hungary, three sub-committees
were formed, which adopted three principal recommendations. The first
was to reject the validity of a defence argument of obedience to superior
orders. The second was to enable lawyers to take testimony under oath
in one country to enter into the evidence of trials of individuals accused
of war crimes committed in another country. The third was to affirm the
42 Hersch Lauterpacht, International Law and Human Rights (New York: F. A. Praeger,
1950).
World War, 1941–1943 149
intention of the United Nations to pursue war criminals without a statute

of limitations.43
Cassin claimed to have inspired the third St James’s Conference, but
this is conjecture. He also claimed to have helped avoid a too technical
approach in the workings of the Commission. He personally assembled
and framed dossiers on war crimes committed in France and against
French citizens. These included maltreatment of French prisoners of war,
black and white, in Germany; the machine-gunning of civilians during
the exode of 1940; and the role of German soldiers and the Gestapo in
the transit camp of Drancy.44 Above all, he pressed the Commission,
and succeeded in persuading them that they had a responsibility to act
on behalf of millions still under Nazi persecution, who awaited the day
of their liberation as the first day of judgment.
On 4 April 1944, the Commission received from the constituent mem-
ber states lists of all men in the SS, the Gestapo, the army or other lead-
ership positions in each occupied nation, with the intention of seeing
who among them would stand trial for war crimes.45 This was the key
step before setting up trials of those whom the Germans had to hand
over to Allied authorities at the Armistice, as suspects in war crimes
prosecutions.
He thus contributed to a trans-national approach to trans-national
crimes, in particular genocide, a word invented during the war by Raphael
Lemkin, another Jewish jurist in exile.46 Like Lemkin, Cassin emphasized
the collective character of Nazi crimes without neglecting individual ones.
The essential task was to create a common body of international law in
order to punish Nazi crimes and to put under trans-national jurisdiction
the national and trans-national criminals of the future.47
Cassin’s work during the last year of the war, when he divided his time
between London and Algiers, developed along two main lines. The first
was the restoration of the rule of law within the French state. The second
was the construction of an international legal order based on human
rights. Two chapters below deal with these two dimensions. But before
that, we must return to Cassin’s work within Free France itself.
43 382AP175, Deuxième rapport du Professeur René Cassin, délégué de la France à la Commis-

sion d’enquête des Nations Unies sur les crimes de guerre, 3 May 1944, pp. 4–5.
44 Deuxième rapport du Professeur René Cassin, p. 6.
45 Deuxième rapport du Professeur René Cassin, p. 7.
46 John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 24–47.
47 Deuxième rapport du Professeur René Cassin, pp. 13–15.
Minister of Justice and Education

It is a major paradox that the beginnings of Cassin’s new international
legal career coincided with a major and painful political setback. We
have noted that the day of the Second St James’s Conference was also
the day that de Gaulle announced the formation of the French National
Committee. In this government, Cassin was marginalized, to his great
surprise. He lost the post of permanent secretary of the Council for the
Defence of the Empire, and he was appointed Minister, not as he had
wished, for Foreign Affairs or for Labour, but for Justice and Education,
which was a second-rank position.
Cassin felt deeply humiliated to be demoted in this manner. He had
been perfectly loyal towards de Gaulle and had taken no part in Admiral
Muselier’s conspiracies. Since de Gaulle’s return to London, though,
the General had shown him ‘a reserve bordering on coldness’.48 He
was excluded from the drafting of texts organizing the French National
Committee. ‘I would have had to be blind’, he wrote thirty years later, ‘if
I had not seen the way the General’s decisions deprived me of access to
virtually all of the efforts for the liberation of France, either with respect
to foreign relations or with respect to the domestic resistance.’ These
were signs that de Gaulle held a ‘grudge’ against Cassin, and for his
ingratitude, Cassin was deeply hurt.
At the time, I was disgusted by the injustice of a development which penalized

me morally after 17 months of uninterrupted and loyal efforts. If I had the pride
to control myself and to avoid the least protest, it was not due to servility towards
the leader of Free France but due to my sense of the heavy tasks which we had
still to fulfil for France.49
De Gaulle never explained the reasons for his decisions; we are therefore
left to conjecture. Crémieux-Brilhac said de Gaulle was looking for a
strong hand, and that was not Cassin’s forte. ‘The eminent professor was
not eager to use a cane’, not for assistance in walking but as an offensive
weapon.50 Cassin’s words of caution to de Gaulle not to endanger the
Franco-British alliance during the crisis in Syria certainly played a role.
De Gaulle probably acted out of his sense of Cassin’s personality. Cassin
was a great public servant. His devotion and his loyalty, alongside his
lively and subtle intelligence, and his huge capacity for work, made him a
marvellous administrator. But he was not a man of power; he lacked the
authority of those who could impose their will on others. He appreciated
48 Les hommes partis de rien, p. 402.

49 Les hommes partis de rien, pp. 406 and 407. 50 La France Libre, p. 183.
World War, 1941–1943 151
honours, but he did not like to give orders or to make others feel his
power. He was not a killer. To give Cassin major responsibilities in Free
France could have appeared to de Gaulle as a mistake. As Crémieux-
Brilhac observed, Cassin never played a part in politics at the highest
level. Appointing him to the Ministry of Justice, de Gaulle kept him in
his team, in a position in which his gifts would be fully and efficiently
employed. De Gaulle’s decision of 1941 was bitterly resented by Cassin,
but it was not as unjust as it appeared.
Ironically, this marginalization, bordering on disgrace, liberated Cassin
and enabled him to begin the international career which led him to the
Universal Declaration of 1948 and, twenty years later, to the Nobel Peace
Prize. If he was evicted from the central councils of Free France, he was
able to throw himself into the inter-Allied judicial scene.
Ambassador of Free France, 1942

After the dust had settled, and the new French National Committee
began its work, Cassin was faced with a new set of challenges. The first
was to suppress his personal disappointment over de Gaulle’s decision to
distance him from the core leadership of Free France. The second was
to shape his new Commissariat in such a way as to provide Free France
with a set of instruments essential for the judicial reconstruction of the
Republic after Liberation.
We turn to that second task below, but first consider Cassin’s role as
an emissary in the Middle East and Africa in the first half of 1942. On
the one hand, this assignment was a bitter pill for Cassin to swallow.
He had long experience of international work before the war, but after
a year at the heart of Free France his travels inevitably distanced him
from the day-to-day business of forming the embryo of a government in
exile. How could he not hear in de Gaulle’s voice the unspoken words:
now that you are expendable, you have the time to see the world? In
addition, there was the problem of leaving his wife Simone for such an
extended period of time. She was very much alone, without English,
without family, without a job, or a set of tasks which could have given
shape to her life. Leaving her was difficult, and only on his return in the
spring did he learn of how hard a time it was for Simone. Cassin could not
have known that the petty conflicts of the French community in London
would turn nasty, but so they did. The director of the Institut Français,
Professor Saurat, resented having his institute turned into a boarding
house for Free France. The flat in which René and Simone Cassin lived
was Institute property. Saurat chose the moment of Cassin’s departure
on his overseas mission to inform Simone that unfortunately their flat was
needed urgently to house another family. So she was turned out to find
somewhere to live in London a few months after the Blitz, where empty
flats were available so long as you did not mind living without a roof or
walls. As it happened, Simone found lodgings outside of London, near
Brighton, but Cassin never forgave this gratuitous act of cruelty, which
almost certainly was aimed at him.51 Cassin placed personal matters
aside during the war; and so he packed his bags in December 1941 and
started on a long and arduous journey first to the Middle East and then
to Africa.
First stop was Cairo, where on 28 December 1941 he met William
Bullitt, personal emissary of President Roosevelt.52 A man of many parts
– a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, a writer, bon-vivant
and ardent Francophile who had been analysed by Sigmund Freud, Bul-
litt was a man Cassin had known for a long time. Cassin asked him to
convey a message from de Gaulle that Free France was committed ‘to
bring to the fight for the Liberation and integral restoration of France,
all the populations and territories not under enemy control’ as well as
‘to maintain central authority exercising sovereignty in international rela-
tions concerning all parts of the Empire’.53 So much for British designs in
Syria. Bullitt also brought Cassin up-to-date on what he had just seen in
Syria. There, following the fighting of spring 1941, General Catroux had
installed Free France in place of Vichy, but the old guard were still there,
biding their time. Cassin thought Bullitt had underestimated Catroux’s
achievement, a point Cassin made as well to Oliver Lyttleton, who had
weathered the storm of de Gaulle’s fury over Syria a few months before.54
His second stop was Damascus. Here he had formalities to attend to,
as an emissary of de Gaulle and the Conseil National Français. He met
the President of the Republic, various ministers and functionaries, and
paid his respects to the dead in the military ceremony at Aleppo. There he
made the point that Free France had lived up to the Mandatory promise
to defend the liberties of this country, but only at the cost of confronting
Vichy and its henchmen.55 He paid particular attention to the abrogation
of Vichy’s racial laws in Syria.56 He also visited the Faculty of Medicine,
French schools and a centre for treating lepers, in Lebanon and Syria,
and paid tribute to the work of these schools and institutions in cementing
ties between France and those communities linked to her by a common
51 382AP27, Notebook of Simone Cassin, 5, 8 and 11 Jan. 1942.

52 382AP59, Cassin to Tixier, 16 Feb. 1942.
53 382AP59, Cassin to de Gaulle, 29 Dec. 1941.
54 382AP59, Cassin to de Gaulle, 30 Dec. 1941.
55 382AP59, René Cassin, ‘Quelques impressions de Syrie’, 1 May 1942.
56 382AP59, ‘Abrogations des lois de Vichy’, 3 Jan. 42, Damascus.
World War, 1941–1943 153
culture.57 He also had the chance to meet Catroux, whose work for Free
France had been crucially important.
His third stop was Palestine, where he stayed from 15 to 18 January
1942. Here he presented himself as a champion of Anglo-French ties
in the Middle East. He saw too how positively both Arabs and Jews
responded to de Gaulle and Free France. He was particularly struck, both
here and in Lebanon, by the success of the Alliance Israélite Universelle
in flying the flag of the French language and Republican values; here was
an organization which Cassin was to lead in a few short years. His active
engagement in their work dates from this mission, and he responded
quickly to their plea for financial aid. Cassin too tried to do his best to
recognize those Christian missionaries and teachers sympathetic to the
cause. His rule of thumb was that the Jesuits were pro-Vichy, but many
other religious were loyal to Free France.
In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv he made the rounds of British officials,
Zionists, religious and university figures, and Arab dignitaries. In a press
conference in Jerusalem on 18 January, he affirmed the root and branch
opposition of Free France to Vichy’s racial laws, abrogated in Syria and
in other territories, and the firm commitment of the French National
Committee to the support of education in Jewish and non-Jewish schools
alike. Cassin was well aware that the schools of the Alliance Israélite
Universelle were in a financially precarious position, and needed help,
which he promised he would try to obtain.58 He noted further that news
was filtering through that in occupied France many people were giving
any help they could to Jews, and that those previously hostile were having
their minds changed by Vichy brutality.59 Here his presence resembled
the way ministers were treated before the war, which was precisely the
point: protocol conferred legitimacy on Free France.60 Cassin’s visit was
performative: by arriving as a visiting minister, and speaking as one, albeit
in the form of a commissaire, he became one. The shadow of Vichy was
hard to dispel, but the effort to do so was unavoidable.
Pro-Pétain elements were still ensconced in Egypt too, where Cassin
spent the rest of January 1942. He was particularly struck by the service
and loyalty to Free France of Baron Louis de Benoist, President of the
French National Committee in Egypt, and managing officer of the Suez
Canal Company. He was an unshakeable ally in an uncertain political
57 382AP59, ‘Quelques impressions de Syrie’, 1 May 1942.

58 382AP59, cable to Cassin, 30 Dec. 1941, on the desperate situation of these schools.
59 382AP59, letter from the staff at Carlton Gardens, relating Cassin’s activities, to Mme
Cassin, 19 Jan. 1942.
60 382AP59, Zimmermann to de Gaulle, 29 Jan. 1942.
landscape.61 In his public meetings, Cassin returned time and again to the
role of Free France as the embodiment of ‘young France, France in arms’,
the wave of the future. Brave words when Rommel and his Afrika Korps
were moving east towards Egypt, but then brave words were what Cassin
was there to provide. He was reassured, though, by the breadth of support
for Free France within the Muslim community, among intellectuals and
politicians alike. More brave words. Had Rommel succeeded in invading
Egypt, local opinion would have turned 180 degrees in an instant.
Cassin wrote to de Gaulle that he understood that his mission had
‘an essentially cultural and moral character’. He was there ‘to affirm to
Frenchmen the presence of a protective authority and to make Egyptians
understand that the France they loved was France still fighting’.62 At the
same time, Cassin saw his mission in the Middle East and in Africa as
more than solely rhetorical. He still believed that the only way forward was
to forge unbreakable links both in London and abroad between British
and French forces and interests. Together they would form a blocking
force, protecting the vital corridor between the Caucasus to the north
and the Suez Canal to the south.
Cassin wrote to his old friend Tixier, that before his mission to the Mid-
dle East he had rejoiced in the recognition of Free France, as an equal
member of the alliance, seated alongside Churchill in the St James’s Con-
ferences. However, the seeds of conflict between de Gaulle and Churchill
had been sown earlier in 1941. On the substance of the quarrel over
Syria, de Gaulle was 90 per cent right, Cassin wrote, but ‘the form’ of de
Gaulle’s objection ‘was less happily phrased’. The upshot was that Free
France itself risked being marginalized in the Alliance, by losing the full
support of Churchill. Cassin’s role, in his view, was to repair some of
the damage done by de Gaulle himself to the Anglo-French alliance by
showing its continuing vitality in the Middle East and in Africa.63 Here is
a key element in Cassin’s outlook. He was utterly loyal to de Gaulle and
had no interest whatsoever in the cabals surrounding him. But he did
not give up his view that without full British support the cause of Free
France would be lost. Saying so had political consequences for Cassin,
but despite de Gaulle’s irritation, Cassin stuck to his guns. He served the
cause, not the man.
Cassin flew the flag of Free France throughout the rest of his mis-
sion in Africa, and tried to coordinate very varied groups in a common
61 382AP59, Cassin to de Gaulle, 30 Jan. 1942, on Benoist whose ‘recent loss of citizenship
confirmed his considerable merits and great authority’.
62 382AP59, Cassin to de Gaulle, undated draft of cable.
63 382AP59, Cassin to Tixier, from Lagos, 16 Feb. 1942.
World War, 1941–1943 155
cause. There was an additional element to consider after December 1941,

when the Americans came into the war. Strategically, it was evident that
they needed to find a foothold in Africa in order to attack the Nazis
from Africa. Without Dakar, still in Vichy hands, that meant fortifying
French and British forces in French Equatorial Africa and in British
and French West Africa. Cassin’s mission was in part to help in this
effort.
His trajectory was long and demanding, always at the mercy of the ele-
ments and the supply of planes and pilots. He was delayed leaving Cairo
by illness, and while recuperating, depressed when he received news of
the fall of Singapore.64 Despite fever and occasional intestinal troubles, he
moved on from Cairo to Fort Lamy from 2 to 5 February, then to Lagos
from 5 to 18 February, then Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire, Léopoldville and
Bangui from 18 February to 3 March. He then proceeded to Cameroon
and Gabon between 4 and 10 March, before passing two more weeks
in Lagos.65 This was a demanding programme, requiring stamina and
finesse in equal part.
At Fort Lamy he saw General Leclerc.66 Cassin thought that Free
French Equatorial Africa was a ‘capital region for the security in Africa
of the Allies, including the Americans’. But before the French could play
their part, they had to put their house in order. The Surgeon-General
Sicé, High Commissioner for Free French Africa, and the governor gen-
eral of French Equatorial Africa, Eboué, were at daggers drawn. There
were issues of substance between them as to who controlled the police,
and who could give orders to whom, but personal friction mattered too.67
Cassin was there to use his good offices to keep them and their entourages
from derailing Free French policy in Africa tout court.68
The problems they faced were immense. Disorder was worsened by
economic chaos. Salaries were rarely paid on time, and officials were
angry and in distress. Essential materials for war production were delayed
by transport difficulties and by doubts as to who would pay for the
goods. No one knew whose orders – civilian or military – were superior
and whose inferior. There were too many civil servants still waiting to
see which way the wind would blow. In sum, Free France in equatorial
Africa was in considerable disarray.
64 382AP27, Notebook 1942, 13 Feb. 1942.

65 382AP30, Financial account of the mission, 21 April 1942.
66 382AP59, ‘Passage à Fort-Lamy’, 2 Feb, 1942, in Cassin’s hand.
67 382AP59, Cassin summarized this in a letter to Sicé after his return to England,
16 March 1942.
68 382AP59, cable of de Gaulle to Sicé, 27 Jan. 1941.
Cassin arrived in Brazzaville on 18 February 1942, and met Sicé the

same day.69 Cassin told him that he needed to find a way to live with the
parallel authority of Eboué and to regularize his administration.70 There
simply was no other choice. He went on the same round of visits to schools
and religious institutions as he had seen in Syria and Palestine, and in
stultifying heat met local notables and reviewed troops. The photograph
of Cassin, in colonial hat and shorts, reviewing troops, brings us a hint
of both the formality and the absurdity of his mission. Formalities had
to be observed, since he was the Republic incarnate come on a mission
to her imperial territories.
In Gabon, in early March, Cassin got a taste of the evident dis-
comfort some soldiers and civil servants felt in serving Free France.
His mission was to meet Valentin-Smith, governor of Gabon,71 and to
help him counter the sabotage in which some local Vichy supporters
were engaged.72 The governor ordered the military commander to pro-
vide a guard of honour for Cassin, suitable to his status as a minister.
Lieutenant-Colonel Chandon, the commander in question, replied that
military regulations limited such honours to heads of states or ministers,
and not to commissioners. There ensued a learned exchange of letters
about different regulations and their applicability to French Equatorial
Africa, with all the acid between the lines. As it happened, Chandon
agreed to the niceties, and then showed up after the plane had landed;
the planned official welcome was limited to Valentin-Smith. Cassin had a
word with Chandon about the incident; we can imagine the icy exchange
which took place.73
Cassin’s next stop was the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where on
10 March he had an extensive meeting with General Hawkin, the British
military commander. Cassin asked for reassurances that there were under
his command sufficient forces to block any move from Dakar against his
positions. Implied in this exchange is the assertion of the importance
of military cooperation between British and French forces both here
and in French Equatorial Africa. In turn Hawkin wanted to know if
Free France could administer French West Africa should it revert to
the Allied camp. Cassin’s response was to point to what Catroux had
done in Syria.74 In a second interview with Sir Alan Burns, governor
69 382AP27, Notebook 1942, 18 Feb. 1942.

70 382AP59, ‘Emploi de temps’, interview of Cassin with Sicé, 19 Feb. 1942.
71 382AP59, cable of de Gaulle to Valentin-Smith, 18 April 1941.
72 382AP59, Sicé to Eboué, 30 Oct. 1941.
73 382AP59, Valentin-Smith to Chandon, 3, 4 and 5 March 1942; 382AP27, Cassin pocket
diary 1942, 5 March 1942.
74 382AP59, March 1942, interview with General Hawkin.
World War, 1941–1943 157
of the Gold Coast, Cassin asked if the British authorities would wel-
come joint military preparations with Free French forces. The response
was yes, enabling Cassin to take one further step towards consolidating
the Anglo-French military front in Africa, in advance of the arrival of
American forces in this sector.75
After another set of delays, Cassin returned to London via Lisbon on
25 March 1942.76 He immediately set down his impressions in a report
to de Gaulle. The thrust of his argument was that now was the time
to intensify the political work of Free France in Africa in preparation
for the arrival of American forces there. They were in a position to be
able to foster rebel groups in French West Africa under Vichy control,
or cut communication lines. Above all, concerted action in sub-Saharan
Africa required close coordination, and smooth relations with both the
British and the Americans, to prepare the ground for the return to the
key destination: the Maghreb.77
In his report to de Gaulle, Cassin did not leave out the obstacles in
their path. In Free French Equatorial Africa, communications were poor,
exchanges of information were infrequent, there was no press service
worthy of the name, and there was what he termed an ‘inequality in
zeal’ among those who were in authority. Cassin was clearly learning the
British art of understatement. The political position in Africa was chaotic;
the financial structure of government and of business was precarious;
banking was uncoordinated. Was it at all surprising that the British and
Americans harboured doubts as to whether Free France in Africa was an
equal partner in the alliance?78
In one sense, they were right; in military and financial terms, Free
France was not an equal, but in legal terms, and in terms of moral
and political authority over her African territories, Free France had to
demand treatment as an equal, and to act the part. Despite the heat,
and the inevitable intestinal problems, despite the disorganization and
delays in travel, despite the cynicism of many time-servers who were
hedging their bets about the outcome of the war, Cassin had succeeded
in representing their case and in underscoring their writ, in the best
possible manner. His was the voice of legality, of the Republican order,
temporarily exiled in London, soon, God willing, to return home.
75 382AP59, interview with Professor Cassin and Sir Alan Burns, 11 March 1942.
76 382AP27, Cassin pocket diary 1942, 26 March 1942.
77 392AP59 Cassin’s thoughts on the political situation are set out in a paper he wrote
entitled ‘L’examen de la situation’, Feb. 1942.
78 382AP59, Rapport au Général de Gaulle, undated, in Cassin’s hand.
On his return to London in late March 1942, he took off the mantle of
the emissary, and put on the clothes of the minister, formally ‘commis-
saire’. Now it was his task to breathe life into his ministry, and to start
work of a kind to which he was perhaps better suited as a scholar and
a jurist. These tasks concerned providing Free France with some long-
term thinking about the reform of the French state and the restoration
of its full legal order.
The organization of the Ministry

Cassin’s Ministry was divided into four parts. A Division of Justice func-
tioned as the pre-war Ministry of Justice and added responsibility for
judicial aspects of colonial administration and foreign affairs. Secondly,
there was a division of Public Instruction in charge of schools, fine arts
and the preservation of French culture abroad. Thirdly, there was a leg-
islative committee responsible for assuring the juridical precision needed
for the drafting of laws, regulations, ordinances, conventions and treaties.
This branch had to provide legal advice of the kind that the Conseil d’Etat
had always given to the government. Finally there was a Documentation
and Research Division, the task of which was to provide studies of the
legislative, economic and social development of France and the territo-
ries still under Vichy control. Furthermore, it was charged with the task
of ‘defining in liaison with Free French offices, and Allied agencies, the
precise measures which would be taken during the progressive liberation
of French territory and at the end of the war’.79
This four-part structure defined the work Cassin was to do between his
return from Africa in late March 1942 and his arrival in Algiers in August
1943. He headed a Ministry of Justice in exile, a Ministry of Public
Instruction in exile, charged with the additional task of protecting French
culture abroad, a Conseil d’Etat in exile, with the authority to examine
legislation proposed by different Ministries. A legislative committee of
five members was also set up.80
As this body was inside Cassin’s Ministry, it could not directly super-
vise the legislative work of other Ministries, a problem which he would
address again in the establishment of the Comité Juridique in 1943.
Cassin oversaw as well the work of a documentation centre, which would
serve as a guide to policy discussions in the French National Committee
as a whole. And these heavy tasks rested on very few shoulders. What
79 382AP53, Commissariat à la Justice et l’Instruction Publique, n.d., emphases and

amendments in Cassin’s hand.
80 Decree of 15 Dec. 1941.
World War, 1941–1943 159
is striking is how fertile this work was, both for Cassin’s future and for
the future of Free France. It was as head of this Ministry – a post that
he saw as a demotion – that Cassin was able to lay the groundwork for
the restoration of the Republican order in post-Liberation France and
for the construction of a human rights regime on the international level.
As in many other parts of occupied Europe, long before the end of the
war was in sight, individuals and groups were planning for the democratic
order to follow the war. When Cassin returned from Africa, the outcome
of the conflict was entirely unpredictable. And yet in London, as else-
where, men and women offered their dreams, their hopes, their utopian
visions, in an act of defiance and of faith in a future in no sense secured.
Cassin’s time as Minister of Justice was such a moment of utopian think-
ing, a leap over a grey and painful period of warfare to another world,
another way of living.81
The study of post-war problems

Cassin admired the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham
House. It was Chatham House which provided Cassin with their review
of the foreign press in 1940 and 1941, which Cassin particularly val-
ued. This organization was what we now call a ‘think tank’ of experts
engaged in research and discussion on matters in which the British For-
eign Office was interested. Cassin’s aim was to provide Free France with
an equivalent.
A decree of 2 December 1941 gave him an opportunity to take this
important step. This decree established four commissions for the study
of post-war problems. Cassin’s Ministry would provide the personnel
needed for this network of commissions. The first focused on economic
and financial matters, and was presided over by Hervé Alphand, former
financial advisor in the French Embassy in Washington. His commission’s
work was useful. The second and the third never got off the ground. But
the fourth commission was extremely active. It was charged with studying
juridical and intellectual problems in both domestic and international
affairs.82
This model of research and policy-planning offered Free France two
distinct advantages. The first service it offered was an escape from the
81 Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom.

82 Decree 53, Journal Officiel, 20 Jan. 1942. This text was circulated to all the committees
of Free France. See Paris, Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fonds Cassin-
Gros, carton 7, dossier 25, cable pour la France libre à New York, au Consulat Général
du Royaume-Uni, 4 Dec. 1941.
reactive and hectic nature of wartime politics. Free France was con-
stantly responding to events on which its spokesmen were inadequately
briefed, and doing so without the time to bring spokesmen up to speed.
A research and documentation centre for Free France would remedy that
problem.
The second function of these commissions was to provide the
blueprints needed for the restoration of Republican rule once Vichy was
overthrown. This meant taking a hard look at the flaws of the Third
Republic and the damage done to the nation during the war both by the
German occupation and by French collaboration.
On his return from Africa, Cassin launched the work of the fourth
commission which he directly oversaw and whose members he chose. He
summarized his thoughts on 30 June 1942, and pointed to six central
issues which the commission had to address. They touched on reform of
the state, a subject widely debated before the war in the Union Fédérale
and the veterans’ movement.
Invalidity in international law of the treaties and acts imposed
on France by Germany following the Armistice.
Punishment of crimes committed by Germans in France during
the occupation.
Reparation of war damage caused to the population living under
occupation.
An international declaration of human rights and the duties of
man and citizen. The compatibility of regimes with interna-
tional society.
Juridical clauses of the future Armistice and the future peace
treaty.
An international organization to defend public expression
of ideas, through intellectual cooperation (press, cinema,
media).83
To realize this ambitious programme, three sub-committees were estab-
lished within the fourth commission, over which Cassin himself presided.
The first sub-committee on intellectual and juridical questions was
headed by Paul Vaucher, who was one of the few French scholars entirely
comfortable in England and in English. He was a student of Elie Halévy,
the most distinguished French historian of Britain, and taught at the
University of London throughout the inter-war years. He later served
as chair of the Inter-Allied Commission for the Protection and Restitu-
tion of Cultural Material, established by the Allied ministers of educa-
tion. The second sub-committee, devoted to intellectual and education
83 382AP57, document on the sub-committees, corrected by Cassin, 30 June 1942.

World War, 1941–1943 161
matters, has left little trace. The sub-committee on state reform was the
most important of them all.84
To head it, Cassin chose Félix Gouin, who was named by decree of
11 November 1942 advisor in Cassin’s Ministry. Gouin had been Cassin’s
contemporary as a law student in Aix. A Socialist deputy, founder with
Daniel Mayer of the Comité d’Action Socialiste in the Resistance; his
credentials were impeccable. He had defended Léon Blum at the Riom
trials in 1941, and thereafter had followed Blum’s guidance.85 Under
Gouin’s leadership, the sub-committee on state reform played a pioneer-
ing role in two domains: human rights and the shaping of the Provisional
Consultative Assembly (ACP).
Human rights
First, human rights. The sub-commission on this topic drew on the
overworked staff of Free France as well as the ideas of a number of
prominent Frenchmen in exile in North America, men who were ardent
supporters of the cause. Henri Focillon, a distinguished art historian,
taught at Yale. Henri Laugier held a post in physiology in Montreal.
Jacques Maritain spent the war writing and teaching at Princeton and
Columbia universities. Francis Perrin was the son of the Nobel Prize
winner Jean Perrin, who died in exile in 1941. He was also a physicist
who held a chair in Paris, and taught at Columbia during the war. Their
goal was to draw together expertise and advice both from those living
in London and from the dispersed world of French intellectuals and
scientists.
In June 1942, Cassin stated his views on what this group had to do. The
matter at hand, he said, was no less than ‘the liquidation of war and the
organization of peace’. The key point, he began, was to assure that France
resumed its place as a major world power. This had been de Gaulle’s aim
from the beginning. He reminded his colleagues that during and after
the Great War France spent too little time planning for the future, and
therefore found herself the victim of faits accomplis to which she had little
or no time to respond. Thus the peace did not adequately reflect French
interests. This time, France had to prepare for the intellectual and legal
leadership position she would occupy in the post-war years. That meant
drawing on French opinion in occupied France, in England, and among
84 3AG1/253, dossier 3, Note of P. Maisonneuve, secretary of the commissions, to Pleven,

28 Oct. 1942.
85 The unpublished memoirs of F. Gouin, Un certain goût de cendres, 2 vols. dactyl., s.d.,
held by the BDIC. Léon Blum wrote a long letter to Gouin, 21 Oct. 1942, cf. L’œuvre
de Léon Blum, 1940–1945 (Paris: A. Michel, 1955), pp. 369ff.
the Republican diaspora all over the world. It also meant coordinating
this effort with groups doing similar work for other Allied nations.86
Cassin then handed over the chair of the sub-commission on intellec-
tual and juridical questions to Paul Vaucher. The essential division of
labour here was that Vaucher would oversee work on human rights, and
Gouin, chairing his own sub-commission on reform of the state, would
deal with the questions of the illegality of Vichy laws, the punishment of
war crimes, and reparations.
In the discussions which followed, it became clear that the subject of
human rights was at the heart of their brief. The secretary of all four
commissions, and one of Cassin’s aides, Paul Maisonneuve, stated that
in America in particular the human rights question was widely debated.
‘The world awaits what position France will take on this matter, which is
far from being resolved, since human rights have been denied by total-
itarian doctrine. What we have to do, moreover, is to complement the
Declaration of 1791 with a code of “The duties of man”.’87
This is the point where the United Nations project departed from
that of the League of Nations. This move constituted a shift from the
protection of minority rights to the idea of a much broader declaration,
which would challenge and limit national sovereignty.
Cassin put this shift in the framework of earlier efforts on minorities.
The solution to this problem of minority right is a matter not only of ideolog-
ical interest, but of practical importance . . . When we understood in 1933 that
the minority question raised innumerable difficulties in states created under the
Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations entertained the idea of replacing
the Minority Rights Treaties by an internationally accepted code of the Rights
and Duties of Man. The rules of this code would be so framed as to guarantee
adequate protection to national minorities.88
Vaucher responded by saying that this matter was of premier importance

in particular in the United States. It would be a major coup, he added,
if Free France would be able to issue such a document. To that end he
suggested that they explore the views of Frenchmen in the United States,
as well as the work of the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation.
Vaucher introduced two other subjects for the sub-commission’s con-
sideration: repression of war crimes and reparations. Here too the point
86 382AP57, Cassin’s notes on ‘la liquidation de la guerre et l’organisation de la paix’,

handwritten notes, 30 June 1942.
87 382AP57, Minutes, section on international juridical questions, meeting of 30 June
1942.
88 382AP57, Minutes, section on international juridical questions, meeting of 30 June
1942.
World War, 1941–1943 163
was to insert Free France into the ongoing Allied discussions of the
subject.
In sum, the goal of this commission was to make the voice of Free
France heard in the unfolding debate about the shape of the post-war
international order. Its workload was daunting. It was charged with pre-
senting a brief on the illegality of treaties and acts imposed on France
after the Armistice of 1940. It was to present considered opinion on the
complex questions of war crimes and post-war reparations. But above
all, it was to get to work on a draft declaration on the rights and duties
of citizens, in light in particular of American thinking on the subject.89
Between June 1942 and August 1943, this sub-committee coopted
many individuals whose advice was sought on particular points.90 And
by late summer 1943, it had drafted documents in which we can see in
embryo the outlines of the work René Cassin was to accomplish through
the United Nations after the war.
This effort of recasting human rights in terms of wartime conditions
coincided with the appearance of the Beveridge Report, a document
which developed out of a musty Royal Commission on Social Insurance,
which surprisingly emerged as a statement of not only British but also
Allied war aims. The work of Beveridge’s publicist Frank Pakenham,
later Lord Longford, in getting this document translated and published
quickly in seventeen languages made all the difference. But then so did
the British public’s yearning for some notion of the ways the warfare
state could be turned after the war into a welfare state. Beveridge showed
them how this could be so.91 Cassin had met Beveridge in March 1941,
describing him as an ‘upright and honest economist, perhaps a bit of
a dreamer’. Cassin was well aware of the way Beveridge’s report had
captured the spirit of the alliance, so evident initially in the Atlantic
Charter of 1941. Now was the time to turn that Charter into a set of
commitments to govern the post-war international order.
Beveridge – and even more so, the public reaction to his report – had
shown that the war was about rights, and so would be the peace. The
expansion of the power of the state in wartime meant that social rights
were cemented into popular expectations as to what citizenship entailed.
Social and economic rights – the right to protection from unemploy-
ment and from illness – took on in wartime the coloration of univer-
sal rights. The sub-committee on human rights followed this logic and
89 Fonds Cassin-Gros, Minutes, meeting of 17 Oct. 1942, on emphasis on American

interest in the subject.
90 Fonds Cassin-Gros, compte rendu, meeting of 9 Jan. 1943 of Section de réforme de
l’état. One of those who joined was Simone Weil, who died later that year.
91 Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (London: Quartet Books, 1975).
turned out a series of drafts of a new declaration of human rights, one

which reflected contemporary conditions and aspirations.92
The sources on which such a document rested were varied. Jacques
Maritain, in exile in New York, had just published a book on human rights
and natural law.93 This was summarized by Maisonneuve, along with
elements of the pre-war International Declaration of the Rights of Man,
published in 1929 by the American Institute for International Law.94 The
Cambridge jurist Hersch Lauterpacht was writing at the same time on the
need for a reassertion of human rights as a pillar of international law.95
The need to reach out to other than French traditions is reflected in the
attention paid to the Anglo-Saxon principle of habeas corpus, studied by
the sub-commission on human rights as a necessary addition to French
law.96 The commission took note too of the ideas of the British novelist
and thinker H. G. Wells, widely discussed in British circles during the
war.97 And Cassin had long contact with the Czech leader Beneš, who,
in his London exile, repeated his call for a new declaration of human
rights, at a meeting of the London International Assembly.98
Over the next year, Free France framed a series of documents which
were to serve as new foundations both for the French Republican and the
new international order. Rights talk was in the air, and the longer the war
went on, the more evident it was that the French Resistance movement
as a whole had to join the Allied conversation or risk being sidelined in
the preparation of the post-war world.99
No one needed persuasion that René Cassin was the ideal man to lead
such an effort to speak for Free France on the subject of human rights.
From 1940 on, he had called for a new initiative in human rights, and
after the creation of the United Nations on 1 January 1942 he was among
many who saw the urgent need to ground such an organization on a much
broader and firmer affirmation of human rights than that on which the
League of Nations had rested. Thus the work of his sub-committee had to
92 Fonds Cassin-Gros, ‘Observations sur l’envoi du rapport Beveridge’, 6 Jan. 1943.

93 Jacques Maritain, Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (New York: Editions de la Maison
Française, 1942).
94 Fonds Cassin-Gros, no. 7, files 25 and 27, Documents sur les droits de l’homme, 1942.
95 Hersch Lauterpacht, ‘Resurrection of the League’, Political Quarterly, 12 (1941)
pp. 121–33; ‘The Law of Nations, the Law of Nature and the Rights of Man’, Transac-
tions, 29 (1944), pp. 1–33.
96 Fonds Cassin-Gros, no. 7, file 27, J. Gommes, ‘L’Habeas Corpus et la législation
française’, 12 Nov. 1942.
97 Fonds Cassin-Gros, no. 7, file 27, ‘Extrait du Manchester Guardian du 7 juillet, 1942’,
dated 1 Sept. 1942.
98 Fonds Cassin-Gros, no. 7, file 27, ‘Dossier déclaration des droits de l’homme’, with list
of references to such appeals made by Beneš and Wells.
99 Fonds Cassin-Gros, no. 7, file 26, Droits de l’homme.
World War, 1941–1943 165
go beyond the limits of the declarations of the French Revolutionary years

of 1789 and 1793, to incorporate elements from documents as diverse
as the American Bill of Rights and the Soviet Constitution. Above all, it
had to reflect the way the war the Nazis had fought had torn up previous
ideas about rights as matters limited to the internal workings of sovereign
states.
The final document, approved on 14 August 1943, was in sum a
preamble to a new French constitution and a new phase of Republican
political life. The preface to the document says so in no uncertain terms:
the aim was ‘to help citizens to become conscious of the rights they have,
and of the duty to defend and respect the rights of others’. The document
began with a preamble which stated that ‘The French people, persuaded
that the disrespect and contempt of human rights are the worst causes
of the misery of the world, resolved to state in a solemn declaration their
sacred and inalienable rights.’ What followed was a statement in thirty-
four articles of the rights of man and in twelve articles, the duties of man.
The final line had echoes which have lasted: ‘If a nation, if a community
of any kind, violates human rights, all of humanity must give total help
to the oppressed.’100
In effect, this was an effort to revive by reiteration the French Revolu-
tionary tradition of rights. What better way to transcend the damage that
Vichy had done?101 There are echoes of 1789, 1791 and 1793 throughout
these documents, but there were also elements reflecting contemporary
circumstances. Many of the phrasings of this document appear in subse-
quent drafts and discussions both during and after the war; other formu-
lations were dropped. The important point is that the effort to create a
new rights-based domestic and international order had begun in earnest.
The obstacles against realizing such a commitment were formidable.
What mattered was that Free France was in the forefront of these efforts.
The Provisional Consultative Assembly (ACP)

The second critical task which Cassin took on between spring 1942
and the autumn of 1943 was the construction of an assembly which
brought all elements of the Resistance movement together to prepare
for the return of the Republican order after Liberation.102 For some
100 382AP57, Secrétariat des Commissions d’Etudes des problèmes d’après-guerre, sous
section des droits de l’homme, section réforme de l’état, SRE/128. Déclaration des
droits de l’homme et du citoyen, 14 Aug. 1943. Another copy is in Fonds Cassin-Gros,
no. 7, file 26.
101 Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom, chapter 4.
102 Fonds Cassin-Gros, no. 7, file 27, Problèmes législatifs.
considerable time, Cassin had told the General that he had to have the
support of a kind of representative council of French opinion. On 24
September 1941, the same day Cassin had been appointed minister, de
Gaulle issued a law creating the French National Council. This text
noted that ‘a consultative Assembly’ would be established, the purpose
of which was to provide the National Committee with a sense of French
public opinion, broadly conceived. The design of this assembly dates
from March–April 1942, just before de Gaulle set out his political aims
to the Resistance as a whole on 24 April.103
On 19 December 1942, the commission on state reform began its
deliberations on the reform of electoral law and the regulation of the
press, radio and propaganda.104 Full studies appeared only in the spring
of 1943, in the context of de Gaulle’s conflict with Giraud. After their
landing in North Africa, the Americans first supported Darlan, then
Giraud, in order to create a political order solely devoted to waging war,
rather than to framing national policies. Giraud was, for Free France, a
formidable enemy, because his authority was accepted by the proconsuls
of Morocco and French West Africa. The crisis which ended with the
creation of the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN), took
on a dramatic character between February and June 1943.
Giraud envisaged constructing a Council of the Empire, formed of
higher civil servants, mainly the governors of French colonies. For Cassin
and Free France, this proposal was unacceptable. It gave a legislative
competence to appointed civil servants and amounted to a kind of
federalism totally at odds with Republican tradition. In the words of
Cassin’s close associate Manfred Simon, this plan would transform the
colonies into ‘principalities run by unqualified men, who would arrogate
to themselves extensive powers which would not be subject to anyone’s
control’.105 Instead, what had to be set against Giraud’s proposal was a
unified and democratic project.
De Gaulle expressed this alternative line on 9 February 1943. The
sub-committee on state reform, chaired by Gouin, designed a project
for a provisional representative Assembly. ‘Representative’ meant that this
103 On this déclaration, see Crémieux-Brilhac, La France Libre, pp. 369ff. A ‘2ème pro-
jet d’Assemblée représentative provisoire’, dated 4 April 1942, may be found in the
National Archives in the Fonds de Gaulle, 3AG1/277, dossier 3. In the Fonds Cassin,
382AP71, dossier ‘Création d’une ACP’, a project for a ‘Conseil administratif’, dated
3 Dec. 1942, annotated by Cassin: ‘1er projet élaboré à Londres’, which he corrected
to: ‘Projet d’Assemblée consultative’.
104 382AP57, Agenda, 10 Dec. 1942 of meeting of section on state reform.
105 Note ‘relative au décret pris le 5 février 1943 par le général Giraud, réorganisant les
pouvoirs publics’, undated, sent by Cassin to de Gaulle, doubtlessly written by Manfred
Simon, 3AG1/151, dossier 5.
World War, 1941–1943 167
assembly would have the power to control the government.106 This posi-
tion was totally unacceptable to de Gaulle. The text was discussed on
17 May by the legislative committee, of which Gouin was not a member.
Cassin presided over this vivid discussion, in which Laroque and Tissier
participated. The outcome on 20 May was the proposal of an Assem-
bly of a purely consultative character. This text was transmitted to de
Gaulle the next day. Those eligible to serve on this assembly included
MPs, elected members of the General Councils of the departments, who
had not compromised with Vichy, representatives of the forces and of
the Resistance, of France’s overseas territories, and Frenchmen residing
abroad. The Assembly would advise only on such texts that the Govern-
ment would submit to it, and there was no compulsory scrutiny except
in the cases of budgets and loans.107
In its broad outlines, this is the form of the ACP created by the law
of 17 September 1943. The Assembly met for the first time in Algiers
on 3 November. It was the outcome of a major effort undertaken by the
committees which Cassin had created inside his Ministry. He had at one
and the same time strengthened de Gaulle’s political position at a crucial
moment and created a vehicle for the restoration of the Republican order,
four years after the catastrophe which had abolished it.
Cassin had played a central role in the spring of 1943, but he did
not intervene in the final discussions within the CFLN that summer.
He was no longer in Algiers, and the Comité Juridique, over which he
presided, was created too late for examining the law promulgated on 17
September, which came before the ACP had become fully operational. In
his new official capacity, he followed his earlier line of thinking, thereby
determining in large part the manner in which Republican legality would
be restored in France. It is to this important matter that we now turn.
106 382AP71, Minutes of meeting of the section on state reform, 17, 23 and 30 April 1943.
107 382AP71 and Fonds Cassin-Gros, carton 7, dossier 27, Minutes of two meetings.
3AG1/277, dossier 3, Project for a decree/law creating the ACP, transmitted to de
Gaulle, 21 May.
7 Restoring the Republican legal order:
the ‘Comité Juridique’
Between 1943 and 1945, the route to the restoration of the Republican
order passed through the Comité Juridique. Its work changed the char-
acter both of Free France and of Cassin’s place in it. The construction
in Algiers of the French Committee for National Liberation (CFLN)
enabled France not only to wage war but also to reconstruct the state in
order to govern the country as soon as possible. This objective required
drafting the rules through which the new government would act. On
6 August 1943, the Comité Juridique was created to examine and define
precisely these rules, the nature of which was crucial to the transition
from war to peace. The same day, ‘Mr René Cassin, professor of law in
the Paris Faculty’, was named president of this committee. This appoint-
ment constituted a shift for him from work in the political to work in the
administrative arena. This new stage of his life led to his being named
head of the Conseil d’Etat, in which post he served for sixteen years.
What now?
It is impossible to account for the creation of the Committee and the
appointment of Cassin as its head outside of the context of the spring
and summer of 1943. De Gaulle arrived in Algiers on 30 May, and
with Giraud created the CFLN on 3 June, a kind of dual power shared
between them. As a consequence, Free France had to move its centre
of operations from London to Algiers and to bring into its executive
Giraud’s followers. Even before the list of ministers in the CFLN was
announced, de Gaulle charged Cassin ‘with ongoing responsibility for
the day-to-day work of the civil administration in Britain’.1 It was evident
that Cassin would not be needed in Algiers, and would not be named
a minister in the new National Committee. On 7 June, Jules Abadie,
a physician and a Giraudiste, was named Minister of Justice, National
Education and Health.
1 AN, 382AP30, cable dated 3 June 1943.
168
Restoring the Republican legal order 169
The reasons why Cassin was not appointed to cabinet office are
unclear. It is not enough to point to the advantage of finding a place for
a Giraudiste. The hypothesis of a political breach between de Gaulle and
Cassin must be rejected too. Cassin’s note of 20 March 1943 sent to de
Gaulle is completely clear. Cassin pointed out three risks of working with
Giraud: being compromised by dealing with what was left of ‘vychisme’
(sic) and Nazism; being left after joining Giraud under the effective con-
trol of a foreign power; and facing a delay in granting the French peo-
ple their proper voice after Liberation.2 More probably, Cassin suffered
because of his personality and the circumstances of the day. In the new
political context, he represented only himself and that counted for little.
To the young officers with the glory of their recent victories, as well as
to the members of the Resistance coming from occupied France, the
legal preoccupations of a disabled veteran of the Great War were not of
profound interest.
This brutal dismissal deeply wounded Cassin. In several draft
responses to de Gaulle, he spoke of ‘bitterness’ in the face of ‘unjust
treatment’. He asked, ‘Was this series of humiliations really necessary for
the general interest?’ He chose, however, not to break with de Gaulle,
while retaining his dignified stance. He sent de Gaulle a telegram on 8
June noting the decision. He would accept the decision, with the same
will to serve as he had shown since 28 June 1940. These words drew
attention to the length of his service to de Gaulle and to the way he had
accepted in September 1941 a previous political setback.
Should you and the new Committee choose not to show your confidence in me
in an appropriate manner, I would beg of you, since I am unable to serve in
uniform, to allow me to retire in dignity with the shortest possible delay. It is
only just that intellectuals, veterans and, generally speaking, the common people
recognize that the man they knew as their representative ever since the beginnings
of the French Resistance, indeed had merited their trust.3
The main point for Cassin was that his principal role in the Resistance
rested not on his legal competence but on his standing in civil society.
He was one of the original members of Free France, from its first days,
whose voice was recognized by many Frenchmen. Moreover he was right,
as we have seen, and of this he was proud. He had represented a con-
stituency he knew very well. But the fact that he did indeed speak for
a large population before the war was underestimated outside the veter-
ans’ movement, and counted little compared to what the Resistance had
done.
2 382AP30 and 382AP71. 3 382AP30, telegram of Cassin, 8 June 1943.

Faced by this reaction, de Gaulle offered Cassin an honourable way

out. We do not know if de Gaulle thought he should treat with care a man
who had served him loyally and for whom he had considerable respect.
Perhaps he believed he still needed Cassin’s professional skill. Perhaps he
aimed to place a loyal follower in a strategic position in which he would
control parts of the administration which still remained on the side of
Pétain or Giraud. Whatever his reasons, de Gaulle explained to Cassin
that he had not named him Minister of Justice because he intended to
appoint him as president of a Legislative and Judicial Committee which
he was about to create.4
This was hardly an attractive proposition to offer at the very last minute,
since this matter had not been raised before, and since Pierre Tissier
would be the secretary of this committee. As we have seen, the two men
were not on friendly terms. Tissier had joined de Gaulle in June 1940
as well. In 1943 he was in de Gaulle’s inner circle, and may have been
responsible for the idea of creating a sort of Conseil d’Etat at that time.
Having authored a number of important documents for Free France,
Tissier felt he was more able to draft official documents than Cassin,
for whom he felt a degree of contempt. Cassin felt that Tissier was an
anti-Semite, and he was certainly Cassin’s main rival.5 As Tissier was
as authoritarian as Cassin was diplomatic, the prospect of working with
Tissier was hardly an attractive one. Cassin kept his cards to himself.
At the same time in Algiers, the relations between Giraud and de
Gaulle had worsened, to the point that rupture was just avoided on
several occasions. To guarantee the continuation of day-to-day work in
London was a significant matter in June 1943, since it would enable
de Gaulle to preserve his base should the opposition of Giraud and
the Americans become insurmountable. On 12 June, de Gaulle sent a
telegram to Cassin, with a copy to Soustelle, asking him to preside over a
new structure, with Soustelle, d’Argenlieu, Legentilhomme, de la Vigerie
and Valin.6 De Gaulle kept Cassin informed about the state of the crisis,
but did not seem eager to have him in Algiers at that time.7 On 24 June,
he sent Cassin a warm handwritten letter about the presidency of his
proposed Comité Juridique.
Cassin’s reply, dated 25 June, probably crossed with de Gaulle’s. In a
four-page deeply considered letter,8 Cassin adopted his time-honoured
stand. ‘Having recognized, from 18 June 1940, that you were working for
4 382AP30, telegram of de Gaulle, 14 June 1943.

5 See above, p. 118. 6 3AG1/252, dossier 1, pièce 41.
7 Telegrams of 14, 15, 19, 23 June, 7 July 1943, 3AG1/234, of 16 and 23 July, 3AG1/252.
8 382AP30. Numerous handwritten drafts show the evolution of his thinking.
the honour and interests of the people of France, I served by your side,
without restriction, in all kinds of posts.’ For this reason, he did not raise
the injury he felt, and asked instead the only relevant question: where
‘could I still be useful?’
He considered three possibilities. The second and third were purely
rhetorical, since they were not on the cards: he might have accepted a
diplomatic mission in London, rather than the management of day-to-
day business there, or he might have served as a representative of Free
France in North America. The only realistic proposition was the first
one he considered: the presidency of a legislative and judicial committee.
And this he discussed at length.
In effect, he put in an acceptable form his conditions for agreeing to
this proposal. First, he rejected the direction of the judicial part of this
committee. Here we have to bear in mind one of the particularities of
the French system of jurisdiction. There are two domains of justice. The
first is the administrative order. This concerns conflicts between the citizen
and the state. When a citizen believes that an administrative decision is
ill-founded or illegal, the matter is judged by administrative courts. The
Conseil d’Etat is the highest administrative court. The second is the
juridical order. It concerns occasions when a citizen breaks a law; he is then
pursued and tried in the penal courts. When citizens are in conflict with
one another, they go before the civil courts. The proposed committee
would have the competence of an administrative court. Since Cassin had
been a minister in Free France, he reasoned that it would be impossible
for him to render judgments against the administration he himself had
directed. He had a conflict of interests in the matter. ‘I would have had to
recuse myself in the majority of cases, because I was myself at the origin
of most of the laws of Free France.’
He had, though, a second reason, much stronger than the first. The
proposed position was beneath his dignity.
It would be absolutely unreasonable for me to be confined in a ‘technical’ posi-

tion, centred on the past; which was perfectly well-suited to many honest magis-
trates or high civil servants who never spoke to the masses or led negotiations.
The legislative committee was much more interesting for him. But he
was well aware of the experience of the former legislative committee
within his own Ministry, whose writ was ‘constantly violated’. He was
very cautious.
I will be asked to clean up improvisations and to cover up the egoism of whoever

it may be. Not only the Army had to be rejuvenated and cleansed. Other eminent
bodies of the state are rotten by routine, self-satisfaction and esprit de corps, and
they are not suited to work with independent men, having experience and the
confidence of the people.
In order to overcome these obstacles, the president of the legislative com-

mittee had to have ‘direct and regular access’9 to the General, without
having to go through the Minister of Justice:
It is necessary to protect the President of the French committee [CFLN] him-
self from certain dangerous possibilities imbedded in the organization’s statutes
concerning which territories come under French sovereignty. I would never have
accepted a text which could have been interpreted as denying our authority over
occupied territories, after which Allied powers might not grant us the full recog-
nition we reasonably deserved.10
This argument – possibly against Tissier – was a good one. But for Cassin
there was more at stake:
Even if all these conditions are fulfilled, I am not certain, despite my joy at being
able to return to French soil, that I would remain at such a post; I wonder if I
would be the best man to do the job. It is not possible to ask me to do the work
of the Minister of Justice, after having ousted me from these functions.
Though Cassin did not formally accept this appointment, and was still
in London, where he participated in a meeting of inter-Allied Ministers
of Education on 27 July, nonetheless de Gaulle created on 6 August a
Comité Juridique and named Cassin as its president.
The new Minister of Justice took the trouble to inform him of it in
a letter asking him when he would come to Algiers. De Gaulle himself
telegraphed Cassin on 19 August saying he wanted to see him as soon as
possible.11 Cassin went to Algiers and met de Gaulle.
His conditions were accepted. De Gaulle needed him in his inner cir-
cle. The Comité Juridique had no juridical competence, which was given
to a provisional juridical committee under the presidency of Tissier.12
On the other hand, its legislative role was greatly enhanced. In addition
to handling matters under review by the Conseil d’Etat before the war,
it took over responsibility for two other matters. First, it was empowered
to revise the laws and regulations in operation in the diverse territo-
ries under the control of the CFLN in order to make them conform to
principles respected before 16 June 1940. Secondly, it had the task of
9 Underlined in the text.

10 The law of 3 June 1943 creating the CFLN said, in effect, in article 2, that it ‘exercises
French sovereignty on all territories outside the control of the enemy’, which excluded
metropolitan France. This was surely not de Gaulle’s intention.
11 382AP30.
12 Law and decree of 17 Sept. 1943. This law is the first to treat the Comité Juridique.
‘placing in proper juridical form proposals for laws and regulations to be

submitted to the CFLN’. Hence no text would be discussed by the CFLN
before the Comité Juridique had examined it. This gave it considerable
power, well beyond that of the Conseil d’Etat, which never succeeded in
being granted such complete powers of prior review.
Cassin, however, was still reluctant. He set to work and called a first
meeting of the Comité Juridique on 2 September, in order to define
the principal lines it would follow. Cassin delayed his return to London,
where he had represented France in the Allied Commission on War
Crimes, and he held a second and third meeting of the Comité Juridique
on 9 and 13 September. Even then, he still hesitated. In a letter to de
Gaulle dated 6 September, which he never sent,13 he reserved his final
decision:
I regret to inform you that it is impossible for me to become on a permanent
basis president of the Comité Juridique in Algiers. The only thing I could do is to
organize it, to launch it in such a way that it could usefully operate when I am in
London, or if I were to become, as is my intention, a member of the provisional
consultative assembly.
When he left for London, anyway, the replacement of Abadie by de

Menthon as Minister of Justice removed any hope of his being part of the
executive of Free France. De Menthon, himself a professor of law, had
served in the domestic Resistance.14
Cassin continued to hope to play a political role as a member of the
provisional consultative assembly, created by a law of 17 September.
He remained a man of the Third Republic, for whom power lay in the
Assembly. The efforts he made to be named by the French Résistants of
Great Britain account for his delay in leaving London. But this hope was
also unfounded; another candidate was selected.15 Cassin then asked the
General and the Minister of the Interior, Philip, to suggest his name to
serve as a Radical party representative within the domestic Resistance.16
Too late: they too had chosen other names. When Cassin returned
13 This document, identified as ‘lettre non envoyée’, may be found in 382AP30, and
without that designation in the archives of the Conseil d’Etat, A/CE 9938/1. The call
numbers of these boxes have changed since they were first catalogued, and require
careful comparison to be located.
14 Decree of 4 Sept. 1943.
15 382AP30, letter of Cassin to unspecified addressee, 23 Oct. 1943. The president of the
Association des Français de Grande-Bretagne informed him of this outcome in a letter
of 29 October, to which Cassin responded on 8 November (382AP71).
16 Telegrams of 28 and 30 Oct. 1943, AN, C 15260, dossier personnel de Cassin,
94001/507. He claimed membership since 1931 of the Radical party, in its section
for the fifth arrondissement of Paris. His correspondence in 1943 proves his links with
this party (382AP99, dossier 6).
from London at the beginning of November, the provisional consul-

tative assembly had met for the first time on 3 November, without him.
The presidency of the Comité Juridique was thus the only function he
could exercise. And that is what he did.
The Comité Juridique was a very small body. It was composed of five
members, including Cassin and Tissier. Its first three meetings set out
the fundamental principles of the return to the Republican legal order.17
In those meetings, the Comité gave its first opinions, after hearing an
oral report from one of its members concerning diverse ministerial pro-
posals. From 19 September to 5 November, Tissier replaced Cassin and
chaired thirteen meetings. The Comité wasted no time. The first laws
it examined were simply published without any indication of an opinion
of the Comité. On 28 October, the Journal Officiel published eight laws,
three of which stated that the Comité Juridique had rendered its opin-
ion. At the end of the year, the practice was set: despite a few exceptions,
against which Cassin protested,18 the majority of proposed laws had been
examined by the Comité Juridique. Its place was settled.
Not though without difficulties. Some Ministers objected to the
Comité’s scrutiny of their proposals. The Minister for Colonies, for
instance, objected that the Comité was not in a position to take on
the responsibilities or the procedures of the Conseil d’Etat, and they
asked for more flexible treatment.19 Others went further, asking that it
be limited to juridical corrections. On the other hand, Tissier, who had
resigned from the Comité Juridique, to which he had not come since
Cassin’s return to Algiers, criticized it for systematically confirming the
government’s proposals.20
These criticisms led Cassin to define his approach in a letter to de
Gaulle of 1 December 1943, on the eve of a CFLN meeting, which
would discuss two proposals concerning the Comité Juridique. Cassin’s
thinking was straightforward, and showed a constancy which extended
much later to his period in the Conseil d’Etat. He made three points.
First, only the government had political responsibility; it and only it
had the power to decide. Secondly the Comité had ‘the imperative duty
to provide the government with independent opinion’; it had to give the
17 A/CE 9938/42.
18 382AP71, letters of Cassin to the secretary general of the CFLN, 29 Nov. and 15 Dec.
1943.
19 A/CE 9938/1, letter of 22 Nov. 1943.
20 Tissier, having submitted his resignation to the Minister of Justice, received a response
from Cassin on 24 November, saying his resignation was unacceptable, which was as
imprecise as it was pretentious. He wrote to Tissier on 27 November and reproached
him for not having verified the validity of his observations (382AP71). Tissier’s response,
on 28 November and Cassin’s letter of 30 November may be found in A/CE 9938/1.
government its advice on the compatibility of the aims of a given proposal

with the workings of state institutions as a whole and ‘the juridical means
proposed to realize this goal’. Thirdly, since the Comité Juridique ‘aims
at constructive criticism, when its views are negative, it would try to
match the goal legitimately sought with the appropriate juridical means
to achieve it’. ‘When it is fully informed, the government decides.’21 This
logic tells us much about Cassin’s approach to the role of the Comité
Juridique as well as the Conseil d’Etat.
We have no idea if de Gaulle responded to Cassin’s letter, but Cassin
had won the day. The Comité Juridique gained what was needed for its
effective work. Its secretariat was reinforced by the arrival of two co-
workers who would accompany Cassin for many years, one of whom,
Mlle Lesimple, later became his personal secretary in the Conseil d’Etat.
Two new members joined the Comité. One of them was the chief of the
former Legislative service which Cassin had created within the Ministry
of Justice. Last but not least, a decree of 28 December 1943 fixed the
financial and administrative structure of the Comité. It lost the adjective
‘provisional’. By 31 December, the Comité had met thirty times and
dealt with over 150 dossiers.
At this very moment, Cassin’s hope of playing a political role grew
again. A law of 6 December extended the composition of the ACP, and
gave ten supplementary seats to the domestic Resistance. One of these
seats was set aside for ‘personalities who had joined Fighting France at
the moment of the Armistice’ of 1940. Cassin got this seat. He served
in the ACP from 4 January 1944 and naturally joined its commission on
state reform and legislation. Cassin refused to limit his role to that of
a legal technician; he participated frequently in the ACP’s debates, and
spoke eighteen times on several matters, sometimes at length.
His standing was then as a champion of Free France. He was very
severe when considering the members of the foreign service who had
given credence to the idea that Vichy was a sovereign state while in reality
it was a vassal of Germany. He received applause when he objected to
the opinion that ‘our diplomats represent France coming back into the
war, because she never left it. It was that France and only that France
which must be represented and which had to take her place among the
community of nations.’22
Conversely, he defended vigilantly the interests and rights of those who
were the first to join Free France. He objected to the suppression of posts
the result of which would be
21 A/CE 9938/1 and 382AP71.

22 Meeting of 29 Feb., Journal Officiel, 4 March 1944, p. 4.
to eliminate men who, without being civil servants, without having had precise
duties, offered their services to France in distress. I denounce here an invisible
and regrettable purge. In London there is a committee for the revision of posts
which proposed to deprive of their employment or to downgrade the poor chaps
whom we were very happy to find among us at the beginning, when we were
short of qualified personnel.23
He wanted to intervene on matters of foreign policy as well, serving

on the ACP’s commission on foreign affairs. His long participation in
the League of Nations, and his numerous contacts, gave him a stand-
ing in this field which he would not let others forget. His presence
suggested a continuity between the pre-war and the post-war periods.
In a lengthy speech he gave on 12 May, analysing the causes of the
League’s failure and searching for lessons for the future, he cited Lord
Halifax and developed the idea that ‘in the world to come, each State
would abandon some of its national sovereignty to strengthen interna-
tional solidarity’.24 The basis of security was a ‘reciprocal international
commitment to be ready to act in solidarity against eventual aggression’.
Later on he argued for the need to break up the German General Staff
which knew it was losing the war but led a policy of systematic destruc-
tion in order to prepare a future campaign of revenge. He denounced the
cynical remarks of General Von Rundstedt in a lecture at the Berlin Mili-
tary Academy in 1943, demanding the destruction of at least one-third of
the population of Germany’s neighbours by ‘systematic starvation, more
powerful than machine guns . . . and whose efficiency was at its height
among the young’. German militarism mattered more to Cassin here than
Nazism.
These incursions Cassin made into general politics were less important
than what he had to say about the return to the Republican legal order.
There was a difference between the Comité Juridique and the ACP. The
Comité Juridique responded to all government proposals in preparation.
The ACP was in a weaker position, since it only had the right to vote
on those proposals the government decided to send it. Hence, Cassin’s
position within the Legislative Commission of the ACP was powerful,
since he presided over the Comité Juridique. It became even stronger
when Giaccobi, the chair of the ACP Legislative Commission, became
minister and when Cassin was elected as his successor.
Cassin’s election produced some difficulties. Was it possible for him
to be the chairman of both? The Comité Juridique discussed this on
10 May. André Hauriou, a professor of law in Toulouse and a member of
23 Meeting of 13 March, Journal Officiel, 16 March 1944, p. 7.

24 Journal Officiel, 1 June 1944, pp. 21–4.
the Resistance, decided not to stand for the presidency against Cassin, but
argued that, according to the principle of separation of powers, holding
both positions was impossible. For Hauriou, the ACP was the equivalent
of the legislative assembly which had control over the executive. Cassin,
on the other hand, stated that the ACP was only a consultative body
and that there was nothing incompatible in serving on two consultative
bodies. When Cassin was named member of the ACP, he had offered his
resignation as president of the Comité Juridique to the president of the
CFLN, who refused to accept it. This argument showed that Cassin saw
that the more important body was the ACP. Cassin’s position won the
day, and he was elected by a vote of nine to one over Hauriou.25
De Gaulle was asked by Cassin’s enemies to intervene in this matter.
His intervention shows the strength both of Cassin’s allies and of his
opponents. Cassin met de Gaulle on 22 May. The solution was to provide
Cassin with leave from his duties as president of the Comité Juridique
when the ACP was sitting. This was not entirely to Cassin’s liking, but
it could be presented as something Cassin himself had suggested,26 and
it would not be published as a decree in the Journal Officiel. De Gaulle
wrote in his own hand, after having signed the order, ‘Please keep me
informed of all matters of interest to you and please remain in constant
contact with me.’27
Despite de Gaulle’s diplomacy, this resolution was another bitter pill
for Cassin to swallow. In a handwritten letter of 3 June, never sent,
he expresses his ‘bitterness about certain manoeuvres which show little
respect for one who has been one of your most loyal aides . . . I do not
know what has prevented you from using me fully in international nego-
tiations or in a managerial capacity. There are so many mediocrities who
present themselves without having risked anything.’28
Finally, the crisis ended to the advantage of Cassin. We do not know
precisely how Cassin was able to hold on to the reins as president of
two committees deemed by de Gaulle as ‘evidently incompatible’, but
that is what he actually did. He presided over the meetings of the Comité
Juridique on 1, 2 and 3 June, was absent on the 6th and 8th, and returned
to the chair on the 9th. At precisely the same time, he presided over the
25 AN, C 15269, dossier 94001/682, meeting of 10 May 1944.

26 382AP71, Cassin to de Gaulle, 29 May 1944, and to de Menthon, the same date, asking
for this leave.
27 382AP27, Cassin’s pocket diary. The exchange of letters and the original copy of the
decree of 31 May may be found in 382AP30.
28 382AP30. This letter was to have been sent to de Gaulle if Cassin had not returned from
a trip to Corsica. He was absent during the meetings of the Comité Juridique between
3 and 9 June and there is nothing written in his notebook between 5 and 9 June.
Legislative Commission of the ACP until the end of the session. He spoke
as its chair in public sessions.29
Probably the reason Cassin was able to continue in the manner he had
intended to act was the approach of the Liberation. This session of the
ACP was the last to be held in Algiers. In Paris, things would be different.
But Cassin could have had no doubt as to the necessity of choosing
between a political or an administrative position. His choice had already
been made. Had he not concluded his letter to de Gaulle of 29 May
with these words: ‘my deepest wish is to continue to head the Comité
Juridique at the moment when it must accompany the government [to
France]’?
On 11 October 1944, the composition of the ACP changed radically.
Cassin must have been aware of this change, and could have asked for
one of the six seats reserved for Radical-Socialists. But he made no
such request. By then, he had received congratulations from the Min-
ister of Justice, de Menthon, on his appointment to the post of vice-
president of the Conseil d’Etat by the Council of Ministers on 3 October
1944.30 He took up his post at the end of the year, only when the final
steps were taken towards the purge of collaborators within the Con-
seil d’Etat. Until then, as he wrote to de Gaulle on 9 September, it
was necessary to maintain the Comité Juridique alongside the Conseil
d’Etat.31
For the future, he envisaged two possible solutions. One was to main-
tain both institutions and to provide them with separate jurisdictions;
the other was to merge them, and to provide the Conseil d’Etat with
broader jurisdiction. In the latter case, it would be necessary to create
inside the Conseil d’Etat a board charged with providing opinions on
urgent matters.32
On 31 October, Cassin presided over the first meeting of a specific
committee charged with studying how to reform the Conseil d’Etat. On
22 November a first decree named ‘Mr. René Cassin, professor in the
Faculty of Law of Paris’ as a member of the Conseil d’Etat. A second
named him its vice-president, or effective head. The Ministry of National
Education periodically renewed his leave from his post as professor. At
the age of fifty-seven, Cassin then began a new career, as the head of the
highest administrative court of the country.
29 AN, C 15269, dossier 94001/682. The transcript of the Commission documents his
presidency throughout June and July 1944, and again in September 1944.
30 382AP100, de Menthon to Cassin, 4 Oct. 1944.
31 3AG4/3, dossier 5, Fonds de Gaulle, Cassin to de Gaulle, note of 9 Sept. 1944.
32 3AG4/3, dossier 5, Fonds de Gaulle.
The re-establishment of Republican legality

It is very unlikely that Cassin would have been named vice-president of
the Conseil d’Etat had his presidency of the Comité Juridique not been
successful. He continued to serve as its head until its fusion with the
Conseil d’Etat on 31 July 1945.
It is beyond our task to provide a full narrative of the work of the Comité
Juridique. By definition, the texts handled by it covered all domains for
which public regulation was needed in France, for instance the wages
of railway workers on local lines, the supply of food, the organization of
ministries, the budget of the Antilles or other colonies or other ministries,
or the writ of the wire service Agence Havas, or insurance companies. In
effect, the Comité Juridique examined all aspects of the restoration of the
good working of the French state at the moment of Liberation. It gave
particular attention to the juridical probity of the measures it adopted.
It framed the political choices of the government. It warned it, without
always being heard, about debatable solutions, such as to promulgate a
general regulation in order to resolve a particular problem.33 At times it
proposed alternative legal solutions more fully to assure the realization
of the government’s objectives, as in the case of the nationalization of the
Renault factories.34 The Comité Juridique could respond but it could
not initiate policy. Rather than providing a sketch of all the dossiers it
examined – around 1,500 35 – we will try to show what was at stake in its
work.
As Crémieux-Brilhac has remarked, the ambition of restoring the
Republican legal order should not be taken au pied de la lettre.36
Neither Free France nor the domestic Resistance wanted a return to
33 This is the ‘Affaire Châtel’. To force the retirement of the governor general of Algeria,
the Minister of Colonies proposed a text on the need to rejuvenate the civil service;
this text was criticized by the Comité, for not insisting on a hearing before a special
tribunal (opinion of 26 Nov. 1943). The Ministry ignored this (law of 7 Jan. 1944),
and prompted a protest from the Comité Central de la France Combattante (Combat,
CGT, PCF, Socialists) who in a lettter of 4 March 1944 to the secretary general of
the CFLN charged him with acting as Vichy had done and for arrogating to himself
‘dictatorial prerogatives in permitting a ministry forcibly to retire a civil servant without
justifying his decision and without a committee of inquiry into the case’ (A/CE 9938/2,
dossier 106 and 9938/10, dossier du Président Cassin).
34 A/CE 9938/26, dossier 788, avis du 4 déc. 1944.
35 Until 2 September 1944, the date of his transfer to Paris, there were 58 opinions, 178
decrees and 415 laws, in sum 651 texts; after 2 September, 18 opinions, 11 decrees and
892 laws, in sum 921 texts, on which Cassin reported; see Assemblée Générale du Conseil
d’Etat. Séance du 2 août 1945 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, n.d.). These 1,572 texts
correspond to 1,474 dossiers preserved in the archives of the Comité, several having
successive drafts on the same law figuring in the same dossier.
36 La France Libre, p. 615.
the status quo before the war. Remaining committed to the democratic
principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, they
wanted to reconstruct a democratic juridical order, under extraordinary
circumstances. Sharing a profound hope for renewal and reform impos-
sible to fulfil in the short term, they wanted to create the democratic
framework essential for their future realization in liberated France.
The return to the Republican legal order had several facets. First was
the general revision of laws, ordinances and regulations, thrown into
turmoil by the war. Second was the need for a new organization of the
state, suitable to a restored Republic possessing the means to operate
more efficiently and to embody the country’s democratic aspirations.
Finally, there was the day-to-day business of bringing collaborators to
justice and providing compensation to their victims. This task was hardly
compatible with the will to respect Republican legal principles literally.
The Comité Juridique was fully responsible for the first of these
tasks. The text of the law creating it was precise. Its aim was to revise
legislative and regulatory instruments applied in the diverse territories
under the control of the CFLN with a view to assuring their uniformity
‘and their conformity with the principles [the text does not say ‘Repub-
lican principles’] that were legally in effect on 16 June 1940’.37
Realizing these objectives was not a simple matter, though it was indis-
pensable and had significant consequences. From 16 June 1940 on,
many public authorities had issued various legal orders and documents.
Many of them had been inspired by the ideology of Vichy and had to
be annulled. But it was impossible to erase the facts of fiscal measures
or customs regulations without creating impossible contradictions. How
would it have been possible, for instance, three or four years later, to
recalculate the taxes individuals had to pay, and to ask for additional
payments or refund them for overpayments? Moreover, to annul all pro-
motions, changes in post or retirements of civil servants would create
administrative chaos. Hence Cassin and the Comité Juridique decided
to confirm all fiscal and customs measures, the management of civil ser-
vants, and all legal judgments with the exception of politically inspired
ones.38
Juridical disorder nevertheless remained strikingly apparent. In effect,
Darlan, and then Giraud, had issued laws and regulations which operated
in different territories in different ways. For instance, a rule applied by
Darlan to Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia could have been replaced by an
order signed by Giraud which applied only to Algeria. The same chaos
ruled elsewhere, for instance in the Antilles and Madagascar, with powers
37 Law of 6 August 1944. 38 A/CE 9938/42, meeting of 6 Sept. 1943.

having been delegated to governors general. To put a semblance of order

in the place of this jumble was not an easy matter. The solutions adopted
were based on a precise chronology.
Cassin firmly set the date of 16 June 1940, when Pétain formed his
government, and not 10 July, the date of the suicide of the Republic,
as the beginning of illegality. All regulations in effect before 16 June
remained valid. It was anathema to change Republican laws. All regu-
lations promulgated at Bordeaux or Vichy after 16 June 1940 were null
and void.
The choice of 16 June was symbolically crucial; the Legislative commis-
sion of the ACP discussed this.39 It is difficult today to understand fully
the significance of this point. For Free France and for Cassin, Pétain did
not submit his government to the approval of the Chamber of Deputies,
before having asked for and having signed the Armistice. It was unthink-
able to admit to the legality of this government between 16 June and
10 July, because to do so would render valid the terms of the Armistice,
and thereby recognize as legal the right of the German army to shoot
members of the Resistance as outlaws. The Armistice, furthermore, was
an act of treason, and thereby juridically null and void. Those who had
committed these acts had broken with Republican legality. In the words
of the Minister of Justice, de Menthon: ‘The men who had usurped
power on 16 June 1940, and who later tried to mask their coup d’état by
the so-called Constitutional Law of 10 July 1940, never exercised either
legitimate or legal authority.’40 The crucial divide was 16 June, and not
10 July.
The nullity of the decisions taken in Algiers by Admiral Darlan, from
the date of the Allied landing in North Africa to the date of his assassi-
nation, that is from 8 November to 25 December 1942, was obvious, as
was the validity of de Gaulle’s decisions in London before 3 June 1943,
when the CFLN was created, and thereafter those taken by the CFLN.
Texts promulgated by General Giraud were a different matter. Here the
divide was the date of Giraud’s speech of 14 March 1943, when he for-
mally announced the abrogation of Vichy rules and regulations. Giraud’s
decisions taken before this date were null and void. After that date, they
were valid, except when they confirmed Vichy texts.
39 AN, C 15269, dossier 94001/682, meeting of 19 June 1944. Cassin insisted on the
need to invalidate all acts between 16 June 1940 and 10 July, since many had serious
consequences, notably those which forbade French colonies to defend themselves.
40 ACP, meeting of 26 June 1944, Journal Officiel, 29 June 1944, p. 96. For a further
discussion of this choice of dates, see Antoine Prost, ‘La mort de la République: le
débat juridique’, in Pierre Allorant, Noellie Castagnez and Antoine Prost (eds.), Le
moment 1940 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), pp. 91–9.
The Comité Juridique, with Cassin in the chair, carefully examined all
legal documents of the CFLN, and afterwards of the GPRF, the provi-
sional government of the French Republic. Referring to laws of the Pétain
government was inadmissible, since to do so was to give legal existence
to the government which issued them; this was evidently impossible. It
refused to dissolve the peasants’ guild set up by Pétain, since this orga-
nization was said never to have existed. The texts which had created it,
though, had to be declared null and void.41
There are other examples of such casuistry. For instance, when the
property of the Communist party was restored to it, Cassin made a dis-
tinction between valid measures taken before 16 June 1940 by a legitimate
government, and invalid measures of Vichy. The first had to be abro-
gated; the second to be declared null and void.42 The Comité Juridique
did not modify texts which antedated 16 June 1940 without many quali-
fications. In order to appoint Resistance figures as prefects, they changed
the statutes of the prefectorial corps, but only provisionally.43
Once the principles were established, the task was to apply them to the
entire corpus of legal documents. This was a monstrous job, which Cassin
could not carry out without the cooperation of the CFLN’s Ministries,
over which he had no power. For this reason de Gaulle himself wrote to
his Ministers on 22 December 1943, enjoining them to name one of their
team to work with the Comité Juridique. The same day, he asked Cassin
to undertake a systematic appraisal of the Journal Officiel of Vichy and to
examine all texts with relevant Ministries.44
This was no mean achievement. First, there was no complete series
of Vichy’s Journal Officiel in Algiers. They found one in Corsica, but it
stopped at the liberation of the island in August 1943. Then Ministers
proposed to validate en bloc entire categories of laws and decrees, if they
seemed not to have been inspired by political considerations. This was
de Menthon’s proposal as Minister of Justice. He proposed to validate
retroactively all Vichy laws with only a few exceptions.45 Cassin and
the Comité rejected this proposal; for them, ‘the common law required
the nullification of all Vichy’s legal dispositions. Validating them was the
exception and not the rule. It would frequently be necessary to validate
41 A/CE 9938/2, dossier 281, opinion of 17 March 1944, law of 26 July 1944.
42 A/CE 9938/2, dossier 298, opinion of 7 April 1944, law of 6 May 1944.
43 A/CE 9938/14, dossier 336, opinion of 23 May 1944, law of 3 July 1944.
44 Fonds de Gaulle, 3AG/1/276, dossier 4 and A/CE 9938/42, ‘Révision et unification de la
législation’. De Gaulle’s letter to Cassin specifies that the Comité had the responsibility
to classify all legal instruments.
45 3AG1/276, dossier 4, proposal of 9 Nov. 1943.
the effects of a nullified regulation, but in that case, such validation must
be stated explicitly’.46
At this stage, the CFLN had not resolved the conflict between the posi-
tions of de Menthon and Cassin.47 The stakes were twofold. On the level
of principle, what constituted the rule and what constituted the excep-
tion? Annulling a measure exceptionally or validating it exceptionally did
not have the same meaning. This was also a practical matter. To validate
en masse dispensed with the task of examining each and every text, and
on this point Cassin refused to budge. The need for such scrutiny was
precisely his argument.
On 26 February and 13 May 1944, he met to coordinate this task with
various members of different ministries.48 The subsequent work made
greater progress in the smaller ministries which followed his instructions
to classify all texts in three categories: those which were null and void and
had no effects; those which were null and void, but the effects of which
persisted; and those valid and thus continuing as fully legal instruments.
The larger ministries continued to ask for a provisional validation for all
regulations which had not been politically inspired.49
Cassin’s obstinacy finally paid off. The ministries provided lists which
the Comité discussed and adopted with amendments. This huge effort
led to a first law of 9 August 1944 ‘concerning the re-establishment of
the Republican legal order on the continent [in France]’. Its first article
states: ‘The form of the government of France is and remains that of a
Republic. In law it never ceased to exist.’ This was Cassin’s formulation,
and it was at the core of all the work he did. All legal acts and regulations
of Vichy after 16 June 1940 were null and void. This was the principle.
But ‘this nullity must be explicitly stated’. This statement left open an
ambiguity. What was the standing of Vichy regulations which had not
been explicitly nullified?50 Were they validated implicitly or not?
46 A/CE 9938/12, dossier 212, opinion of the Comité Juridique on the proposal of 9 Feb.
1944. It was submitted to the ACP for further examination on 21 June by the Comité.
47 3AG1/276, dossier 4, note of the secretary general of de Gaulle’s government.
48 A/CE 9938/42, ‘Révision et unification de la législation’. The Comité Juridique exam-
ined a new text of 3 June provided by the Ministry of Justice, which it had sent in
modified form to the ACP. On the recommendation of Hauriou, the ACP examined
and adopted this text. Cassin intervened in this debate as president of the Legislative
Commission. The text was returned to the Comité Juridique, which confirmed the list of
texts under discussion with the ministries. It refused for instance to include the ‘Charte
du travail’ in its list of annulled texts, because the law on the re-establishment of the
right of workers to organize had annulled it and this law was in effect (title 3).
49 3AG1/276, dossier 4, note of Cassin to Louis Joxe, secretary general of the CFLN,
13 May 1944.
50 See Anne Simonin, Le déshonneur dans la République. Une histoire de l’indignité 1791–1958
(Paris: Grasset, 2008), p. 372.
This matter was never clarified fully. The law of 9 August 1944 was
a compromise. A statement of principles hid the fact that Ministers still
were unprepared to provide a full list of texts and to have them examined
one at a time. Publishing a first list of regulations validated or nullified
as an annex to the law of 9 August enabled Cassin to show that the
full project was under way, and to press the ministries to continue this
task. Later on, other lists of texts were published. The extent of the
backbreaking work Cassin and the Comité Juridique did can be gauged
by scrutinizing the 818 texts they classified. And this was not all. Once
a law was annulled, all regulations which followed from it were nullified
automatically. This was both a lot and a little; a little because of the
dimensions of the legal structure they addressed; a lot because of the fact
that only Cassin and six other people were there to do this huge job.
Cassin’s political thinking and the law of 21 April 1944

At the same time as the Comité Juridique engaged in this ordering of
regulations and laws, they faced an even bigger question, that of the
structure of the state itself, that is, the organization of public powers. If
the French Republic had never ceased to exist, it still could take several
different forms. Deciding among them was primarily the work of the
ACP rather than that of the Comité Juridique.
Cassin was among many in the Resistance both in England and else-
where who had begun serious thinking about this question during the war.
The Resistance had organized a Comité Général d’Etudes, which devel-
oped a number of proposals, as did political parties. The sub-committee
on state reform of Free France, the presidency of which Cassin had given
to Gouin, focused on this matter in the autumn of 1942.51 At that time,
no one could have imagined how and when France would be liberated.
Most people thought that first there would be a military phase, lasting
many months, and perhaps a full year; then, when part of the homeland
would be liberated, a pre-constitutional phase; and finally a phase of con-
stitutional reform after the return of prisoners of war.52 While fighting
was still going on, such reforms had to wait. But to postpone elections
until constitutional reform was enacted fully risked waiting too long.
One solution was set aside right away: that of returning to the laws
of the Constitution of 1875. Such an approach was impossible, because
it required either the election of a new Senate and a new Chamber of
51 See the notes of the SRE, nos. 104, 116 and 118, respectively 10 April, 6 and 19 May
1943, A/CE 9938/12, dossier 203. Unfortunately these are only fragments.
52 A/CE 9938/12, dossier 203, note SRE 118 unsigned, 19 May 1943.
Deputies, or the nomination of a provisional assembly, composed of

two delegates from each departmental council, many of which had been
discredited by collaboration. In any event, virtually no one wanted to
see the Constitution of 1875 restored, since public opinion viewed it as
responsible for the country’s military defeat, arising out of its political
weakness and instability.
Cassin did not share all these criticisms, and his reflections during the
war are important precursors of his thinking in the next constitutional
crisis of 1958. For him, the Constitution of 1875 was ‘a kind of mas-
terpiece. It had a flexibility, a capacity to adapt to events, which it had
shown over time.’53 It succeeded in winning the Great War without com-
promising its principles. Governmental instability was due to the depth
of the division of society between a left and a right of roughly equal
strength. The origins of this division, Cassin believed as a Republican
of his generation, was the religious question. Instability arose also from
the tendency of elected deputies to adopt a position in office different
from what they had been elected to bring into law. Cassin regretted that
the practice of dissolving the Chamber had been abandoned, since it
meant elections the representatives did not want to face. The Senate had
increased its strength to despotic levels. Its blockage of women’s suffrage
was a scandal. People could be for or against, but the refusal of the Senate
to consider the issue was unacceptable. Cassin supported the existence
of a second house, but not with powers equal to the first. In addition,
he pressed for strengthening the Economic Council, and took the view
that the Third Republic had suffered from having political parties which
were too weak, rather than too strong. Finally, he made it clear that he
favoured the limitation of state sovereignty in international affairs.
In the autumn of 1943, the ACP took up formally the problem of
state reform. On 21 and 22 January 1944, Cassin, in a long intervention,
explained why he was in favour of electing a constituent assembly rather
than of retaining the laws of 1875.
The ACP, in unanimity with the government and without a doubt the quasi-
totality of French Republicans, shares the strong commitment to proceed to the
election of a constituent national assembly, directly elected by all citizens of both
sexes. This is the only way to give the new Republic the public powers modern
France requires . . . There are those, like me, who are attached to the Constitution
[of 1875], who now proclaim publicly the impossibility of returning to it without
a seriously organized national consultation . . .
53 Allocution de M. le Professeur René Cassin à la Commission pour l’étude des problèmes de

l’après-guerre, ‘La constitution de 1875 et sa réforme’, 10 July 1943, personal dossier of
Cassin, CAC 20040382/65. Another copy of the text of this speech can be found in the
Fonds de Gaulle with the stamp ‘Vu par le Général’, 3AG4/2, dossier 2.
The Republican legal order must never be interpreted so strictly as to become a

second-line trench for those who bet on the victory of Germany.54
In effect, those who wanted to go back to 1875 wanted to prevent the

people of France from constructing a new Republic arising out of the
efforts of the Resistance.
This statement, roundly applauded, needs to be borne in mind. It
summarized Cassin’s thinking about the return to the Republican legal
order. He maintained scrupulously his commitment to the spirit (though
not the letter) of 1789 as well as to the laws in force before 16 June 1940.
‘It is one thing’, he said much later, ‘to respect a law which is part of a
living branch, and another to retain a fetish for a dead law.’55
This first debate of the ACP disclosed an agreement on the need for a
constituent assembly elected by the universal suffrage of both sexes, when
the prisoners of war and deportees would return home. More urgent
still was the re-establishment of local democracy. Some members of the
ACP proposed keeping the then current elected members in office, after
having purged collaborators among them, or exceptionally appointing
in their place municipal councillors. Others wanted elections, and, to
speed things up, suggested that ration cards could be used as electoral
cards. The communists wanted to go even further and to elect municipal
councils by votes by counting hands raised in public squares.56
These options were criticized strongly. The majority of the ACP sup-
ported democratic elections, based on secret ballots, and electoral lists
not yet in existence. Delay was inevitable. A consensus emerged on the
necessity of placing alongside the provisional government a new consul-
tative assembly, the composition and the designation of which remained
unclear. At the end of the January debate, the ACP adopted a resolution
demanding that the government present to them its proposal on these
matters.
This document was discussed by the ACP on 22 March. Let us leave
aside the details of the discussion. On one point though, Cassin’s position
needs to be explained. He was one of the few members who did not
accept votes for women in the first municipal elections. We have seen his
advocacy of votes for women in a future constituent assembly. Women’s
suffrage was included in the first proposals provided by the Ministry of
54 Debates of 21 Jan. 1944, Journal Officiel, 27 Jan. 1944, p. 5. Our italics.

55 Debate of 22 March 1944 at the ACP, Journal Officiel, 25 March 1944, p. 27.
56 In the same meeting of 22 March, Billoux remarked: ‘This procedure had been utilized
in a great country, the Soviet Union’, p. 15.
Justice, when he headed it.57 Why did this measure apply to elections for
the Constituent Assembly and not for municipalities?
On 2 March, the legislative commission adopted a paradoxical posi-
tion. Women were eligible to serve in municipal councils, but the ACP,
not being sovereign, had no authority to extend to them the vote. They
would be eligible to serve without being electors. During the discussion
of the ACP, the Commission accepted that women would have the right
to vote for the Constituent Assembly since it was a sovereign assembly,
and was not under the regime of the previous Constitution, which had
denied women the vote. But the commission rejected unanimously an
amendment by a Communist delegate that women should have the right
to vote in municipal elections.58 In plenary session of the ACP, Cassin
also voted against this amendment. So did the president and several
members of the Legislative Commission, including Hauriou, an eminent
jurist from Toulouse and an expert on constitutional law. Why did they
do so?
This question does not have a simple answer, since Cassin did not
speak in this meeting. The charge of anti-feminism is unfounded, given
his previous position on women’s voting for the Constituent Assembly.
Three reasons seem plausible. The first is that municipal elections were to
be held three months after the liberation of each department, before the
return of prisoners of war and deportees. Inevitably the electorate would
be massively female. Cassin never alluded to this point. The second
was the problem of establishing valid electoral lists in so short a period,
when the administration would be overworked and disorganized, and at
a time before refugees and others including underground fighters could
return home. The fear of improvisation leading to manipulation no doubt
played a role. The vote on this point immediately followed the rejection of
elections by acclamation in public squares. The third reason was purely
juridical. The Constituent Assembly would be a revolutionary innovation
and would mark a rupture with the Constitution of 1875. Municipal
elections had to conform to Republican legality, and for Cassin and the
rest of the commission it was necessary to operate within the framework
of the laws in effect prior to 16 June 1940. It was, therefore, the task of
a new assembly, undoubtedly legitimate, to change the law. Then, and
only then, would women have the right to vote in municipal elections.
This episode is a revealing one with respect to Cassin’s thinking. On
one hand, he appears here relatively insensitive to the massive movement
57 A/CE 9938/12, dossier 203, SRE 104, text on the election of a constituent national
assembly, 10 April 1943.
58 AN, C 15269, dossier 94001/682, meetings of 2 and 24 March.
of opinion reflected in the domestic Resistance and which swept objec-

tions aside. Here was a man from London and a Republican of an older
generation, a prisoner of his own juridical scruples.
On the other hand, we can see the courage of his convictions. Fully
aware both of the requirements of an extraordinary situation and of the
need to respect the laws scrupulously, he tried to find solutions which
could register the moment without departing from the law. Few would
have appreciated the subtlety of his thinking. And yet here is precisely the
line he followed in his work on punishing the criminals and in restoring
the rights of the victims of injustice.
The general principles of law in exceptional times

Here we come to questions of major importance for Cassin. These are
not purely juridical. They had a heavy symbolic, affective and material
charge, especially for a man whose family suffered, as we shall see later,
from organized pillage and deportation, under Vichy’s racial laws. Cassin
often placed himself at the junction of law and human suffering, as we
have seen in his work for the victims of the First World War.59 In this
effort, he was a lucid realist, and his vision separated him from pure
jurists. His achievements arose from the braiding together of these two
elements: a concern for the victims and for the law.
To be sure, it is impossible to specify his role in the decisions of the
Comité Juridique. It was a collective body. He presided over it, took on
a number of cases, and signed its opinions. But he was not alone. His
personal authority and the small size of the committee lead us to believe
that his opinions generally prevailed. However, we do not know precisely
how his influence led to a softening or a hardening of particular opinions.
Dealing with the victims of Vichy

What is most striking here is the frequent disagreements Cassin and the
Comité Juridique had with the Ministry of Justice and its Minister, de
Menthon. Many people in the Ministry of Justice were not convinced of
Vichy’s illegality and many still shared Vichy’s ideology. More surpris-
ingly, the Minister of Justice followed this line at times. Cassin had to
intervene vigorously in order to impose the Republican legal order.
59 Continuity is evident. See 382AP73.

We will consider only three instances. The first concerns loss of citizen-
ship, a matter studied rigorously by Patrick Weil.60 Vichy had removed
French citizenship from many foreigners who had received it under the
law of 1927. These measures were very different from the stripping of
nationality by legal judgment against members of Free France, including
de Gaulle and Cassin himself. Those foreigners stripped of citizenship
numbered 15,154, of whom roughly 6,000 were Jews, most of whom were
deported later. For Cassin, this was ‘one of the most shameful pages of
this regime’.61 The Minister of Justice proposed to abrogate the laws of
Vichy under which these acts had taken place, but to validate their effects.
The aims set out in his first proposal show that this was so:
In order to avoid the effect of nullification leading to a massive and automatic

reintegration of those who had lost their French Nationality, a reintegration
which would occur regardless of the circumstances and facts which had led to the
measures taken . . . we propose to validate the effects arising from the application
of these laws in the past.62
In a letter to the president of the Comité, de Menthon even added:
Too many naturalizations in the immediate pre-war period of doubtful Israelites

provided a pretext for anti-Semitism which may raise a problem when they
return to their homes. To annul systematically all measures of denaturalization
which have occurred would not be a good way to prevent the recurrence of this
problem.63
Hence he proposed to return French nationality only to those denatural-

ized people who would make an application in the next three months.
The Comité Juridique opposed him categorically. Such decisions
‘which would have the effect of doing away with naturalizations regu-
larly ratified before 16 June 1940 are subject to the same status of being
null and void’ as other unjust decisions taken after 16 June 1940. And
this applied, ‘no matter if it were true that these naturalizations had been
too numerous and had been given to unassimilated people who did not
have adequate moral standing. These objections may have been sufficient
to refuse granting French nationality, but they do not justify, in any case,
doing away with French nationality once accorded.’
60 Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (Paris:

Grasset, 2002); ‘Racisme et discrimination dans la politique française de l’immigration,
1938–1945/1974–1989’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire, 47 (July–Sept. 1995), pp. 77–
102.
61 A/CE 938/2, dossier 28, note of 14 Jan. 1944.
62 A/CE 9938/2, dossier 234, opinion of 11 Jan. 1944, published 19 Feb.
63 Letter of 9 Sept. 1943, A/CE 9938/12, dossier 234.
If some denaturalizations may have been desirable, the government

had been accorded by the law of 1927 the right to act in this way. But
this is hardly a reason to confirm Vichy’s decisions. ‘It is inadmissible
to force the victims of illegal and arbitrary measures to have to make a
request for their reversal.’64 The only concession the Comité Juridique
was prepared to make was over very minor technical matters.65
The conflict between the Comité Juridique under Cassin and the Min-
istry of Justice under de Menthon took on an even sharper form when
faced with the question of the theft of Jewish property. The so-called
‘Law’ of 22 July 1941 had placed all property possessed by Jews, busi-
nesses, firms, shops, investments, houses other than a principal residence,
in the hands of provisional administrators. When these assets had mar-
ket value, the administrator was charged with keeping them going until
he was able to sell them. In the case of those which did not have mar-
ket value, or could not continue to operate, he had to liquidate them
rapidly. In both cases, he handed over the proceeds, minus a commis-
sion, to the Caisse des Dépôts, a state banking organization which held
the accounts of Vichy’s General Office on Jewish Questions, the Com-
missariat Général aux Questions Juives. When Liberation came, seized
properties which had not been destroyed were in the hands either of the
provisional administrator or of the persons who had acquired them.66
Two different laws regulated the restitution of these assets to their
original owners or their successors. The first was a law of 14 November
1944 concerning property in the hands of the provisional administrators;
the second, a law of 21 April 1945, on property in the hands of those
who had acquired it. In both cases, the Comité Juridique took strong
issue with the Minister of Justice.67
For the Ministry of Justice, the law of 22 July had legal status. To be
sure, one had to return seized property to those who had been deprived
of it, but the provisional administrators and those who had acquired the
property had acted within the law. Here is the reason why the governor
64 Letter of 9 Sept. 1943, A/CE 9938/12, dossier 234. 65 Law of 24 May 1944.
66 For a fuller explanation, see the report of the working committee on the spoliation of the
Jews of France: Antoine Prost, with Rémi Skoutelsky and Sonia Etienne, Aryanisation
économique et restitutions (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2000).
67 A/CE 9938/27, dossier 785. This box refers solely to spoliation and proposals submitted
by different concerned groups, including the Comité de Juristes, the Comité Français
de Défense des Spoliés, etc. as well as successive proposals of the Ministry of Justice.
The fact that many documents are undated raises problems for detailed research on
this matter. A first proposal was examined by the Comité on 1 April 1944. A new
comprehensive proposal was submitted to the Legislative Commission of the ACP on
26 June, and examined in seven meetings in July and August (AN, C 15269, dossier
94001/682).
general of Algeria on 3 April 1943 had guaranteed that those who had
acquired seized Jewish property would be reimbursed, and that the origi-
nal owners had one month only to sue for the return of their property. As
in the case of those who had been denaturalized, this placed on the shoul-
ders of the victims the burden of demanding the re-establishment of their
rights. This meant the practical nullification of the principle stated in the
law. Given so short a delay, those who had been deported or were still in
hiding, those ill-informed or ill-educated, would be stripped irrevocably
of their rights.
The Comité Juridique first examined a draft of what later became the
law of 14 November 1944. They sent it to the Minister of Justice, who
returned to them a new proposal. This gave to the provisional admin-
istrator one month to return property to the person from whom it had
been seized. Once restored, the accounts were drawn up, and a balance
was established between the revenue due to the original owner and the
cost of maintaining the property. The Ministry of Justice added, however,
that when the provisional administrator had spent money to improve the
property, he would retain hold of it, until the final accounts were estab-
lished. This may have appeared to be a minor matter, but in fact an
administrator could draw out the process for a very long time.
Cassin immediately responded as the lawyer he was. Article 1293 of
the civil code stipulates that when the restitution of a good unjustly seized
is at stake, any compensation due happens after restitution, which must
come first.68 Cassin prevailed, and the clause put forward by the Minister
of Justice vanished from the law.
Now let us consider the second law, that of 21 April 1945, which
concerns the case of the property of Jews in the hands of those who
had purchased it. This too was a matter of dispute between the Comité
Juridique and the Ministry of Justice.
The Comité was fiercely critical of the proposal of the Minister. It ‘was
characterized by giving exceptionally favourable treatment to those who
had to return seized property’. No distinction was made between those
who had acquired these goods in good faith and in bad faith. It required
those who had lost property to prove that they had been threatened
into giving their consent. It negated the sale of property not from the
moment of the injustice but from the date the person who had lost it
made a claim to recover it. The Ministry even envisaged compensating
68 A/CE 9938/20, dossier 650. The proposal concerning property in the hands of the
provisional administrators was sent to the Comité Juridique on 14 October 1944, and
discussed on 21 and 22 October 1944. The Minister of Justice transmitted a new text
on 31 October to which Cassin immediately objected, referring to article 1293 of the
civil code.
the person doing the injury for the costs of undoing it. Thus, the Comité
commented, ‘those obliged to restore goods acquired in bad faith would
be creditors of the Public Treasury on the grounds that their speculation
did not succeed’. Finally, the Comité thought the proposed restitution
would take too long.69
The opinion of the Comité Juridique was inspired by a more rigorous
and more realistic view. Victims were often unequipped to engage in
the legal procedures. Burdened by material worries, filled with anxiety
about their families, without legal culture, many did not know how to
recover their goods, or those of their parents. The proposal submitted
to the ACP, which heard it on 15 March 1945, distinguished two cases,
according to the moment the administrator had been named. Had the
sale occurred after or before his being named? In the first case, even
if the original owner had signed the document of sale, it was an illegal
forced transaction, contrary to procedures in place before 16 June 1940.
Those who had acquired such goods were guilty of acting in bad faith;
the sale was null and void, and the property with all proceeds reverted to
its original owner.70
The second case concerned sales which took place before the provi-
sional administrator had been named. This was not infrequent, since
many Jews were interested in selling property before it was confiscated,
even at a below-market price. These sales were deemed to have been
conducted under the threat of violence, but the person who bought the
property could prove that he had paid a just price for it. In this case,
the person originally dispossessed would have the chance to prove that
the sale was completed under menace. If that was not the case, he had to
reimburse the full price paid by the purchaser in order to recover it.
The most important point in dispute was that of procedure. The Comité
Juridique imposed a relatively rapid and exceptional procedure to resolve
this issue.
There was a third matter still for the Comité Juridique to consider.
Most of the French bureaucracy did little to expedite the reintegration
69 A/CE 9938/27, dossier 785. It appears that after two proposals from the Ministry
of Industrial Production, the Ministry of Justice seized the initiative, in its proposal
of 30 October 1944, transmitted to the Comité on 13 November. The Comité also
received two proposals from the Ministry of Finance in January 1945. The Comité’s
decision was distributed in the form of a cyclostyled copy, dated 5 February 1945,
accompanied by an alternative proposal in thirty-eight articles and a table comparing
the two. The government adopted this proposal on 9 February and submitted it to the
ACP on 13 February.
70 This was the case with respect to Rachel Cottage, the family property where Cassin
passed his holidays in his youth. Cassin left to his cousin Max the management of all
paperwork concerning the spoliation of the family.
of civil servants who had been dismissed under Vichy laws. The prin-
ciple here was established in two laws promulgated before the Comité
Juridique was created.71 Reintegration is a right, when there is no evi-
dence that dismissal was a result of professional or personal fault or
incompetence. But in their place, new appointees had been engaged and
had been promoted. What could be done about them? For this reason,
the civil service was cautious, and reintegrated individuals only in incon-
testable cases of unjust dismissal. The difficulty was that many acts of
injustice had occurred for what were claimed to be professional reasons.
Hence many victims of unjust treatment did not get their jobs back.
The Comité Juridique discussed a proposed bill on reintegration,
which would become the law of 17 January 1944. The Comité wanted to
ease access for those who had not been reintegrated into their former jobs
to the juridical committee which had the power to reinstate them.72 The
Comité stated that these people had the right to have the same promo-
tions in grade and pay they would have had, had they not been dismissed
or discharged. They widened the right of recovery of jobs to civil servants
and judges who had resigned or took leave because of their desire not
to serve under Vichy, or because they foresaw that they would become
victims of measures of exclusion, such as the Jews and Freemasons.
Difficulties continued, however, leading to the adoption of a second
law, that of 29 November 1944. The Comité insisted that civil servants
who had been dismissed or condemned because they were absent also
had the right of reintegration. After all, this applied to members of the
Resistance, a position supported by the government.73 Despite all these
efforts, reintegrated civil servants continued having difficulties in return-
ing to the work they had done before the war, at the same level of interest
and responsibility.
Vichy repression and respect for the general principles of law

If it was necessary to compensate the victims of Vichy, it was also neces-
sary to punish acts of collaboration. In this domain, the Comité Juridique
tried to prevent arbitrary measures and to preserve the rights of the
defendant.
A first step was taken by Tissier in October 1943 concerning admin-
istrative internment. The Comité had to examine a proposal about the
71 Laws of 4 July and 5 Aug. 1943.

72 A/CE 9938/2, dossier 72, meetings of 9 Nov., 10 and 24 Dec. 1943, 26 Jan. 1944.
73 A/CE 9938/21, dossier 663, opinion of 23 Oct. on the first version, and of 27 Nov. on
the version formally adopted.
internment of those deemed to be dangerous for national defence or

public security, and proposed creating a Supervisory Committee (Com-
mission de Vérification).
The Comité ‘held that the respect for individual liberties’ required
the amendment of the text so that the dossiers would be referred to the
Supervisory Committee within three days ‘and that, it would render an
opinion within fourteen days after the dispatch (and not the receipt) of
the dossier’, and after having questioned the internee. The government
followed the Comité’s opinion and this measure was included in the law
of 18 November 1943.74
The subject did not go away, since the Supervisory Committee sub-
mitted to the Comité Juridique the case of internments ordered by the
governor general of Algeria against alleged black marketeers convicted
of false documentation concerning grain stocks.75 The Comité reacted
firmly:
The Comité Juridique has taken the view that we must put an end in general to
the abusive use of administrative internment, as much in our laws and regulations
as in day-to-day administrative practices.
The CFLN and the Home Minister, who is competent in this area, must make
it clear through circulated instructions that administrative internment is, in any
case, not a penal sanction but a security measure against individuals who may
trouble the public order or the security of the country.
Consequently, such a measure cannot follow a penal condemnation except
when the facts leading to the guilty verdict show that the individual is a pos-
sible danger to public safety and must be rendered incapable of harming the
public.
For the same reasons, administrative internment cannot in any case be set for a
fixed period but only during the time when public order can be endangered.
We find similar observations in other dossiers. In the period of Libera-

tion, the temptation was great, in effect, to prefer immediately applicable
administrative decisions to lengthy penal procedures. For instance, the
Ministry of Industrial Production proposed to integrate administrative
internment in the set of measures it wanted to adopt for purging collab-
orators in private enterprises. The Minister of Justice had here the same
view as the Comité Juridique. For him, most of the incidents criticized
could be dealt with through the common law. Internment ‘is a measure
that a regime concerned to maintain a certain tradition of Republican
74 A/CE 9938/2, dossier 57, opinion of 19 Oct. 1943.

75 A/CE 9938/2, dossier 248, opinion of 18 April 1944. These internments rested on a
law of 25 February, referring to a decree of the governor general dated 17 Nov. 1943.
1 Henri (Azaria) Cassin at age
ninety-five
2 Cassin’s mother Gabrielle

and her twin sister Cécile
3 The Cassin children: c. 1892
From left to right: Fédia Cassin, René Cassin, Félice Cassin, two unidentified
cousins, and Yvonne Cassin.
4 Cassin and his sister Yvonne, Nice, c.1900
5 Cassin in
Nice, 1902
6 Cassin the student, 1902
7 Cassin the student in Aix-en-Provence, c. 1908

8 Félice Abram, with her
children, c. 1930
9 Rachel Cottage, Bayonne, c. 1930

10 Medical record of Cassin’s treatment, Antibes, 1914
11 Recuperating from his war
wounds, 1914
12 Recuperating, 1914
13 René Cassin and Simone
Yzombard, 1915
14 Cassin in the early 1920s

15 Simone in the
1930s
16 Drawing of Cassin speaking

at the UF Congress, 1923
17 At UF Congress, c. 1930
18 In the French Delegation to the League of Nations, 1925

19 Official report on Professor René Cassin, University of Lille, 1929
Translation: Though Mr Cassin would probably be elected quickly to another
post in a Faculty of Law, I would commit a grave injustice if I were to leave in
the shadows the merits and the devotion of such an eminent teacher, one of the
most highly praised professors of our Faculty, and one of the most esteemed
members of our institution. As much through his teaching as through his
disinterested social commitments, Professor Cassin has contributed widely to
the standing of our university. Consequently, I have the honour to propose that
Mr Cassin be promoted on his merits. Signed the Dean
The name of Mr Cassin does not need any further comment. Signed The
Rector 25 Feb. 1929
20 CIAMAC delegates in Geneva, 1930
21 In medical clinic for surgery, 1936

22 ‘This is not a last will and testament’, envelope addressed at the time of
Cassin’s operation, 1936
23 Cassin on holiday, 1939
24 In Free French
headquarters,
Carlton Gardens,
London, 1940
25 At St James’s Palace,
24 September 1941
26 The French National Committee, London, October 1941

27 Cassin in Aleppo, 1941
28 Reviewing the troops at Brazzaville, 1942

29 Ceremonial sword as member of the French Institute, 1948, with inscription
From the top: flame
Insignia of Union Fédérale
Cross of Lorraine
(on the cross-guard) Hercules slaying the dragon of hatred
Hands clasped, signifying amity among the peoples
The grip:
A winged woman, signifying Peace and love (dedicated to Ghislaine)
30 René Cassin and Eleanor Roosevelt, 1948
31 Cassin, presiding at the European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg, 1966

32 In the Galleries of the Palais Royal, Paris, 1968
33 Brandishing the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, 1968
34 At the UN, 1968

35 Cassin and the president of the Swedish Nobel committee, Oslo, 1968
36 With Pope Paul VI, c. 1968

37 In Jerusalem with the
family of André
Chouraqui
38 Dancing in
Mauritius after a jurists’
congress, c. 1968
39 Ghislaine Bru in 1935
40 Ghislaine Connochie in
1943
41 Ghislaine Connochie in
1944
42 Madame Ghislaine
René Cassin, 1987
legality must not use . . . In a sane juridical framework, we do not replace

the punishment of prison or detention decided by courts with adminis-
trative internment.’76
The Comité Juridique succeeded in creating an organization which
respected the principles of law. The regional and local commissions had
no right to pronounce by themselves such major sanctions. They only
had the right to ask the representatives of the government to bring before
the courts those collaborators who merited administrative internment or
professional exclusion. The law of 16 October 1944 pointed out that the
Conseil d’Etat could hear an appeal against the imposition of such sanc-
tions imposed by committees purging collaborators within private enter-
prises. Purging those guilty of supporting Vichy could not undermine
the fundamental principles of law under which the Comité Juridique had
undertaken its mission.
It is difficult to say whether this vigilance on the part of the Comité
Juridique and Cassin arose from the vast jurisprudence concerning the
British practice of habeas corpus. In London, as we have seen,77 the sub-
committee on state reform had proposed to establish a French habeas
corpus principle. A note on this subject stressed that in France citizens
were not protected against arbitrary administration. Article 10 of the
code of criminal procedure – the law of 25 March 1935 – permitted
prefects, in cases of emergency, to arrest those deemed to be responsible
for crimes or misdemeanours against the internal or external security of
the state, with the only proviso being that the chief prosecutor be apprised
of the situation. ‘The arbitrary facet of the government tends always to
return . . . Any minister, any person who has a modicum of power, has an
incorrigible tendency to absolutism.’ Under the writ of habeas corpus,
on the contrary, every person detained had the right to demand to be
brought before a judge, and anyone, minister, deputy or civil servant, who
refused risked immediate imprisonment; those responsible for detention
must give reasons for it. The court must pronounce within three days.
The protection of liberties is thereby assured by the judge.78 Since the
habeas corpus project never reached fruition, the Comité Juridique and
Cassin at least tried to contain administrative internment within strict
rules.
76 A/CE 9938/19, dossier 637. The text of the Minister of Industrial Production transmit-
ted by the secretary general of the government on 8 October 1944, with a note from the
office of the Ministry of Justice dated 6 October. The opinion of the Comité was dated
10 October, and the law announced on 16 October 1944.
77 See above, p. 164.
78 A/CE 9938/12, dossier 203, note of 12 Nov. 1942, signed by L. Gommes.
The course of justice and the crime of national indignity

These rules were extremely difficult to enforce in the time of Liberation.
The real risk of popular justice was that it would be too rapid to be fair
and too improvised to be comprehensive. Hence the GPRF decided, by
the law of 26 June 1944, to create as and when necessary special courts
of justice charged with punishing acts of collaboration. Cassin and the
Comité Juridique had not opposed the creation of these courts, but they
drew to the government’s attention ‘the grave importance of a decision
creating exceptional courts applying exceptional procedures’.79 However,
this law defined collaboration according to the laws in effect on 16 June
1940, such as acts aiming to aid and abet the enemy. Hence, the law of
26 June 1944 was not retroactive. But its definition of collaboration was
too limited. Being a member of the Milice, of the Legion of Veterans or
of collaborationist parties, having served as an executive officer within
ministries and departments, in the propaganda service or in the General
Office on Jewish Questions, or having published articles or pamphlets in
favour of collaboration or racism, was not punished under the penal code
or the code of military justice of 1940.
To judge these acts, it was necessary to introduce into the penal code
a new crime, that of national indignity, and to create special courts to
judge it. This was the purpose of the law of 26 August 1944.
Defining this new crime posed problems of conscience for jurists. The
first problem was that this law was retroactive. Was it possible to punish
someone for acts committed when these were not defined as criminal
under the law? Cassin’s stand in this debate is difficult to elucidate. When
the law was discussed by the ACP on 10 July 1944, he spoke as president
of the Legislative Commission, and he defended this exception to the
principle of non-retroactivity, even though the commission he chaired
had rejected it.80 He developed two arguments. First, collaborators had
been put on their guard, and Free France had frequently told the French
people that such acts would be punished. Those guilty of collaboration
had been alerted as soon as the situation permitted. Secondly, Cassin
stressed the fact that here was only a minor exception to the principle
of non-retroactivity. Because national indignity was not a crime inserted
in the penal code, it remained an exceptional measure, and moreover,
did not amount to imprisonment, or internment, or such deprivations of
liberty.
79 A/CE 9938/14, dossier 389, opinion of 12 June.

80 AN, C 15269, dossier 94001/682, meeting of 22 June. The discussion began on 16 and
19 June and continued on 28 and 29 June.
Eight days later, the Comité Juridique discussed the text adopted by
the ACP. Despite Cassin’s arguments, the text was rejected. This shows
it did not always follow its president’s line. The Comité Juridique asked
the government to pay attention
To the grave consequences of such a measure which violates the principle of
the non-retroactivity of penal law, a principle which without being stated in the
Constitution, is expressed in article 4 of the penal code, and is considered as one
of the intangible and sacred principles of French penal law.81
We do not know precisely what position Cassin took in the discussions of

this matter. The Comité Juridique’s position was delicate, in that there
was a general consensus on the need to punish collaborators, which would
occur whatever the penal code said. The Comité therefore proposed to
the government a text which did not refer to the terms ‘punishment’
and ‘crime’ in order to avoid any reference to the penal code, but it
established national indignity without saying what merited calling it a
crime or another act. Such an unspecified legal term was impossible
to put into law. The government, however, did not follow this line of
argument. It said that national indignity was a crime for which there
would be only non-custodial punishment in the form of limitations of
rights and public shame.82 Proceedings would be held by special courts
of justice, soon termed ‘civic chambers’. This regime was later amended
several times, notably by a law of 26 December 1944, but the Comité
Juridique demanded only secondary modifications of measures which
were in the original law, such as conditions of appeal to the Higher Court
(Cours de Cassation).83
On 6 April 1945, the government named Cassin, in his new role as
vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat, to chair a Jury of Honour charged
with reviewing the credentials and record of individuals who had been
stripped of the right to stand for public office. Either they had been
sentenced to the penalties attached to national indignity, or they had
voted in favour of granting full powers to Pétain on 10 July 1940, or they
had been members of certain specified organizations under Vichy. And
now, they wanted the reinstatement of their rights.
Some prefects had decided that some of these individuals could be
permitted to stand in the municipal elections soon to be held. This was
shocking and created evident disparities between departments. It was
81 A/CE 9938/15, dossier 489, opinion of 18 July. 82 Law of 30 Sept. 1944.

83 The law of 26 December was reviewed by the Comité, which issued its opinion on
14 January (A/CE 9938/28, dossier 832). The Comité set the precedent that adhesion
to certain groups before the groups collaborated was not a crime, and it fixed the date
of 1 January 1941 as the point of departure for such matters.
necessary to put some order into this chaotic situation. Cassin began
to do so by setting the procedure for such appeals. For each appeal,
a competent individual was appointed to meet, if possible, with the
appellant party and to report on the case to the Jury of Honour.84 The
reasons for the decisions had to be stated, and the decisions themselves
published in the Journal Officiel.
Since the jury was composed only of three people, Cassin included, this
task was a heavy one. Cassin could hardly avoid sitting whenever the jury
met. It met between April 1945 and October 1946. Its last meeting was
held on 25 October 1946. The jury met forty-nine times and examined
672 cases. Of these, 115 of 438 Members of Parliament and 77 out of
217 departmental councillors had their rights restored.85 Members of
the jury took the matter very seriously indeed.
Tony Bouffandeau, a distinguished member of the Conseil d’Etat,

affirmed that collectively from 1940 to 1944 this Council had served
the Vichy regime, but had remained nonetheless vigilant guardian of
‘Republican principles’. It had helped ensure that ‘the general princi-
ples of law’ prevailed.86 While many members of the Conseil d’Etat, and
many commentators, have long accepted this view, it does not stand up
to scrutiny. Jean Massot, another distinguished member of the Conseil
d’Etat, has shown that it did indeed get its hands dirty during Vichy.87
The argument of Bouffandeau, nevertheless, expressed part of the
truth. The Conseil d’Etat abrogated some Vichy decisions, even when
they conformed to the letter of the law, when those decisions contravened
previous practices and/or violated the general principles of law. Here we
see the beginning of a movement in the Conseil from considering the
letter of the law to considering the spirit of the law. This is a fundamental
matter of the definition of law itself. Is it the language of statute alone, or
is it more than that, in the sense of placing law above statute, or in French
84 AN, AL/5284, note of Cassin, 12 May 1945. The case of Members of Parliament –
but they were not the only ones concerned here – is discussed in Olivier Wieviorka, Les
orphelins de la République. Destinées des députés et des sénateurs français, 1940–1945 (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 2001).
85 Final report of the Jury of Honour, AN, AL/5284.
86 Tony Bouffandeau, ‘La continuité et la sauvegarde des principes du droit public français
entre le 16 juin 1940 et l’entrée en vigueur de la nouvelle Constitution’, Etudes et
Documents du Conseil d’Etat, vol. 1, 1947, pp. 23–48.
87 Jean Massot, ‘Le Conseil d’Etat’, in Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida, Vichy
et les Français (Paris: Fayard, 1992), pp. 312–28; ‘Le Conseil d’Etat et le régime de
Vichy’, in Deuxième centenaire du Conseil d’Etat, Journées d’études, 14 Nov. 1997, ‘Le
Conseil d’Etat et les crises’, La Revue Administrative (Paris: PUF, 2001), pp. 28–45;
Jean Marcou, ‘Le Conseil d’Etat sous Vichy, 1940–1944’, Thèse de Droit, Université
de Grenoble II, 1984.
placing droit above loi? Here is the moment when we see the emergence
of the realm of rights from the realm of law.
There is in this moment a new opening. Faced with the silence of
texts, and especially when the application of these texts is abusive, one
can appeal to the general principles of law; they constituted a higher
normative framework, even when they were not stated in a foundational
document, such as a Constitution.
From this point of view, we need to stress the similarities between the
Conseil d’Etat and the Comité Juridique at this time, as Cassin himself
had done in his introduction to a collection of essays including Bouffan-
deau’s. Much more than the Conseil d’Etat, the Comité Juridique had
referred to this notion of ‘general principles of law’. We have seen this
in the debate about the retroactive character of national indignity, which
violated ‘one of the intangible and sacred principles of French penal
law’.88 Undoubtedly, the circumstances of the day were exceptional, and
decisions had to be taken under pressure. In addition, the Comité was
forced to be audacious and to innovate, because the theory and the prac-
tice of law offered no solution to the problems of the day. It was not
mere opportunism that the Comité found it necessary to refer to general
principles of law. On the contrary; as we have seen in the case of national
indignity, these principles were always honoured. Only under exceptional
circumstances would it become possible not to apply them.
The Second World War was the historical moment when the upheaval
brought into clear light a fundamental distinction. Above statute law was
something more important: the general principles of law, the violation of
which must always be respected. This affirmation of a normative struc-
ture above statute, arising in Algiers, and then in Paris, was the bedrock
on which human rights rested and still rest today.89
88 The Comité used this expression in other cases. A law which did not permit citizens
denied their right to be named on lists of voters to pursue redress in the courts had to
specify ‘that the loss of such rights constitutes a derogation from the general principles
of law in this instance, motivated by exceptional circumstances’ (A/CE 9938/14, dossier
380, 26 May 1944). The Comité rejected the dissolution by law of an association of those
who had acquired Aryanized property not only because it is not possible to legislate such
monetary matters, but also because the statutes of this association were regulated by the
law of 1901 and that therefore they were qualified as legal under the general principles
of law. The dissolution of an association by a law is contrary to these principles and
to Republican tradition. It was the job of a judge to require such a dissolution. (A/CE
9938/29, dossier 852–3, 21 Dec. 1944.)
89 On the international level, this too was the legal basis of the Nuremberg trials. See
chapter 9, below.
8 Freeze frame: René Cassin in 1944
The man who returned to Paris at the beginning of September 1944 was
not the same as the man who had left France in June 1940. The professor
of law had become a national and an international leader. The jurist
who, through his work for veterans, had been close to the political arena
without having entered it through electoral mandate had been launched
into the high politics not only of France but of the Allied world. He
benefited from the cachet of being one of the first of de Gaulle’s close
advisors. He had been responsible for the successful re-establishment of
Republican legality. In the following years he would occupy numerous
official positions. He would not, though, have a political career which
his role in Free France might have prepared him for in 1944 or after,
even after de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958. He would never become
a major political figure, but rather would serve as one of the highest civil
servants in France. How can we account for his personal trajectory?
The man in the portrait

If we had met René Cassin in 1944, we would have found a man in
conservative clothes, befitting a professor of law. Not very tall – 5 feet
6 inches – his manner was open and lively. Like many of the men of his
generation, he wore a beard, which he groomed carefully: while most
shaved it off as they grew older, he kept it all his life, which gave him
a certain distinguished air. Seeing this bearded man, the young volun-
teer Daniel Cordier immediately identified him in the entourage of de
Gaulle.1 After the war Marceau Long referred to Cassin as having ‘that
“beautiful white beard”’. Others spoke about his voice: ‘a low voice, at
one and the same time, soft and authoritative’, as Pierre Racine said.2
1 Daniel Cordier, Alias Caracalla (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), p. 287.

2 Comité d’Histoire de l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration, René Cassin et l’Ecole Nationale
d’Administration (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2004), p. 53. Marceau Long had
been general secretary of the French government, before being named vice-president of
200
Freeze frame: René Cassin in 1944 201
Another man who worked with Cassin recalled his low voice ‘with its
charming Mediterranean accent, and without rhetorical gestures’.3 No
one described Cassin as an invalid: there was no trace in his comportment
of the consequences of his war wounds, although he wore throughout his
life a surgical belt.
Those who knew him were struck by his courtesy, his welcoming smile
and his often mischievous expression. The young recruits to the Conseil
d’Etat were somewhat surprised by his interest and his curiosity about
them. He acknowledged them when he passed in the corridors, and he
paid attention to what they said. Nicole Questiaux, another member of
the Conseil d’Etat, who became Minister of Social Affairs under Mitter-
rand, was struck by his capacity to listen to people. When he entered the
Conseil d’Etat in 1952, Marceau Long was received by Cassin: ‘The pro-
fessor considered us to be a bit like his students. He wanted to eliminate
the distance between us. We knew besides that he liked “young people”,
and that the young liked him. To each and every one, he gave respon-
sibility and assignments which rested on their gifts and which prepared
the way for the future evolution of the Conseil d’Etat, for which these
people would be the agents.’4 In 1953, Cassin made a personal effort to
find a way to provide Long with a telephone, which at that time was not
easy to acquire. He did it simply, and in a friendly and considerate man-
ner. Alain Plantey, who knew Cassin as a member of the administrative
council of ENA and in the Conseil d’Etat, confirmed this view. ‘What
was striking about René Cassin, was his youthful spirit. He was often the
youngest of the band and young people could simply not disagree with
him.’5 Perhaps he treated some of these young people like the children he
never had. In later years, Philippe Parant remembered an incident from
his youth. He was alone at age twelve on the Champs-Elysées in Paris
on 14 July 1945 to receive the medal of a ‘Companion of the Liberation’
in place of his father, who had died in 1941 in Africa. Cassin took care
of him and explained to him what was happening in the ceremony. This
was a simple act of kindness.6
This kindness arose out of his sense of courtesy, of tact, and of atten-
tion to his collaborators and his subordinates. He always tried to avoid
giving a sense of superiority. At age seventy-five, he was flying back from
the Conseil d’Etat in 1987. Pierre Racine was the first director of in-place training for
the students of ENA. He also served in the Conseil d’Etat.
3 Alain Plantey, in René Cassin et l’Ecole nationale d’administration, p. 44.
4 Marceau Long, in René Cassin et l’Ecole nationale d’administration, p. 12.
5 René Cassin et l’Ecole nationale d’administration, p. 42.
6 The medal was awarded for Parant’s work in rallying Equatorial Africa to Free France.
He died in a plane crash.
Mauritius where he had been a delegate to a legal congress. The pilot

suggested he take a first-class seat, to make him more comfortable during
this fourteen-hour flight. He refused: ‘Thank you, but no, I want to stay
here with the others.’7
Fundamentally, this courtesy stemmed from a profound generosity.
‘I knew I was in the presence of a man with a great heart’, said Pierre
Racine, and Alain Plantey confirmed this too. ‘He was a good man. He
never thought badly of other people; there was no meanness in him. Of
course, one could say he was authoritarian. In the General Assembly
of the Conseil d’Etat, he took the decisions, but never for unsavoury
reasons.’8
Despite his self-assurance and the authority which he had through
his offices, Cassin had self-doubts over many years. At the major turning
points of his life, he wrote at length interrogating his motives and express-
ing his fears. As we have seen, in 1928, he meditated about the prospects
of a political career, and in 1936 he paused for reflection before having
surgery. In December 1940, he took stock of the events of that decisive
year. These forms of self-examination are linked to his scrupulous sense
of morality. Cassin was particularly intent on maintaining clearly the dis-
tinction between what one does and what one does not do. Here is an
anecdote, which is useful precisely because it was confirmed by the man
who benefited from it. Jean Rivero, one of Cassin’s colleagues, wrote:
During the competitive examination for the Agrégation in law in 1919, one of
those competing with Cassin, someone from Poitiers unknown to him, was asked
to discuss an issue which had been taught before the war by a member of the
jury, Professor Bartin. Cassin gave this candidate the notes he had taken while
attending this course. He acted out of a sense of fairness in the competition.
Dean René Savatier, 40 years later, remembered with praise this gesture, which
René Cassin, when I told him about it, had entirely forgotten.9
We also see these scruples in his dealing with money. Cassin kept some of
his accounts in his notebooks. He always carefully separated his personal
expenses from those which arose from public service, and he could not
even imagine being reimbursed for his own personal expenses. In 1940,
when he left Paris, and left his papers in the basement of his flat, he nev-
ertheless took time to pay his taxes in advance. He wrote in his notebook:
‘the tax inspector was quite amazed’.10
7 An anecdote reported by Alain Plantey, who was in the plane, René Cassin et l’Ecole
nationale d’administration, p. 43.
8 René Cassin et l’Ecole nationale d’administration, pp. 51 and 43.
9 Jean Rivero, ‘René Cassin, professeur de droit’, pp. 1445–8.
10 382AP27, Diary, 10 June 1940.
Material wealth had little importance to him, but he was careful in

ensuring that his income matched his expenses. His professorial salary
was insufficient to cover the costs of a public life in which he had often to
pay out of his own pocket. He acted as a legal consultant, as did many of
his colleagues in the Faculty of Law in Paris.11 He earned some money as
well from the reproduced lectures. Still, his personal wealth was not sub-
stantial in 1940. When he left France, he withdrew 10,000 francs from his
bank account, which was the equivalent of two months’ salary.12 All his
assets were confiscated by Vichy: a small house in Antibes, which he had
purchased in 1935 for 56,000 francs, and a stock portfolio worth between
150,000 and 200,000 francs.13 In 1945, he invested 200,000 francs in
the company which edited Ici-Paris. This was a profitable investment.14
At the end of his life, Cassin owned his apartment on Quai de Béthune,
on the Ile St Louis. It was valued at 500,000 francs in 1970, which was
the equivalent of 500,000 euros in 2008.15 In addition, he held a valuable
portfolio of bonds, including the blue-chip Pinay bonds. His position as
a public servant ensured that he would live a life of ease, but he was not
a man with a considerable fortune, as his father had been.
Well aware of his importance, Cassin appreciated recognition. He was
disappointed in being classed only in the third place in the Agrégation
examinations in law in 1919. He was also very particular in insisting on
being treated in the manner his office required. For instance, during an
inspection of African territories in 1942, he objected when a military
official refused to welcome him as a Minister. In his person he embodied
the authority of the state. But for many French officers, Cassin repre-
sented the detested Popular Front, and with a touch of malice, they saw
11 He probably served as a trustee of the estate of a barrister’s chambers. The barrister,

who had died in 1924/5, remains unknown. Letter of 29 March 1954 to Mme Marcel
Lévy, with a list of 172 files of her father, concerning the period 1924–39. AIU, AM
Présidence 007a.
12 382AP27, Diary, 20 June 1940.
13 382AP158, documents on the restitution of confiscated assets of Cassin. As it is impos-
sible to eliminate double counting in these sources, we cannot be more precise.
14 382AP160, list of stockholders, annexed to a letter of P. Blanchonnet to Cassin, 16 May
1947. He owned twenty of 300 stock certificates of Ici-Paris (valued at 10,000 francs
each). His brother Fédia had ten certificates, and his cousin Max ten as well. For the
year 1947, he received 7,000 francs in dividends (letter of Blanchonnet to Cassin, 29
June 1948). As the circulation of this paper increased, so did its dividends, until it closed
in 1974.
15 In his last will and testament of 1970 (382AP184), he left to the International Institute
for Human Rights in Strasbourg half the proceeds of the sale of his apartment, which
he intended to sell, with the right to remain in it for the rest of his life. Should the
apartment not be sold, the Institute would receive the sum of 250,000 francs. This
estimate does not take into account the huge increase in the value of property between
1970 and 2008.
in him someone who worshipped honours. This is the opinion of Henri

Laurentie, general secretary of French Equatorial Africa: ‘He has all the
insignificance and all the vanity of senile professors. His heart jumps for
joy when in his presence soldiers present arms.’16
While exaggerated, there is a small kernel of truth in this claim. The
accumulation of distinctions, his election to the Academy of Moral and
Political Sciences in 1947, his receiving the Grand-Croix of the Légion
d’Honneur in 1959, and finally, his winning the Nobel Peace Prize in
1968, not to mention the innumerable honorary positions or distinctions
both at home and abroad he received, undoubtedly flattered his van-
ity. He not only accepted honours; he sought them out. Hardly one to
underestimate his achievements, he found it normal, if not self-evident,
to make the case that he merited the highest honour in France – the
ultimate transfer of his coffin to the Panthéon, alongside Félix Eboué
and Jean Moulin, the heroes of Free France and the Resistance.17
Cassin’s vanity arose from his high ambition to leave behind some-
thing great, something without the slightest trace of the petty-minded
or mediocre. On several occasions, he was tempted by political life, but
without success, and when the occasion arose in 1941, he was unable to
stamp his authority on the moment. Perhaps the key to this failure lay in
his own personality. He was a man of compromise and not of confronta-
tion; he enjoyed honours but had neither the taste nor the will to power.
He remained the champion of those causes which were more important
than his own person. Such a kind of nobility was at the core of his moral
authority.
This helps explain why the company of the great men of the world did
not cut him off from the humble and the modest. He was always at their
disposal, ready to defend them. In his correspondence, there are numer-
ous letters from people unknown to him who ask for his help. Through
his faithful secretary, Mlle Lesimple, or directly, he always replied to
them. Among these people were many veterans of Free France, who
16 Letters from Henri Laurentie to Félix Eboué, 22 February and 3 March 1942, kindly
given to us by Philippe Oulmont, of the Archives de la Fondation Charles de Gaulle,
Fonds Eboué, F22/20.
17 Eboué was the first black governor general of a French colony, Chad, which he rallied to
Free France. Jean Moulin was the leader of the Resistance in France, sent by de Gaulle
to head and unify the Resistance. In 1943, he was captured, tortured and died en route to
Germany. 382AP183, manuscript text of 17 August 1969, confirmed 26 August 1970,
codicil to his handwritten will and testament of the same day. To the question put to him
by Jacques Robert, asking if, after the Nobel Prize, there was anything else he wished
for, he replied: ‘If, after my death, my remains could be transferred to the Panthéon, it
would please me very much.’ De la France libre aux droits de l’homme. L’héritage de René
Cassin (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2010), p. 97.
had thrown in their hand to help the cause, but who later had difficulty
finding their place in post-war society, because they were neither civil
servants nor ex-soldiers. Among those who wrote to him, there were also
residents of Nice or Antibes, who knew him or his family. He intervened
on their behalf when their demand was neither abusive nor bound to
fail. In his behaviour, there was not the slightest trace of arrogance or
contempt for ordinary people. Ghislaine Bru, his second wife, told this
story. They were in the Chartreuse mountains one Christmas, and were
invited to join a long winter evening with a farming family of the village.
Cassin and Ghislaine joined them with pleasure, drinking warm wine,
eating crepes and discussing livestock.18 On other visits to this mountain
region, Cassin would stop in at a town hall, and in conversation with the
clerk, also a veteran of the Great War, Cassin would ask if there were
any administrative or bureaucratic matters on which he might help. Yes,
there was a minor matter to attend to. Cassin said he would do what he
could, and, to the great surprise of the clerk, a phone call announced in
short order that the problem had been resolved. In these same mountain
villages, when he saw a local war memorial, he stopped, and proceeded
to read the names of every one of his comrades of the Great War aloud.
This was his fraternity of equals, ordinary men who had answered the
call and who had given their lives for their country. He never forgot them.
The teacher
In 1945, Cassin stopped his active teaching, but he remained a teacher
in his flesh and bones. Before 1940, he never cancelled his lectures on
account of his commitments. He attracted graduate students, as the warm
tribute of the dean and the rector of the University of Lille attest.19 Dean
Julliot de la Morandière spoke of ‘the professor loved by his students,
attracted by the clarity of his mind, the charm of the music of his voice
and of the passionate interest [he showed] to those who listened to him’.20
He had the need to explain to you and to make you share his point
of view. Jean-Marcel Jeanneney, who heard his lectures as a student,
retained the image of a brilliant teacher, whose voice was not very strong –
microphones were not then in existence – and who did not wave his
arms for effect.21 He was a master of public speaking: from speeches
18 ‘René Cassin, l’homme au quotidien’, in the UF brochure René Cassin 1887–1976,

compagnon de la Libération, Prix Nobel de la Paix, p. 21.
19 Dossier personnel du rectorat, Archives départementales du Nord, 2T194.
20 Ceremony presented René Cassin with a medal with his effigy, Hôtel de l’Amérique
Latine, 10 June 1966, personal dossier of Cassin, CAC, 20040382/65.
21 Interview with Antoine Prost, 17 May 2009.
at congresses to after-dinner toasts, to presentations on commissions,

he served his apprenticeship within the veterans’ movement which was
more varied and more demanding than speaking in the amphitheatres of
law faculties. He spoke with the eloquence of his time, replete with noble
words and high diction. On his lips, the words, France, war, peace, law
lingered for at least two syllables. The recording of his acceptance speech
for the Nobel Peace Prize shows him, at age eighty-one, a master orator,
who breathes life into his text by his intonation and his delicate gestures,
and brings to his audience his convictions, his passion, and the force of
his emotions.22
His teaching skills were reinforced by a limpid style, which avoided
technical terms and unnecessarily long sentences. He wrote easily many
articles for learned journals and for a variety of newspapers.23 Through-
out his life, he published regularly in journals with a wide circulation,
such as the Cahiers de l’UF and the Journal des Mutilés before 1940.
He welcomed addressing the public at large, as he did in 120 speeches
broadcast by the BBC during the war.24 This accounts for his surprising
collaboration in the journal Ici-Paris, where his articles were side by side
with horoscopes, love stories, and columns about marriages, scandals
and stars. There he commented on political and international events, on
the economy, on teaching, on the UN, on rights and liberties. There he
recalled history, Verdun, the Marne or London. In this weekly periodi-
cal, from 1945 to 1974, he published 300 articles, on average one every
month.25 At least in this arena, Ici-Paris, he found a huge audience; this
journal sold more than one million copies weekly in 1970.26
So many activities and so diverse: how did he manage them all? His
intellectual power, his writing skill, his talent, were backed by hard work.
22 We wish to thank Ann Cecilie Kjelling, Chief Librarian of the Library of the Nobel
Institute in Oslo, for providing us with a copy of the video recording of the ceremony.
23 This is the reason why it is impossible to establish a complete bibliography of Cassin’s
articles.
24 382AP105, letter to Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, 18 Dec. 1951. Texts of these
speeches may be found in 382AP50. Some appear in J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac, Ici Londres.
Les voix de la liberté, 1940–1944 (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1975).
25 René Cassin, ‘Ici-Paris a 20 ans’, 1041, 9–15 June 1965. This was his 199th article.
In the following ten years, he continued to publish articles at the same pace. He was
probably well paid for them, but he had written for so long without payment for the
veterans’ press that it is likely that these articles mattered to him more for their audience
than for what profit he could make from them.
26 Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral and Fernand Terron, in Histoire
générale de la presse française, vol. 5, De 1958 à nos jours (Paris: PUF, 1976), p. 384,
list the following numbers for sales: in 1947, 1970 and 1974 respectively, 743,000,
1,184,000 and 699,000.
He said he had no need for more than five hours of sleep a night.27 We do
not know precisely how he organized his work, but he was relentless. His
doctoral thesis and his professional files show it. Either with respect to
very important texts, like his London broadcasts, or in his reports or in
ordinary correspondence, in his handwritten drafts, the typed documents
marked heavily by additions and changes reveal an obstinate worker.28
He weighed his words with great precision. And he wrote copiously. For
a lecture at the Institute of Political Studies in Aix in 1970, he wrote three
letters to the director of the institute in order to address the sensibilities
of his audience and to avoid any misunderstanding.29
Remaining a professor, Cassin continued to emphasize the importance
of teaching and research. He spent considerable time and energy on
supervising the teaching of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and of the
training of students of ENA. Schools were the forging houses of the
future for him. It is not surprising that he gave a substantial part of his
Nobel Prize gift to found in Strasbourg, near the European Court, the
International Institute for Human Rights. He worked to ensure that many
institutions offered teaching on human rights in faculties or in institutes
of political science. Cassin was less a man defined by his profession or
his public office, outstanding as he was, and more a man with a cause:
veterans’ rights and pacifism between the wars, Free France in 1940, and
then human rights. In effect, these causes were one.
In order to define more systematically his convictions and his mode of
thinking, we have analysed statistically a limited body of his writings, cho-
sen as a sample taken at various points of his life.30 The first feature which
stands out is his patriotism: France is by far the most frequently used
proper noun and français the most frequently used adjective.31 France
does not designate only a state or a country: the term is very often linked
with liberté(s), égalité, droit(s), justice. It is France, pays des droits de l’homme
et du citoyen, le pays de la liberté et de l’égalité, a country which does not
have the right to fail because it leads the world towards emancipation,
even through colonization. France is inseparable from la République, and
their merging is characteristic of his generation: here is the Republican
patriotism of the soldiers of the Great War. As he wrote in his testament,
27 Jacques Robert, ‘René Cassin au Conseil Constitutionnel’, in CNCDH, De la France

libre aux droits de l’homme, p. 97.
28 382AP50.
29 Documents kindly communicated to us by Jean-Charles Jauffret, whom we thank here.
30 We want to thank profusely Dominique Labbé and his team for having formatted this
body of twenty-one texts, comprising 24,616 words, and for his technical assistance.
31 France = 112 occurrences (4.55/1000), Français (noun) = 27 (2nd position on the list),
SDN + Société des Nations = 22 (3rd position), français (adj.) = 63 (1st position on the
list of adjectives).
if he had fought all his life for France, ‘it was for the France of human
rights and not for an ordinary country’.32 He thought of himself as ‘one
of those who never despaired either of France or of the Republic’.33 Here
lies the singular importance of his position in Free France. The cluster of
words surrounding ‘law’ most frequently used by Cassin is the following:
‘The France of the rights of man and the citizen calls the brave men of
all the peoples of the Empire participating in Western civilization to join
the fight of free men against Hitler’s barbarism.’34
This analysis of Cassin’s vocabulary confirms a second characteristic:
he was a man of the possible. The verbs he used most frequently, as
everyone else did, were avoir and être, but in third place, we find not faire,
as we might expect, but the verb pouvoir. He was not a theorist, but a man
of the possible. In his view, ‘rights’ refer to those held by individuals or
groups concretely rather than ‘right’ as an abstract principle. When using
the words ‘right’ or ‘rights’, the plural predominates: there are thirty-
nine occurrences of ‘rights’ (of which twenty-one are ‘human rights’)
as opposed to thirty-six for ‘right’. This realism discloses his particular
attention to the implementation of rights, which is even more important
than their definition and their affirmation.
His approach to rights starts with attention to standing or legal status,
as we see in his insistence that wounded soldiers have rights because
they can go before a tribunal to ensure that they are respected. The
most characteristic phrase of this sample, including thirty-one of the
words most closely associated with rights, is a bit technical and lengthy.
It deserves full citation though. It was broadcast by the BBC:
When we attempt to go beyond the current state of claims reserved exclusively

to nation states before the great political entities such as the General Assembly,
the Security Council of the United Nations or the International Court of Justice
in The Hague, to reach the stage, which France considers to be the next one,
when the claims of individuals or groups about violations of human rights will
be examined by a permanent international commission of inquiry and concili-
ation, it will be necessary not to pause there but rather to prepare as soon as
possible the diverse elements of the final stage, those guaranteeing international
jurisdiction.35
To this Republican patriot, rights exist not in books but in courts. In

the UN as well as in the Conseil d’Etat, Cassin remained a man whose
political baptism was the Dreyfus affair.
32 Testament of 26 Aug. 1974, not in the sample, 382AP194.

33 Speech to ACP, 27 Jan. 1944, in the sample.
34 30 Sept. 1941, in the sample. 35 30 Sept. 1941, in the sample.
Loyalties
In his recollections of Cassin, Alain Plantey defined him as a ‘man of
loyalties’.36 Here is part of his character which we find in many domains.
The private life of Cassin was characterized by its deep stability. He
married Simone Yzombard on 29 March 1917, after they had lived
together since January 1910. Their union lasted until her death in 1969,
that is, for more than fifty-nine years.37 She was, he said, ‘a fine wife’.38
One of her correspondents spoke of her as ‘lively, elegant and gay’.39 The
romantic love of youth yielded place to a reciprocal affection, despite a
sense that René had both of isolation from her, and of guilt that he had
not spent enough time with her. She had given up the chance of a career
in the theatre or the cinema,40 and had no other evident social occupa-
tions. In addition, the couple had no children.41 Their time in England
was full of hardships for Simone, who did not share the unbreakable
optimism of her husband. Her health was not very good; a number
of correspondents asked René about her health during the 1950s, and
she took summer cures during which her husband usually accompanied
her.
When they were apart, the letters they exchanged were frequent, long,
and full of affection. They used diminutives and signed their letters with
affectionate names. Here we are sure of a bond of mutual and deep
tenderness between them.42 Cassin made every effort to avoid being cut
off from his wife by his obligations. Before 1940, they often went to the
theatre together and attended balls and parties with their friends. Once
they dressed up as an Indian prince and princess. They toured Florence
together in 1950, and Istanbul in 1953, and René had happy memories
of these trips.43 Later, when her health had deteriorated, and she suffered
forms of senility, Simone sometimes accompanied him to UN meetings
in Geneva. Nicole Questiaux has a moving memory of Cassin in the
36 Plantey, in René Cassin et l’Ecole nationale d’administration, p. 42.

37 In his testament written on 31 July 1914, he wrote that she had lived with him for more
than four years: 382AP1. He referred to her by her stage name: ‘Simone Dylta (Pauline
Yzombard)’.
38 ‘Fragments autobiographiques’ recalled by Françoise Beer-Poitevin, in Cassin, La pensée
et l’action, p. 197.
39 382AP158, letter signed Loulette, Douala, 18 Nov. 1948.
40 382AP1. In a letter of 17 September 1914, René asks Simone if she is working on Racine
or Beaumarchais and hopes that she will find employment in a theatre or cinema.
41 Cassin notes soberly that his wife ‘had accidents [probably miscarriages] which deprived
us of the hope of having children from our marriage’. ‘Fragments autobiographiques’,
p. 200.
42 382AP158. 43 ‘Fragments autobiographiques’, pp. 208 and 227.
1960s, walking beside his sick wife, in a hotel corridor, trying to tell her
about the meetings he had had all day long.44
Even before the war, Simone had never been particularly interested in
sharing René’s engagements. In 1928 already, René reflected: ‘Simone
seems to have decided irrevocably not actually to share my responsibil-
ities and the obligations which follow concerning other people.’45 The
hard years of war, between London and Algiers, made things worse. She
suffered from isolation, and a kind of depression. She was happy about
his successes and sad about his failures. In September 1944, after hav-
ing gone to the cinema in Algiers and seeing on the screen the victory
parade on the Champs-Elysées, she wrote to René: ‘I wanted to cry out
in sorrow that you were not there.’46 Cassin appreciated the way she
spoke up for him, but he would have preferred that she would have been
more interested not only in him but in the work that he did. In 1944, she
begged him to give up his public work and return to teaching and legal
consultations.
I beg you, do not be deluded or misled. Learn to say no. You must not sacrifice
yourself again to work for others. It’s enough . . . I do not at all want you to be
a judge, however high you may be. Your liberty will be completely shackled,
whereas your profession permits you to write in a newspaper and to give legal
consultations. To make laws all your life ? No, no, and no. Besides, after a short
time, when the political winds change, you will be unloaded!!’47
Even taking circumstances into account – she was writing from Algiers
when he was in Paris – she clearly did not accept his commitments. This
must have saddened him.
Six years after Simone’s death, in the last months of his life, René
remarried. In 1975 he suffered a stroke, and was under care in Salpêtrière
hospital in Paris. It was there that he married Ghislaine Bru, whom he
had met in London in 1940. Ghislaine was a film actress before 1940.
She had played in half a dozen films, and had been chosen to play an
important role in Quai des brumes. She turned this role down to marry her
first husband, and Michèle Morgan took the role.48 From March 1943
Ghislaine served in the Ministry of Education headed by Cassin, working
in the French book service, and as a teacher and lecturer in English. She
also served as secretary to the Communist leader, Waldeck Rochet, in
44 Interview with Nicole Questiaux. 45 Handwritten text, 17 April 1928, 382AP8.

46 Letter signed ‘Petite’, from Simone to René 14 Sept. 1944, 382AP158.
47 Letters of ‘Petite’ to René, 12 and 13 Sept. 1944.
London in 1944.49 In 1946, she started work at UNESCO. She stayed

there for three years, then left for personal reasons and worked in various
capacities in the south of France and then in Savoie.50 Cassin later wrote
on her behalf several letters of recommendation.51
Ghislaine became important in his life during the Second World War,
and he remained close to her in the decades which followed.52 When
Cassin was elected to the Institute in 1948, he had to wear a ceremonial
sword. The handle of the sword he commissioned was in the form of a
naked winged female, symbolizing peace and love. On the back of the
photograph of this sword is an inscription, in her own handwriting at
a much later date: ‘dedicated to Ghislaine’.53 It is possible that Cassin
offered this dedication to Ghislaine at the time. He certainly visited her
in her chalet in the Grande Chartreuse and she visited him in Paris in
the 1950s and 1960s.54
When Cassin retired from the Conseil d’Etat, he lost the service of a
secretary. Ghislaine helped him organize his archives and typed some of
his papers.55 In 1971, she worked as his secretary two mornings and three
afternoons a week.56 She admired Cassin profoundly. He considered her
to be his assistant, and certainly she worked with him on many different
matters. In his will and testament of 1970, he left to Ghislaine Mareschal
Bru, ‘who, first in London, and then again in Paris, was deeply devoted
to me and to my personal work’, the sum of 150,000 francs along with
Pinay bonds which cover inheritance taxes.57 In 1974, she accompanied
him during his trip to inaugurate the Lycée René Cassin in Jerusalem.
After his death, and until hers in 2002, she devoted her time and efforts
49 Ghislaine Bru papers in the possession of Chantal Connochie-Bourgne, letter of Ghis-

laine Connochie to Waldeck Rochet, 21 Sept. 1944.
50 382AP105, letters between Ghislaine Bru and René Cassin, undated.
51 382AP184, letter of recommendation of R. Cassin, 27 Dec. 1947, annotated by G.
Bru; 382AP134, letter of recommendation from Cassin to the director of UNESCO,
15 Dec. 1962. For Ghislaine’s correspondence with Cassin between 1948 and 1953,
see 382AP104.
52 Born in 1913, Ghislaine Bru married a Scots cameraman, with whom she had a daugh-
ter, Chantal, in 1944. She divorced her first husband and married a farmer from Savoie,
M. Mareschal, after the war. They too had a daughter, Aryane. Ghislaine Bru’s papers
attest to the deep and enduring relationship between René and Ghislaine, from the
1940s until the day René Cassin died. We are grateful to Chantal Connochie-Bourgne
and Aryane Mareschal for giving us access to their mother’s correspondence and per-
sonal papers.
53 382AP211.
54 We met Chantal Connochie-Bourgne on 3 June 2011 and on 29–30 July 2011, and are
grateful to her for insights into Cassin’s life with her mother.
55 Letter of Cassin to the director of UNESCO, 15 Dec. 1962, 382AP134.
56 Archives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, AM Présidence, 014A, note of E. Weill,
4 May 1971.
57 382AP184, typescript of will and testament, dated 26 August 1970.
to his memory, participating in many meetings, and joining in the efforts

of the UF and the Association for Fidelity to the Work of René Cassin
to have his remains transferred and reinterred in the Panthéon. His love
letters to Ghislaine in the 1970s are moving and full of passion. She
clearly gave a new meaning to his life in his last years.58
If Cassin did not found a family, he remained deeply attached to his
own. It was a large one, where cousins were close. It was a family hit
very hard by the Shoah. It mattered a lot to him, perhaps even more
so since he did not have his own children. He had been torn by the
divorce of his parents. His mother died in 1944, and was secretly buried.
After the war he saw to it that she was finally interred in the family
tomb in the Jewish cemetery in Bayonne. His father lived on, dying in
May 1959. René was very close to his elder brother Fédia and to his
sister Félice. Both remained in France during the Second World War,
and both had to find hiding places for their children. Even in London,
he found ways through intermediaries to exchange letters and telegrams
with his family. In the second half of 1940, a list he made shows that he
sent three messages to his father, one to his mother, seven to Fédia, two
to his cousin Max, living in Madrid, and four to the Montags, cousins
on his mother’s side, and he received six letters from Fédia, two from
his mother, and one from the Montags.59 In 1941, he received and sent
telegrams from and to his family in France, for example on the birth-
day of his mother.60 After the war he remained in frequent contact with
his brother and Max on all aspects of family business. When possible,
he joined Fédia on holiday, and together they celebrated Jewish holi-
days, despite René’s agnosticism. He conducted an abundant correspon-
dence with his niece Félice. Her daughter, Hélène Berthoz, has published
extracts from these letters written between 1953 and 1974.61 René rarely
missed an opportunity to be of service to his relatives, however distant.
Among those who wrote to him for help while he was vice-president of
the Conseil d’Etat, many claimed to be friends of someone in his large
family.
His family ties grew even stronger after the tragedy of the war. At
the end of his life, Cassin wrote a kind of family history,62 and he was
58 Ghislaine Bru papers, in the possession of Chantal Connochie-Bourgne.

59 382AP27, one of the last pages of the Diary of 1940.
60 382AP27, Diary, 7 May and 14 June 1941.
61 René Cassin (1887–1976). Une pensée ouverte sur le monde moderne. Hommage au Prix
Nobel de la Paix 1968, Actes du colloque organisé par l’Association René-Cassin et le
Collège de France le 22 octobre 1998 au Collège de France (Paris: H. Champion,
2001).
62 382AP198, ‘Notes sur la famille Cassin’, 12 April 1972.
accompanied in receiving his Nobel Prize in December 1968 in Oslo by

his sister Félice and his niece Hélène Berthoz.
Outside his own family, Cassin developed very strong ties, almost
familial in character, with his collaborators in the Alliance Israélite
Universelle, over which he presided from 1943 to his death. André
Chouraqui, brilliant, a man of many talents, was for him like the son
he never had. Their mutual affection was very real. They wrote to each
other like a father and a son.63 Chouraqui welcomed him to his home
in Jerusalem. He attended the marriage of Cassin and Ghislaine Bru in
November 1975, and his account of Cassin’s last days is very moving.64
His diverse offices in public service brought Cassin together with many
different personalities, in France and abroad, a list too long to enumer-
ate. They are scattered throughout this book. There were many loyal
collaborators and some close friends. The closest among them probably
was Paul Ramadier, whom he knew from the days of the Ihering Society.
Ramadier had been wounded too, and was the witness to René’s mar-
riage in 1917. René nominated him as a lawyer for the Office des Mutilés;
Ramadier got the post.65 Their ties were never completely broken, even
between 1940 and 1944,66 and we find them again very close during the
crisis of 1958.67 In 1961, Cassin devoted one of his articles in Ici-Paris
to the book recently published by Ramadier on the Socialists and the
exercise of power. A few months later, he wrote an obituary notice for
his friend in Le Monde.68
Aside from these friendships of his youth, Cassin’s circle included two
deep networks of solidarity, besides the Jewish world we will discuss
below. The first network was that of Free France. For such a loyal man,
the years in London mattered greatly. He acted many times on behalf of
those with whom he had worked during the war, and helped Louis Gros
and Manfred Simon obtain their posts in the Foreign Office. He arranged
that Gros offer a course of lectures in ENA.69 His surprising collaboration
with Ici-Paris arose as well from his Resistance loyalties. The founder of
63 We are indebted to Annette Chouraqui for having given us access to the papers of André
Chouraqui in Jerusalem.
64 André Chouraqui, L’amour fort comme la mort. Une autobiographie (Paris: R. Laffont,
1990).
65 CA/ONM, CAC 20050206–7, registre 7, Council meeting of 10 June 1920, p. 3086.
66 Aline Fontvielle-Vojtovic, Paul Ramadier (1888–1961), élu local et homme d’état (Paris:
Publications de la Sorbonne, 1993), cites two letters from Ramadier to Cassin, dated
22 December 1940 and 10 May 1941, pp. 237 and 239.
67 382AP109, letters of Ramadier, 29 Nov. 1958, 7 Jan. 1959 and 7 May 1960.
68 Ici-Paris, 840, 2–8 Aug. 1961; Le Monde, 17 Oct. 1961: ‘Un humaniste’. Ramadier died
on 13 October.
69 PV/CA/ENA, 15 Feb. 1952, CAC, 19900256/2.
Ici-Paris, Henri de Montfort, served in the Resistance. His wife died in

Ravensbrück. A lawyer by training, a specialist on Poland and the Baltic
region, he was administrative director of the Institut de France, then later
general secretary of the Académie Française. He had launched in 1941
a clandestine newspaper, La France continue, and at the Liberation this
gave him the right to publish a newspaper initially under this title. He
received authorization, as well as an indispensable allocation of paper for
this purpose. Cassin intervened to help him in both circumstances, and
their relationship lasted until de Montfort’s death.70
In contrast, Cassin remained very severe with those who had under-
mined de Gaulle and with those who had been collaborators. He wrote
in 1949 to oppose (successfully) the nomination of the former director
of the Institut Français of London to one of the sixteen Rectorates of
France. During the Blitz, this man had abandoned his staff and fled.
He had not worked with the French National Committee, and he had
created diplomatic incidents and had engaged in unfair personal attacks.
‘His office became the rallying centre for those who had been pushed to
the margin and who wanted an understanding with Washington, in order
to create an alternative government to replace the National Committee
of de Gaulle.’71 Similarly, Cassin refused to act in favour of one of his
former colleagues who had served as Rector of Paris under the Vichy
regime: ‘Never will I write a letter of recommendation for Mr Gidel.’72
The principal legacy of his war years evidently was Cassin’s relation-
ship with de Gaulle. Free France had created between them a powerful
bond, composed of esteem, consideration, confidence, admiration, and
a kind of friendship on de Gaulle’s side. On Cassin’s side, there was
loyalty, admiration, respect, and a kind of complicity and a freedom of
exchange in thought and expression. Very few of those who had served
70 382AP164, Cassin, ‘Henri de Montfort n’est plus’, Ici-Paris, 1071, 5–11 Jan. 1966.
Cassin’s articles may be found in 382AP160. When de Montfort was looking for an
editorial secretary, Cassin introduced him to Gabriel Perreux, a veteran of the Great
War, an alumnus of the ENS, and a friend of Jacques Meyer and André Ducasse, with
whom he wrote a book about soldiers of the Great War. In 1959, de Montfort fired
Perreux, who disapproved of the editorial line of the newspaper. In a letter to Cassin,
dated 10 January 1960 (382AP160), Perreux made vague but serious accusations against
the editors, and warned Cassin: ‘I wish very deeply that you will not be caught up in
some more or less sordid affair. And you truly have God’s grace not to see what kind of
use they are trying to make of your name and your influence.’
71 382AP99, letter to the Ministry of Education, 3 Aug. 1949. Cassin had suffered from
the behaviour of this director both personally and in his work as Minister of Education,
and his grievances were fully justified. Since Napoleon, the rector is the central officer
of French education. Appointed by the Minister, he is in charge of the universities, high
schools and primary schools of an entire district.
72 Draft letter which he refused to sign, 30 March 1950, 382AP111.
Free France could have ended a letter to de Gaulle with this saluta-
tion: ‘With my anxious and confident devotion’.73 After the death of de
Gaulle’s handicapped daughter, Anne, Cassin sent him a letter of con-
dolence which de Gaulle appreciated.74 In 1967, in the wake of the Six
Day War, he publicly criticized de Gaulle’s policy, but de Gaulle did not
break off relations with him. Cassin went to Colombey for the funeral of
the man whom he had served loyally, for it was a way to serve France
herself, without the slightest trace of servility.
Even more than the Second World War, the First World War left a
lasting impression on Cassin. The deep relationship he had with his
comrades in the UF went further than their shared activism. Though his
relationship with Pichot had been brutally ruptured, he wrote his widow
a warm letter of condolences.75 He was very close to Léon Viala, who had
served at Cassin’s side in CIAMAC and who continued to work with him
at the end of the war.76 Others remained close comrades, like Jacques
Delahoche, also a former president of CIAMAC, who at the Liberation
became director of the National Veterans’ Office,77 or Jeanne Callarec,
a war widow, UF activist in Brest, who had been a key figure in the
ONP. She also was a leader of a local resistance movement.78 Despite
the disappointments he expressed in the 1930s, Cassin remained faithful
to the veterans’ movement. He worked to rid it of former collaborators
and to reconstruct it after the war. With Etienne Nouveau, a lawyer
and a member of the ACP, who before the war had been president of
the Amputés de France, Cassin helped create a new federal structure,
the Union Française des Anciens Combattants (UFAC) of which Viala
became the first president. He successfully prevented the unbalancing
of the Federation by giving too much power to many small associations,
as had been the case before the war.79 He intervened in favour of some
former comrades brought to court, but refused categorically to help those
whose collaboration had been proven.80
73 See below, p. 294, n. 101.

74 AIU, AM Présidence 001e, de Gaulle to Cassin, 8 March 1948.
75 382AP73, letter of 15 Jan. 1945.
76 382AP117, letters of Cassin to Viala of 9 Oct. 1944, from Viala to Cassin dated 6 Nov.
1944 and 14 Feb. 1945. In the first letter, Viala sent him good news about his father,
whom he had met for two hours in Toulouse.
77 382AP106, letter to Cassin from Delahoche, written in the personal manner (he uses
‘tu’ and not ‘vous’), 4 Dec. 1959, thanking him for having written after hearing that his
wife had had a stroke.
78 382AP106, very warm letter of Cassin to J. Callarec, 22 Dec. 1945, to tell her that she
would be nominated for the Order of the Liberation.
79 382AP116.
80 Thus he refused a request from Paul Patou, to intervene on his behalf after he had been
condemned to five years of ‘national unworthiness’ (indignité nationale), was forbidden
Named honorary president of UFAC, he was invited to post-war con-

gresses, but his stronger ties remained to the UF. He corresponded reg-
ularly with its older and newer leaders.81 He was always invited to the
UF Congresses, and he took part in them regularly after his retirement
from the Conseil d’Etat. When his commitments made it impossible
for him to attend, he sent his apologies and sometimes messages too.82
He was often solicited by departmental associations, and he generally
refused these invitations, but sometimes he accepted them; for instance,
he presided over the UF departmental congress in the Ardèche-Drome
on 27 May 1973 held in Privas. These loyalties did not fade in either
direction. On his ceremonial sword as a member of the Institute, he had
engraved the emblem of the UF. The then current president thanked
him profusely.83 The UF was very active in the effort to have his remains
placed in the Panthéon, and this organization kept alive his memory. This
is more than mere fidelity to the past: this is the solidarity of a gener-
ation. Cassin, at the end of his life, remained above all a soldier of the
Great War. ‘A survivor of the Great War’, was how he signed the very
last article he published, one recalling the blessing the Curé of Dom-
pcevrin had given him while he lay wounded on the field of battle in
1914.84
It is particularly striking how braided together are his work and his per-
sonality. The path he had taken had led him to the highest administrative
responsibility of the French Republic. In this manner he had found the
way to put his exceptional talents and his character at the disposal of
the people. To fashion a political career, he first would have had to be
elected, and his pre-war failures did not lead him to try again later. For
politics, he would have had to be a harder man, more able to say no, as
Simone had written to him. The qualities of his character inclined him in
the opposite direction. Had the existential choice to leave France in 1940
not overthrown the course of his life, he probably would have remained
the professor and veterans’ activist he was, and no more.
from staying in the Pas-de-Calais region and was struck off the medical register. In
contrast he did intervene to obtain for Senator Gaston Rogé of Nancy, a former veterans’
movement colleague, better conditions in detention on account of his health. 382AP109.
81 Among his correspondents were de Barral (Semaine du Combattant), Bravard,
Bréchemier, Bovier-Lapierre, Mme Cassou, Delubac, Didion-Rasponi, Durand, Fonte-
naille, Héline, Humbert Isaac (UNC), Laı̂né, Randoux, and others.
82 He attended and spoke in 1948, 1958, 1959, 1965, 1967, 1969 and 1970–4; he sent
messages of regret in 1950, 1952, 1953, 1957 and 1963.
83 382AP117, letter of Pierret-Gérard, 10 Jan. 1949.
84 Ghislaine Bru papers in the possession of Chantal Connochie-Bourgne. The handwrit-
ten draft of this article shows Cassin’s determination to return to this moment in his
life, despite the difficulty he faced in writing it.
But he was indeed one of the first to join de Gaulle’s nascent move-
ment in London. His position and status were entirely transformed, on
both the national and the international level. The whole context of his
life had changed. Faced with the monstrousness of the Nazi new order,
the defence of the rights of individuals against the state, so necessary for
millions of victims of the war, took on a new and much greater signif-
icance. The pressing moral and political task was how to make future
horrors impossible. From this sense of revulsion emerged a renewed set
of commitments, on which he felt compelled to act. In his new position,
Cassin began the effort to realize a project he and others had begun in
the League of Nations: the creation of a new international order which
would make both war and crimes like these impossible.
Part III
The struggle for human rights

9 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
origins and echoes
On 9 December 1948, René Cassin presented to a plenary session of

the General Assembly of the United Nations the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. The road that brought him to the Palais de Chaillot
was a long one. It passed through many places during and after the
Second World War, and brought him to Oslo and the Nobel Peace Prize.
But to appreciate fully the thinking that went into his contribution to
the Universal Declaration, we must return to inter-war Geneva and the
League of Nations.
In Geneva, in the glow of Locarno, and again after the signing of the
Kellogg-Briand pact, Cassin and a group of distinguished international
jurists thought through the premises on which the absolute sovereignty
of the state rested. These explorations in legal theory antedated the Nazi
seizure of power, when the contours of what Cassin termed the Leviathan
state became visible to all. Then, as we noted in chapter 3, in 1933, a
petition for redress presented to the League of Nations by one single
man, Franz Bernheim, brought to the fore the importance of giving the
individual human being standing in international law. Together these two
lines of thinking – truncating the sovereignty of the state and advancing
the right of individual petition against violations of rights in the state in
which he or she lived – provided the core of Cassin’s approach to human
rights in the post-war decade.
In addition, his work in Geneva brought Cassin into daily contact
with another strand of human rights thinking of importance in his future
work. The ILO was, as we have seen, the venue for his work on behalf
of disabled veterans in the 1920s. CIAMAC emerged from this effort,
and rested on the premise that disabled men, for whichever army they
fought, have rights, not to charity, but to justice. This vein of thought,
deeply imbedded in the history of the international labour movement,
is one of the sources for his later commitment to placing economic and
social rights alongside political rights in the Universal Declaration. Here
again, inter-war Geneva was a forcing house for ideas which in the 1940s
emerged in new and striking ways.
221
Rethinking state sovereignty: Geneva and The Hague

René Cassin entered the League of Nations in 1924, and found there a
community of jurists engaged in a far-reaching and fundamental cri-
tique of the concept of state sovereignty. Many of them either were
French-trained or had taught in French universities. One of the most
prominent of such individuals was the Greek jurist Nikolas Politis. Poli-
tis was French-educated and taught law at the University of Paris at the
turn of the century. He was naturalized as a French citizen and did his
military service in France before the First World War.1 Entering Greek
diplomatic service during the war, he gave up his French citizenship, but
retained his ties and love for the country. He was a delegate to the Paris
Peace Conference, and one of the central figures in the first decade of
the League of Nations. He was a target of the political right, accused of
being a freemason and covert agent of the Comintern. In the League of
Nations, he worked closely with Eduard Beneš, another French-educated
scholar-diplomat, in framing the Geneva Protocol of 1924 for the peace-
ful resolution of international disputes. Beneš too was accused of the
same masonic and communist sympathies by the paranoid right.2 Politis
later became vice-president of the League’s Commission on disarma-
ment, and in this capacity, as in others, he earned the admiration and
respect of Cassin.
Another colleague in Geneva was the Belgian socialist and pacifist
Henri Rolin. Rolin had served in the Great War, and immediately after
demobilization worked with the Belgian Foreign Minister, Paul Hymans,
from the earliest days of preparation of the work of the League of Nations.
Cassin knew him well, and saw ‘a parallel between our two lives between
the end of the First World War and that of the Second’.3 Like Beneš, we
shall see him again in London in 1940. Unlike both Beneš and Politis,
who died in the 1940s, Rolin lived long enough to serve with Cassin both
in the UN and in the European Court of Human Rights. The friendships
Cassin found in Geneva served for a lifetime.
In both Geneva and The Hague, new institutions opened in the inter-
war years to provide a home for these scholars and others struggling with
the difficult questions of war and peace, and the role of the League of
1 Rudolf Holsti, ‘In memoriam: Nicolas Politis: 1872–1942’, American Journal of Interna-
tional Law, 36, 3 (1942), pp. 475–9.
2 See the hysterical article on Politis and Beneš preserved in the Politis Papers in the League
of Nations archive in Geneva, by Robert Vallery-Radot, ‘Un ténébreux personnage: M.
Nikolas Politis’, Revue Hebdomadaire, 21 Oct. 1936, pp. 519–37.
3 René Cassin, ‘L’activité d’Henri Rolin pour la paix (1918–1944)’, in Mélanges offerts à
Henri Rolin. Problèmes de droit des gens (Paris: Editions A. Pedone, 1964), p. xiii.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 223
Nations in curtailing state sovereignty. In 1927, the University Institute of

Advanced International Studies opened in Geneva. Its co-founders were
William Rappard and Paul Mantoux, first director of the Political Section
of the League of Nations. Mantoux’s friendship with Cassin lasted until
the 1950s.4 The great legal theorist Hans Kelsen taught international
law there from 1934 to 1940. Cassin gave annual lectures at the Institute
during his stay as French delegate every autumn.5
There was a second pole of intellectual activity which attracted this
unusual group of jurists. It was the Hague Academy of International Law.
Founded through the aid of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, this institution opened in 1923. It was loosely associated with the
International Court of Justice, which sat in The Hague, and provided a
venue for lectures and publications by leading jurists. Rolin spoke there
on the Assembly of the League of Nations. In 1935, Georges Scelle,
Cassin’s colleague in the Law Faculty in Paris, with whom he had written
on collective security, became permanent secretary of the Academy and
he remained in that post for twenty years.6 Here was a forcing house of
new ideas in the field of international law.
This was nowhere more evident than in the series of lectures Politis
gave, and later published, through the Hague Academy, ‘On the problem
of limiting sovereignty and the theory of the abuse of rights in interna-
tional affairs’.7 He announced unabashedly that international law had
come to a turning point. It used to be the case that international law
was essentially and exclusively the law of states; individual people were
ignored. It used to be the case as well that states acted as if they were
‘sovereign moral persons, who were not subject to the authority of the
rule of law, save when through their free and independent assent, they
accepted its compulsory force’.8 Both premises were no longer valid. ‘The
dominant feature of our times is the intertwining of human relations both
within and across borders.’ The magical aura of the state had given way
to the view that it was ‘an administrator of a federation of public services’.
In the international realm, Politis argued, there was a host of devel-
opments since the nineteenth century moving in the direction of trans-
national legal authority. The Versailles settlement had established ‘Mixed
4 For Mantoux’s stance, see League of Nations Archives, Geneva, Mantoux papers, Paul
Mantoux, ‘Le rôle de la SDN dans la vie internationale, 19 mai 1923’.
5 382AP19, Mantoux to Cassin, 6 Jan. 1932, on his lectures for the Geneva Institute.
6 Hubert Thierry, ‘The European tradition in international law: Georges Scelle’, European
Journal of International Law, 6 (1990), pp. 193–209.
7 Nikolas Politis, ‘Sur le problème des limitations de la souveraineté et la théorie des droits
dans les rapports internationaux’, Académie de droit international de la Haye, Recueil des
Cours (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1925), pp. 5–121.
8 Politis, ‘Souveraineté et la théorie des droits’, p. 5.
arbitration tribunals’, a regime for the protection of minorities, alongside

those features of positive law enjoining on individuals the need to act
in cases of piracy, the slave trade, or the attack on commercial shipping
ruled illegal by the Washington Naval Convention of 1922. In every one
of these instances, individuals were indeed defended under international
law.9
Individuals now mattered in international law, and no state stood out-
side of its reach. ‘What will assure the final triumph of this new concep-
tion of international law’, he wrote, ‘is the ruin into which the alternative
principle of classical theory – that of sovereignty – will fall irreversibly.’10
Only if a new idea penetrated the fog of legal and political inertia could an
international organization like the League of Nations survive and another
war be averted. That idea was limited sovereignty, or sovereignty limited
by international law.11 The critical shift was to see that ‘sovereignty be
reserved solely for the law, and later for the international community.
Sovereignty cannot be ascribed solely to the state.’12
Without this conceptual leap, Politis concluded, the old way of war
and conquest, alongside arbitrary rule, would continue. Until then, the
definition of sovereignty took it to be absolute. ‘The dogma of state
sovereignty’, he baldly states, ‘is obsolete.’ Economic life in particular
had bypassed it, and international law had to catch up with the times. The
search for new concepts of limited sovereignty was the most important
challenge for legal theory and international peace. Here was the heart of
Politis’s message.13
This spirited intellectual challenge appeared just as Cassin took up
his task as a member of the French delegation to the League. Within
this heady intellectual environment, Cassin began to develop an original
approach to the problem of sovereignty, one he deepened in his teach-
ing at the University of Lille in the later 1920s on private international
law.
Cassin shared much of the critique offered by Politis in his 1925 Hague
lectures. But when it was his turn to speak to these weighty issues, he
took another approach to them, one which developed some of Politis’s
ideas, but which took them in new directions. His 1930 Hague Academy
lectures were entitled ‘The new conception of domicile in the resolution
9 Politis, ‘Souveraineté et la théorie des droits’, pp. 8–9.

10 Politis, ‘Souveraineté et la théorie des droits’, p. 10.
11 Politis, ‘Souveraineté et la théorie des droits’, p. 18. Politis cites Kelsen here, among
other authorities. See p. 18, n. 11.
of conflicts of laws’.14 His aim in this extended argument in private

international law was to ‘desacralize’ claims of state sovereignty. Only
thereby, he believed, was it possible to create an environment in which
the all-powerful state could not by its own fiat and with impunity trample
on the rights of the individual.
The original intellectual move Cassin offered in these lectures was to
juxtapose the right of domicile to the right of nationality. His claim was
that each had merit as a basis of political rights.
The tie of nationality is not a primary or a unique bond among the members
of a nation: there are other more elementary ones . . . the district, the region, the
province, and so on. Precisely because the right of domicile rests on a universal
and permanent fact, the concreteness of a place where one lives, a place where
families reside, it has been taken into consideration everywhere to determine the
point of juridical attachment of persons and to order more or less completely the
status of the individual.15
Regimes change, but (with luck) domiciles remain. People remain

attached to their homes whatever happens at the political level. This
has always been the case among minorities and refugees, as long as they
respect the laws of the land. The right of alien residence (while obeying
the laws of a land) in a host nation is therefore based on the prior and
superior force of domicile over nationality. One reflection of this princi-
ple, Cassin argued, is that a married woman in France could have more
than one nationality; in deciding which applies, her domicile could be the
point of reference. In this argument, Cassin cites explicitly the plight of
over one million Russian and Armenian refugees whose personal status
was thrown into doubt by war and revolution. Their standing, he claims,
must be based on a right of domicile independent of nationality.
To Cassin, the choice between nationality or domicile had evolved
over time. Throughout the later nineteenth century, in an era of state
building, those standing on claims of nationality grew in number. By
the third decade of the twentieth century, most European states took
this approach; in contrast, about the same number of people lived in
states where domicile trumped nationality. These were the Anglo-Saxon
countries and Latin American states, in which immigration played a
palpable and powerful role. Cassin’s point is that it was time for the
14 René Cassin, ‘La nouvelle conception du domicile dans le règlement des conflits de
lois’, Académie de droit international de la Haye. Recueil des Cours (Paris: Recueil Sirey,
1930), pp. 658–809.
15 Cassin, ‘La nouvelle conception’, p. 740.
pendulum to move back towards the claims of domicile over national-

ity in a Continent riven by powerful political and ideological quarrels
exposed during the Great War. Jurisprudence had to follow events, in
order not to be overwhelmed by them. Here too we see the parallel
between his logic and that of Politis, speaking to the same forum five years
before.
The implications of Cassin’s argument are far-reaching. Domicile over
nationality describes the bonds of the veterans of different countries who
came together to work with Cassin in his international veterans’ organi-
zation. Domicile over nationality is the principal defence of vulnerable
minorities stalked by powerful nationalist movements in states worried
about their ethnic composition. Domicile over nationality helps correct
the imbalance in the then current international law ‘which confers to
the sovereign nation a competence which is too exclusive, simplistic, and
ill adapted to satisfy the complex needs of international life’.16 What is
worse, despite having done its job well in the period of state formation,
‘the principle of nationality has exhausted its beneficial effects and has
become a germ of doctrines destructive to the international community
and oppressive to the individual’.17 And finally, by privileging the con-
cept of domicile over nationality, Cassin points the way to establishing the
standing of the individual within international law itself. This same line
of argument was adopted by the Institute of International Law in New
York in October 1929, when it drafted a ‘Declaration of the International
Rights of Man’.18
Note the date of Cassin’s disquisition. Three years before the Nazis
came to power, and used sovereign law to destroy every single trace
of natural justice, Cassin constructed a powerful argument against the
extremes of state sovereignty then still unrealized. How much more pow-
erful, then, his argument against the all-powerful state once that state
under Hitler had made war first on millions of its own citizens, and then
on the rest of Europe as well.
We have noted Cassin’s interest in the Bernheim petition, and the
defence of minority rights. As the descent towards war, and thereby
the eclipse of the League of Nations, progressed, Cassin became more
focused on what he came to term ‘the Leviathan state’. In April 1940,
just on the edge of a disaster he had foreseen, he wrote an essay on the
subject for Les Nouveaux Cahiers. He started by linking Nazi aggression
and the Soviet war in Finland to the appearance in the twentieth century

18 Cassin directly cites this declaration in ‘La nouvelle conception’, p. 770.
of monster states, whose power, matched by ‘an ideology of violence

and terrorist methods applied on a huge scale’, enabled them to reduce
millions of men and women to mere instruments of their will.19
This dark reality did not come out of a clear sky. Cassin traces the defor-
mation of the idea of the state as a reflection of popular sovereignty to
German romanticism, which introduced certain ‘irrational and mystical
aspirations’ about language and race and mixed them with a remarkable
martial prowess. It was Hegel, after all, Cassin offers as an aside, who said
that in a true state ‘individuals do not exist’.20 Instead of the rationalism
of Kant, the humanism of Goethe, the liberalism of Schiller, the hearts
of German nationalists beat to another, more militant, drum.
After the war of 1914–18, the new order of the ILO and the League of
Nations established modalities for the protection of the rights of workers
and minorities, and other oppressed peoples. But the conditions of the
Great War reinforced the power of the state. Consequently the League
rested on the conscious solidarities of separate sovereign states, still jeal-
ous of their sovereignty. With the exception of its specialized agencies,
like the ILO, the new organization was still inter-national, not trans-
national, not a representative of the masses across borders but of states
behind them.
This shaky start for the League of Nations was cut short by the world
economic crisis. Impotent, the League could do little to stop the descent
into war. The concentrated and disciplined power of the German state
swept all before it. The risk, as Cassin saw it in April 1940, after the
invasion of Denmark and Norway, was that the future would be domi-
nated by a few Leviathan states, bent on war and expansion. The only
alternative, he pleaded, was if the Allies make the war one for the defence
of human rights. They had to create a new ‘Universal declaration of the
rights of the human person, bolstered by specific guarantees’. This out-
come would require, Cassin affirmed, no less than ‘the curtailment of the
absolute sovereignty of states’.21 Herein, Cassin predicted the trajectory
of Allied war aims long before they were in a position to sketch them out
in full.
Towards UNESCO
After the outbreak of the Second World War, the centre of gravity of inter-
national thinking on war and peace moved, of necessity, from Geneva and
The Hague, to London, New York and Montreal. At the core of many of
19 Cassin, ‘L’Etat-Leviathan’, La pensée et l’action, p. 63.

20 Cassin, ‘L’Etat-Leviathan’, p. 66. 21 Cassin, ‘L’Etat-Leviathan’, p. 71.
these wartime networks was René Cassin. In London, he joined a remark-

able group of jurists in exile. Alongside Eduard Beneš was the young
Czech jurist Egon Schwelb, a Social Democrat and assimilated Jew, who
was a member of the Czech Judicial Council. Henri Rolin was part of
the Belgian delegation, alongside Paul-Henri Spaak. Paul Mantoux, too,
was there. Salvador de Madariaga, the Spanish diplomat who had been
chief of the disarmament section at the League of Nations, held a chair in
Oxford, as did Gilbert Murray. Another of Cassin’s acquaintances from
Geneva, A. E. Zimmern, was Warden of New College, Oxford.
On the other side of the ocean, there were other groups of exiles
with whom Cassin was in touch throughout the war. One was Boris
Mirkine-Guetzévitch, jurist and linguist extraordinaire. A Petrograd-
trained lawyer, he had fled to France in 1920, and began a career as
a jurist in Paris, working with Henri Lévy-Ullmann and Henri Capitant
at the Institute of Comparative Law in Paris. He was secretary general
of the International Institute of Public Law, also based in Paris, over
which presided first Georges Scelle and later Nikolas Politis. Mirkine-
Guetzévitch was at the core of many of the pre-war European networks
in which Cassin had operated, and performed the same function in New
York, where he lived in exile from 1940 on. There he worked with
others to set up, after London, a second centre of French thought in
exile, the Free School of Advanced Studies, housed in the New School
for Social Research.22 From 1942 on, Jacques Maritain, Claude Lévi-
Strauss, Alexandre Koyré and Roman Jakobson all taught there. The
historian Paul Vaucher was in New York too, teaching at the New School
before returning to London to take up the post of cultural counsellor and
head of educational services for Free France. In that capacity he joined
Cassin in the work of the inter-Allied committee on education, to which
we turn below.
Montreal was a third home for French intellectuals in exile. The most
prominent of Cassin’s friends there was Henri Laugier. Landing first in
New York, but preferring, in part for linguistic reasons, to take up a
post in Montreal, Laugier was the foremost spokesman for Free France
in North America. Director of the just-formed National Centre for Sci-
entific Research (CNRS) in Paris, Laugier was a polymath, a man of
seemingly limitless energy and with truly catholic interests.23 Trained as
a doctor before the Great War, he specialized after it in medical research,
22 Emmanuelle Loyer, Paris à New York. Intellectuels et artistes français en exil 1940–1947
(Paris: Grasset, 2005).
23 Biologie et développement. Hommage à Henri Laugier à l’occasion du Xe anniversaire de
l’E.D.I.E.S, présenté par F. Perroux (Paris: PUF, 1968).
in particular in the psychophysiology of labour, and, as Schneider has

shown, in particular in the experimental study of ‘mental and physi-
cal abilities with applications to the selection and training of the labour
force’.24 This was not a French form of Taylorism, but rather an attempt
to understand the worker and his aptitudes. Laugier, like his older col-
laborator and inspiration Henri Piéron, parted company with American
colleagues looking solely for a number, an intelligence quotient (IQ)
which would describe a man’s abilities; their approach was much more
sophisticated than that.25
Like Cassin, Laugier had served in the Great War, and never forgot
its horrors. He joined a group of ex-soldiers whose studies had been
interrupted by the war in forming a group entitled ‘Compagnons de
l’Université Nouvelle’, through which he organized meetings and met
many of the leading political figures of the 1920s, men like Emile Borel,
Yvon Delbos and Edouard Herriot.26 Laugier served briefly as Delbos’s
principal private secretary in the Ministry of Education in 1925.27 Four
years later he was named to the Chair of the Physiology of Work, Indus-
trial Hygiene and Professional Orientation in Paris. In 1939 he held a
chair in the Sorbonne.
The following year he fled France first for London, where his initial
view of de Gaulle was, to say the least, tepid. Then he moved on to
New York before accepting a post in Montreal, where he could live in a
Francophone environment. There he changed his views on de Gaulle and
took up the cause of Free France with all of his indefatigable energy.28
One of his most successful projects was the association France Forever,
which sponsored a successful publication series on science and world
affairs.29 Here is his preface to one of these volumes:
At the very time when a shadow covers the path of French destiny, a small light
will continue to glow, showing the way, linking, in the darkness to which we have
sunk, the luminous past of French science and its future which one day will shine
24 William Schneider, ‘Henri Laugier, the science of work and the workings of science in
France, 1920–1940’, Cahiers pour l’Histoire du CNRS, 5 (1989), pp. 10–29.
25 Schneider, ‘Laugier’, pp. 17ff.
26 Bruno Garnier, Les combattants de l’école unique (Lyons: INRP, 2008).
27 On Yvon Delbos, see Bernard Lachaise, Yvon Delbos, biographie 1885–1956 (Périgueux:
Editions Fanlac, 1993).
28 On this period in Laugier’s life, see Chantal Morelle and Pierre Jacob, Henri Laugier.
Un esprit sans frontières (Brussels: Bruylant, 1997), pp. 189ff, and Jean-Louis Crémieux-
Brilhac and Jean-François Picard (eds.), Henri Laugier en son siècle (Paris: CNRS, 1995),
pp. 73–91.
29 On France Forever, see Eric Amyot, Le Québec entre Pétain et de Gaulle. Vichy, la France
Libre et les Canadiens (Saint-Laurent, Quebec: Fides, 1999), p. 258. Boris Mirkine-
Guetzévitch worked with Laugier in this association.
again, reminding everyone, if they have forgotten, that French scientific thought
is still alive despite its misfortunes; that it still occupies its place in the life of
international exchange; and that one day, as soon as France recovers from her
humiliation, through the victory of the United Nations, her human and universal
mind will regain its radiance and its greatness.
As André Breton put it: the Flame, stronger than the Ashes.30
These words were music to Cassin’s ears. On 1 September 1942, Cassin

wrote to Laugier to thank him for all his efforts on behalf of Free France.
What Laugier had done in North America, Cassin said, was a useful
precedent for his own efforts to rally medical opinion to the cause in
Africa and in the Middle East. Pétainist elements were still too much
in evidence there, and Cassin congratulated Laugier for helping counter
anti-Gaullist opinion in Canada and in the United States, where their
mutual friend Adrien Tixier, the official representative of Free France,
welcomed Laugier’s work.
Cassin then told Laugier about the work of the commissions set up to
examine the reforms that would be needed after the war.31 Cassin asked
for his help with respect to international juridical questions:
For your part, I would very much like you to collaborate actively with us on
the following points: (a) human rights. You have retaken the direction of the
International League of Human Rights, and I have spoken about this in radio
broadcasts to France. However would you please send me a review of the state
of the movement in America, towards an International Declaration of Human
Rights? Beneš is with us. Our role as Frenchmen must be to produce something
important by the end of the war.32
Cassin confided to Laugier that in London they had to fight against the
view in some Anglo-American quarters that, given their weakness, the
Free French should be content with symbolic statements; they had to be
‘supple and docile’, and ‘on the international level, we had to remain in
the “frigidaire” until the end of the war’. Instead, Cassin concluded: ‘My
present task, while here, is to renew France’s role as intellectual leader,
which the fine French team in America usefully occupies there.’33
30 As cited in Jean-Claude Pecker, ‘Henri Laugier, l’édition scientifique, la documentation

scientifique et l’audiovisuel’, Cahiers pour l’Histoire de la Recherche, CNRS Editions,
1995, p. 3.
31 See chapter 6.
32 382AP63, Cassin to Laugier, 1 September 1942. On its own, this letter makes it very
difficult to accept Samuel Moyn’s statement in his book The Last Utopia. Human Rights in
History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), that no one had discussed
human rights during the war, aside from Hersch Lauterpacht.
33 Cassin to Laugier, 1 September 1942.
Here is the point of departure for one of the most creative partnerships
in the history of the journey to the Universal Declaration in 1948. As
National Commissioner for Justice and Public Instruction, Cassin found
a way to assert France’s voice in the planning of a just peace to follow a
just war. Laugier’s friendship and influence were essential in that effort
from 1942 on. He returned to Algiers in 1943, acting as Rector of the
University of Algiers. In 1944–5, he served as director general for cultural
relations in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Having Laugier as a close ally
was the equivalent of the support of dozens of lesser men. This pivotal
friendship was but one element in the revival of pre-war Republican and
internationalist networks on both sides of the Atlantic, networks whose
attention increasingly turned to questions of educational reconstruction
and human rights.
From November 1942 on, Cassin served alongside Vaucher as Free
France delegates to the inter-Allied committee on education, chaired
by Rab Butler, President of the Board of Education in England. Their
task was to prepare for the repair of the staggering damage done to
libraries, schools, museums, newspapers, journals and universities during
the conflict. There was also the matter of the massive theft of works of
art, and the need to restore them to their owners. In effect the whole
world of the arts, learning and scholarship throughout Europe had been
devastated by the war; the task of reconstruction was staggering. Careful
planning was in order.
In his work on the Butler committee, Cassin’s particular focus was on
converting the pre-war International Institute of Intellectual Coopera-
tion into a post-war international agency for education and intellectual
exchange. On 13 August 1943, he reported on the decision of the inter-
Allied committee chaired by Butler to establish just such a bureau to
coordinate wartime planning in this field. It was Cassin’s aim to put the
stamp of Free France on this new institution. Through his intervention,
It was accepted that this Bureau would have to prepare the way more generally for
an international organization to be established after the war. The idea to create at
that moment an International Board of Education, similar to the ILO, seems to
be very positively welcomed by the members of the Conference. But the Board to
be created now would be an organ of implementation as much as preparation.34
He pressed the urgency of this matter at a meeting in February 1944.35

As a result, a number of different proposals were examined on the future
34 382AP69, Cassin to Abadie, 13 August 1943.

35 382AP134, Cassin to René Maheu, secretary general of UNESCO, 13 Dec. 1962.
structure of a bureau for educational reconstruction.36 The visit of an

American delegation in April 1944 showed that there was multinational
support for the creation of a ‘United Nations Bureau of Education’.
Unfortunately, the Commissariat of Education in Algiers, led by Jules
Abadie, no friend of Cassin’s, dragged its feet on this matter, leaving
Cassin and Vaucher up in the air. Finally, after threatening resignation,37
Cassin got the backing for which he had asked, and he and Vaucher pro-
ceeded to work towards the launching of a new institution for educational
and cultural reconstruction, within the framework of the United Nations.
The question remained, though, as to whether the International Insti-
tute for Intellectual Cooperation, formally reopened in February 1945,
would exist alongside this body, or be subsumed within it. Cassin chaired
an advisory committee set up by the Quai d’Orsay to formulate policy
on this matter. On this committee sat Laugier, Paul Valéry, Georges
Scelle, and his old friend from the Ihering Society before 1914, Marcel
Plaisant.38 There was some French reluctance to scrapping the Institute,
but such reservations faded, and Cassin and Laugier worked to refashion
the old Institute in a new form, which we now know as UNESCO. The
new institution was drawn into the orbit of the Economic and Social
Council (ECOSOC), as one of its satellite agencies. Following the inau-
gural San Francisco conference of the UN, a meeting was called in
London formally to constitute the new body.
Just at the right time, Henri Laugier was named head of the French
delegation. His presence was decisive. First came the coup of having the
London meeting co-hosted by France and Britain. This move opened
the door for what was clearly a French takeover of the proceedings.
In the preliminary planning sessions before the founding meeting in
November, Laugier persuaded delegates to adopt both French and
English as languages of reference, which was not controversial. More
importantly, he and Cassin successfully argued that the new organization
be modelled on the structure of the inter-war Institute.39
On 1 November 1945, delegates from forty-four countries met in
London. Cassin was prominent within the French delegation, headed
now by Léon Blum, just six months after he had been liberated from
Buchenwald.40 Since the Labour party had won the General Election,
the British delegation was composed of newcomers. Among them was
36 H. H. Krill de Capello, ‘The creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific,

and Cultural Organization’, International Organization, 24, 1 (1970), pp. 6–7.
37 382AP69, Cassin to Henri Bonnet, 15 July 1944.
38 382AP134, J. Fougues-Dupuy to Cassin, 10 Feb. 1945.
39 382AP134, ‘Lettre introductive’, with Cassin’s handwritten edits, 31 July 1945.
40 382AP134, ‘Délégation française’, 1 Nov. 1945.
Ellen Wilkinson, who presided over the conference. Blum was unani-
mously elected co-president, and with his immense moral authority he
called on all nations to work through the organization ‘to create the spirit
of peace’ within ‘a world where this spirit of peace would become one
of the guarantees (and maybe the surest) of peace itself.’41 Once in ses-
sion, the meeting followed the French lead on all essentials.42 With the
departure of Butler and others who had been at the centre of Allied dis-
cussions, Great Britain had clearly lost the initiative. Instead of London,
Paris became the site of the new organization, thanks in large part to
the sophistication and moral authority of a trio of Resistance figures –
Laugier, Blum and Cassin.43
The final piece in the puzzle was inserted when Laugier was named
by Trygvie Lie to serve as deputy secretary at the United Nations, with
responsibility for social affairs. These included responsibility for popula-
tion, scientific research, drugs and, above all, human rights. The heads
of UNESCO and the nascent Commission on Human Rights reported
to him.44
In September 1946, the personnel of UNESCO were installed in the
Hôtel Majestic, at 22 Avenue Kléber. That building had been the site
of German Military Headquarters in France. The Allies could not have
chosen a better symbol to build a new world on the ruins of Nazism than
this site.45
The Commission on Human Rights

At the founding meeting of UNESCO in London on 16 November 1945,
Cassin addressed the delegates in these words:
Our duty will be more completely defined when our charter has been adopted by
all the United Nations, and when, on what I hope may not be a far distant day,
we have the great Soviet Republic in our midst . . . We shall never lose sight of the
fact, so adequately expressed at the opening of our deliberations, that it is not
41 Capello, ‘The creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization’, pp. 20–1.
42 382AP134, ‘Exposés des motifs’, with Cassin’s handwritten edits, on draft Convention,
16 Nov. 1945.
43 Capello, ‘The creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization’, p. 26. See also the text of the radio programme Cassin wrote for Radio
Alsace, and broadcast on 22 November 1966, 382AP135.
44 Chantal Morelle and Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Henri Laugier 1888–1973. Un citoyen
au service de la science et des droits de l’homme (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1998).
45 Walter Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic. Ein Deutscher im besetzten Frankreich (Freiburg: Verlag
Herder, 1987); Gaël Eismann, Hôtel Majestic. Ordre et sécurité en France occupée, 1940–
1944 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010).
the sum of knowledge that is to be the distinguishing mark of the activities of our
future organization, but the development of culture. One of our great authors
has said: ‘Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.’ We can say:
‘Knowledge without morality can only result in barbarism.’ We who know that
there can be no democracy without culture will direct our efforts towards adding
something else to knowledge: a great ideal, a clear vision of the great problems
to be solved in the cause of international peace and, lastly, and perhaps most
important of all, the mastery of self.46
Here Cassin laid out the path that he and the delegates had to follow.
First, they had to bring on board the Soviet Union, for without the
Soviet bloc none of their ventures would command universal authority.
Secondly, they had to address problems of a moral order, to ensure that
the peace so dearly won could be protected against the perversion not only
of science, but of state power trampling on human rights. That required
action not only in the educational sphere, though that dimension was
critical to Cassin, but in the realm of international law. Here is the link
between UNESCO and the development of Cassin’s human rights work
in the late 1940s.
Cassin and Laugier both were committed to turning a just war into
a just peace. But they could not construct such a peace by a return to
status quo ante bellum. Indeed they could not do so by returning to the
state of affairs before 1914. It was the problem of sovereignty itself which
lay at the heart of the failures of the League of Nations in the 1930s,
and it was to address that problem, and create constraints for state power
within a new kind of international moral order, and if possible a new
international legal order, that Cassin, Laugier and a host of other men
and women turned in the later 1940s.
If UNESCO was one facet of the successful partnership of Laugier
and Cassin, the creation of the Commission on Human Rights (HRC)
within the orbit of the Economic and Social Council of the UN was
another. In article 68 of the UN Charter, the Economic and Social
Council was charged explicitly with setting up a commission for the
promotion of human rights. One of Laugier’s first acts was to construct
such a commission in February 1946. Its brief was to prepare a document
for ECOSOC which would enumerate precisely what were the rights
signatories of the UN Charter had agreed to defend.
Laugier asked John Humphrey, an international lawyer at McGill Uni-
versity in Montreal, to head the secretariat of the new commission. Draw-
ing on their wartime friendship, Laugier and Humphrey worked well
46 ‘The birth of an ideal’, The Courier: Unesco (Oct. 1985), p. 8. The reference is to
Rabelais, in chapter 8 of Pantagruel (1532).
together. Humphrey was a formidable lawyer, whose socialist views, to

the left of the New Deal without a trace of communist sympathies, gave
him an affinity with many of the Latin American delegates with whom he
was to work. He was North American, not American. He did not have
the temperament of a diplomat. Humphrey was the acerbic, outspoken,
straight-talking scholar perfectly suited to complement Laugier’s chain-
smoking, elegant, yet driven Gallic romanticism. Humphrey provided the
prose and precision needed to turn Laugier’s poetry into the language of
international law. And Humphrey’s mastery of French and English prose
gave him a distinct advantage over both Laugier and Cassin. In short, he
was the perfect international civil servant to guide the work of the HRC
in the preparation of an international bill of rights.47
Assisting him in the early days of the HRC was an impressive group of
young people. The deputy director was Egon Schwelb; we have met him
before in London where he was secretary of the inter-Allied commission
on war crimes. In this role he had impressed Cassin in 1943–4.48 Oscar
Schachter served as senior legal counsel. He was an American interna-
tional lawyer, who had worked at UNRRA, the United Nations Relief
and Rehabilitation Agency, at the end of the war.49 Lin Mousheng was
a Confucian philosopher, political scientist and diplomat, an authority
on the Japanese war in China in the 1930s and the author of Chunking
Dialogues.50 Kamleshwar Das was an Indian lawyer, trained by Hersch
Lauterpacht at Cambridge.51 In short, Humphrey and his colleagues
represented very different traditions of thinking about law and rights.
The only evident omission from the secretariat team was someone
schooled in the French tradition, but Cassin and the French permanent
representative to the Security Council, Alexandre Parodi, were in close
proximity. Cassin represented France on the HRC from its inception.
47 A. J. Hobbins (ed.), On the Edge of Greatness. The Diaries of John Humphrey, First Director
of the United Nations Division of Human Rights, vol. 1, 1948–49 (Montreal: McGill
University Press, 1994).
48 Frank Schwelb, ‘Czechs in exile’, www.czechsinexile.org/stories/frankschwelbm-en.
shtml.
49 Oscar Schachter, ‘The development of international law through the legal opinions of
the United Nations Secretariat’, British Yearbook of International Law (1948), pp. 91–
132; Schachter, ‘The place of law in the United Nations’, Annual Review of United
Nations Affairs (1950), pp. 205–30; and Maurizio Ragazzi, International Responsibility
Today. Essays in Memory of Oscar Schachter (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2005).
50 Lin Mousheng Hsitien, American Press Opinion on the Sino-Japanese Conflict (New York:
Chinese Cultural Society, 1937); Lin Mousheng Hsitien, Confucius on Interpersonal
Relations (New York: China Institute in America, 1939).
51 Roger Stenson Clark, ‘Human rights as strategies of the 1960s within the United
Nations: a tribute to the late Kamleshwar Das’, Human Rights Quarterly, 21, 2 (1990),
pp. 308–41.
Parodi, another major Resistance figure, had entered the Conseil d’Etat
in 1925. During the war, while underground, under the name Quartus,
he undertook a study of judicial reforms needed after the Liberation,52
and became the general delegate of the French National Committee
for Liberation (CFLN). As such, he formally welcomed de Gaulle on
his return to Paris. He then served as Minister of Labour and Social
Security in 1945, before beginning his diplomatic career at the UN. He
was Cassin’s link to the Foreign Office, not an easy assignment. And
alongside Parodi and Cassin was Laugier, the grand master of the HRC,
in a key position to steer its recommendations through the treacherous
waters of international diplomacy. His support was crucial in the years
1946–8 when the Universal Declaration was drafted.
He drew around him a remarkable team in his cabinet, whose loyalty
to him and each other was palpable. Alongside Humphrey was the jurist
Louis Gros, a former member of Free France who had worked closely
with Cassin on the commission on war crimes. In New York, Boris
Mirkine-Guetzévitch introduced to Laugier his son-in-law, Stéphane
Hessel, a young Resistance poet and pilot, who had been tortured and had
escaped twice from German prisons during the war. He joined Laugier in
March 1946. Hessel saw Laugier as a unique man, part bon-vivant and
part prophet, a man with a cause. He was not alone; the early years of the
UN were filled with energy and hope. This was a time when the French
presence in the United Nations was formidable: Pierre Mendès-France
and Georges Boris in the ECOSOC, Alfred Sauvy in the Population
Division, and in particular Laugier, with his vision, his impatience with
the conventional, and his relentless drive, focused above all on making
human rights real.53
The Universal Declaration: a collective manifesto

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a house of many man-
sions. The question as to who was its principal architect is still contested.
Mary Ann Glendon has emphasized the crucial role of the chair of the
52 Louis Joxe, Notice sur la vie et les travaux d’Alexandre Parodi: 1901–1979. Lue dans la séance
du . . . 20 avril 1982 (Paris: Institut de France, 1982); Alexandre Parodi, La Libération
de Paris (Paris: Comité de Tourisme (Impr. de Curial-Archereau), 1945); Guillaume
Piketty (ed.), Français en Résistance. Carnets de guerre, correspondances, journaux personnels
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 2009), p. 1097.
53 Thanks are due to Stéphane Hessel for his illuminating remarks in an interview on this
phase of his life. See also Hessel, ‘Henri Laugier aux Nations Unies: le pionnier de la
politique de coopération sociale internationale’, Cahiers pour l’Histoire de la Recherche
(Paris: CNRS, 1995), pp. 303–9.
Human Rights Commission, Eleanor Roosevelt.54 She pointed as well

to the intellectual authority of Charles Malik of Lebanon, and of P.-C.
Chang of China, in orienting the commission’s thinking on matters of
principle and in providing it with a profile not restricted to European
ideas. Others have emphasized the work of John Humphrey, and his sec-
retariat, in creating the Declaration.55 Still others have called René Cassin
the father of the Universal Declaration,56 and it was in that capacity that
he was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968.
All of these statements are true, and all are incomplete. The Universal
Declaration was the product of a process in which dozens of individuals
made their voices heard and through which a consensus emerged enabling
the document to receive the assent of the General Assembly of the United
Nations without a single dissenting vote. On 10 December 1948, when
the vote for adoption was taken, six nations abstained, but no single
nation’s delegate said no. This was an astonishing outcome, given the
moment in international history, right at the onset of the Cold War.
What is most surprising about the Declaration is that it happened at
all. The climate was, to say the least, inclement. The year 1948 was not
a good one for human rights. Czech democracy had come to an end
in February, and Cassin’s old friend Eduard Beneš died in September.
Cassin attended the funeral.57 The Arab–Israeli war had ended, leaving
one million Palestinians in refugee camps. The Berlin blockade opened in
June and continued for eleven months. The Chinese Communists came
within striking distance of Beijing, which they took in January 1949,
completing their seizure of power. In April 1949, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization was founded. Four months later, the Soviet Union
tested its first atomic bomb. The Cold War was well and truly on.
And yet the Universal Declaration was in no sense a Cold War docu-
ment. We need to understand it from the standpoint of those who lived
the moment, in order to see what it meant to its creators. When we do
so, we can see the error of those who say that the document was a fail-
ure, a backward step away from enforceable human rights, a cover for
54 Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).
55 A. J. Hobbins, ‘René Cassin and the daughter of time: the first draft of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights’, Fontanus, 2 (1989), pp. 7–26; Hobbins, ‘John Peters
Humphrey and the genesis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, Journal of
Oriental Studies, 9 (1999), pp. 24–41; Hobbins, ‘Eleanor Roosevelt, John Humphrey,
and Canadian opposition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: looking back
on the 50th anniversary of UNDHR’, International Journal, 53, 2 (spring 1998), pp. 325–
42.
56 Agi, René Cassin. 57 382AP158, carnet de Cassin, 1948.
imperial designs, an insignificant, rhetorical flourish, full of sound and

fury, told by an idiot, but in essence, signifying nothing of importance in
international history. This view has emerged forcefully in recent years,
and requires re-examination.58
Here is where a focus on René Cassin and his role in the drafting of
the document is particularly useful. We have traced the links connecting
the wartime experience of Cassin and a wide spectrum of those within the
anti-Nazi alliance and UNESCO and the Human Rights Commission.
Both were efforts to repair the damage of war, and to help construct the
foundations of a just peace.59 He was fully aware of the opposition he
would face in trying to constrain the power of the sovereign state. And
yet the horrors of the Nazi regime had created a consensus around the
need to shift the balance of power away from the state and towards civil
society and the individual. No state, no party, no individual was above
the law. The Nuremberg trials came out of that belief, and so did the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both were ways of announcing
that the Second World War was over.
In effect, the Universal Declaration was Janus-faced. It looked to the
past and to the future at one and the same time. Its vision of the future
was, perforce, unclear. But its indictment of the doctrine of unbridled
state sovereignty was unmistakable. And this is what connects his life and
work to movements the nature of which Cassin could not predict and the
future of which involved issues remote from his own experience.
Throughout his life, Cassin dealt in the art of the possible. He was not
blind to the storm clouds hardly on the horizon but rather straight over-
head. He believed that a document, a statement of principles concerning
rights, a manifesto securing the support of all those who had brought
down the Nazi regime, was all that could be accomplished at that time.
That was no mean achievement. A legally binding covenant on human
rights was simply an unreachable destination. Was it better to wait until
such a covenant would be acceptable? Not in his view; the time was ripe
for creating a foundational document, one on which a later generation
58 Mark Mazower, ‘The strange triumph of human rights’, New Statesman, 4 Feb. 2002;
Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the
United Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009); Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi,
Human Rights at the UN. The Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2008); Samuel Moyn, ‘Human rights in history’, Nation, 30 Aug.
2010, pp. 31–7.
59 For the American side of this story, and in particular the work of the American Institute
of Law, see Hanne Hagtvedt Vik, ‘The United States, the American legal commu-
nity, and the vision of international human rights protection, 1941–1953’, PhD thesis,
University of Oslo, 2009.
could build. And that is what they have done. Since 1975, a new human
rights movement has emerged on the foundations of the old one, and
it is both unnecessary and unwise to separate the two as if the one had
nothing to do with the other.60
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the final political and
moral act agreed to by the alliance which won the Second World War.
It is the last word of ‘the People’s’ war, a cruel and gruelling struggle
against a Leviathan state which had nearly brought all of Europe to its
knees. In that war, Soviet losses were greater than those of any other ally.
They were part of the alliance, however repugnant the regime. A United
Nations without them, a Universal Declaration without at least their tacit
approval, would make no sense at all.
It is critical to understand the terms imbedded in the Universal Dec-
laration. What it does not say is as striking as what it affirms. It is not an
international treaty, but rather a moral and educational manifesto, affirm-
ing the need to restrict the sovereignty of the nation state. The term ‘the
state’ is used only three times in the document. Instead its focus is on
the inherent rights we all share and which we all express in our families
and in civil society. It is a statement not of unbridled individualism, but
of the moral force of associative life, without which human development
is impossible.
Here is a position entirely consistent with everything Cassin did. He
had worked tirelessly for the injured, the disabled, the disadvantaged in
the veterans’ movement first in France and then throughout Europe. In
the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the leadership of which he had assumed
in 1943, he affirmed the dignity of the Jewish people in the face of indig-
nity, the magnitude of which was both evident and difficult to fathom at
the end of the Second World War.61 He saw his mission as helping to
remedy the damage war inflicted, on individuals, on social groups, and
on the rule of law itself. In the Comité Juridique his aim was the restora-
tion of Republican order at home. In the UN, his aim was the restoration
of the very notion that there was a rule of law, embodying principles, the
violation of which had created the circumstances out of which war had
emerged, and would emerge again.
This mission was one shared for different reasons and in different ways
by his colleagues on the Human Rights Commission. Each contributed
an element to the task at hand, but no one was responsible primarily and
singly for the outcome. One orchestral metaphor may be helpful here.
Without the work of the Secretariat, the Universal Declaration would
60 For the opposite view, see Moyn, ‘Human rights in history’. 61 See chapter 11.
never have been written. John Humphrey and his colleagues provided the
texts and the materials out of which the HRC created the final document.
He assembled and arranged the original score, using word-for-word texts
collected by other groups, such as the American Law Institute.62 Eleanor
Roosevelt, with her dignified and quiet chairmanship, as well as the
authority she bore as the widow of the wartime American leader, was the
conductor, urging harmony on the different members of the orchestra.
But she did not lead every rehearsal; indeed she left to colleagues in the
drafting committee the orchestration at key moments.
The critical point to make is that throughout the two-year preparation
of the Universal Declaration both she and the orchestra tinkered with
the original composition time and again. And so did members of the
audience, the member states of the United Nations. They all urged and
frequently succeeded in inserting phrases, bars, motifs, indeed entire
movements. It is for this reason that it is futile to isolate one individual and
to say he or she wrote the composition entitled the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. A collective wrote it.
In this collection of equals, some were more equal than others. Cassin
was the draftsman par excellence, the international jurist trained to write
the law, and to give it the precision and the clarity it required. In all the
minutes of the drafting committees, Cassin is always called ‘Professor’; he
had the authority of the academy behind him, and used that authority and
the considerable negotiating experience he had gained both in the League
of Nations and in Free France to redraft and to present article after
article of the Universal Declaration in a form which would win the widest
possible support of delegates and delegations from all parts of the world.
And at his side was Laugier, the impresario, ready to add his support,
and above all working hard to ensure that it got on the programme of
the General Assembly. Without him, the General Assembly would never
have been able to vote on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in
Paris on 10 December 1948.
On 23 January 1946, ECOSOC, chaired by Henri Laugier in London,
created a Human Rights Commission as one of its satellite agencies.63
Herewith its original mandate:
The Commission’s goal is to present to the Council proposals, recommendations

and reports concerning:
62 Hanne Hagtvedt Vik, ‘The United States’, p. 255.

63 382AP128, note of M. Aglion, ‘Premières assemblées des Nations Unies Conseil
Economique et Social’, 27 Feb. 1946.
(a) an international declaration of human rights;

(b) international declarations or conventions on civil liberties, on the condition
of women, on the freedom of information, and similar questions;
(c) the protection of minorities;
(d) the prevention of distinctions based on race, sex, language or religion.
To this end, ‘The Commission will undertake studies, present recom-

mendations, furnish information and render other services, as required
by ECOSOC.’ Two days later, ECOSOC decided that the composition
of the HRC ‘will be composed in the first instance of a nucleus of nine
members named as individuals for a one-year period’.64 Among these
nine original members of the ‘nucleus’ of the HRC were Eleanor Roo-
sevelt and René Cassin.65
In May 1946, Cassin travelled to New York for the preliminary meet-
ings of this ‘core commission’ or ‘noyau’.66 He was dazzled by New
York, and enjoyed amenities – baths en suite! – which had been rare in
wartime London or post-war Paris. Discussions about the future shape
of the HRC were held in Hunter College in midtown Manhattan. His
first reactions were tentative but positive. He wrote to his wife Simone:
As far as my work is concerned, everything is up in the air and certainly there are
those who think nothing will come of it. However, there are reasons why I think
that this is much more serious a matter and one which can give to those who
create it a very substantial moral authority, even higher than that of the Judges of
the International Court of The Hague, in certain respects.67
He was immediately at ease with both Laugier and Mrs Roosevelt, who
treated him with respect and at times a degree of deference which evi-
dently he enjoyed. He was not a stranger to vanity. When he spoke,
everyone listened. ‘I have the real impression’, he wrote to Simone on 8
May, ‘shared by others, that I dominate the commission. My proposals
have almost always been accepted, entirely.’68 Eight days later, he was still
very satisfied with the place he had found in the embryonic commission.
Once again, he confided to Simone: ‘I will not be the Rapporteur [of
64 E/20, ‘Rapport du comité d’organisation du Conseil économique et social’, 15 Feb.

1946. All UN documents have reference numbers indicating the reporting body or
agency, ‘A’ for General Assembly, or ‘E’ for ECOSOC. We use these throughout.
65 382AP128, Trygvie Lie to Cassin, 14 March 1946; E/27, ‘Commission des droits de
l’homme et sous-commission de la condition de la femme’.
66 E/HR/5, provisional agenda, 26 April 1946; E/HR/7, ‘Commission des droits de
l’homme du Conseil économique et social’, 2 May 1946.
67 382AP158, Cassin to Simone, 1 May 1946.
the HRC], but on each sub-paragraph of the report, I must add amend-
ments. Fortunately, Mrs Roosevelt and I get along very well. She chairs
and I guide the debate or I summarize it.’69 Thus a working partnership
emerged between Eleanor Roosevelt and René Cassin even before the
first official meeting of the HRC.
Cassin’s view was justified. On 6 May 1946, when Mrs Roosevelt was
absent, he chaired the first drafting session of the ‘core’ commission.
The delegates of Panama and of Cuba had tabled draft Declarations
of Human Rights. Cassin summarized the work at hand. He asked his
colleagues to consider these specific recommendations: that they ‘publish
each year a collection of texts pertaining to the Rights of Man’; that
they insist that ‘a Declaration on Human Rights should be accepted
by all who want to become members of the United Nations’; that they
consider whether such ‘an International Bill of Rights should be drafted
or a Convention which would become an appendix to the Charter of
the United Nations’. Finally, he stated, ‘The Commission might further
consider whether it would not be necessary to create an Organ which
would study violations of human rights and inform the Commission
of these violations.’ The views of Europeans, Africans and Asians had
to be sought, he said, alongside those of the Latin Americans whose
drafts were in their possession. His key point was that, following the
international trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo, the moment was ripe to
draft a declaration of rights and to consider means of prosecuting those
who violated those rights.70
In essence, Cassin helped shape the working agenda of the core com-
mission, very much in a manner which Laugier and Eleanor Roosevelt
supported. We can see from this initial statement that he was open to
considering an enforceable charter and the establishment of some form
of international attorney general to act when evidence exists as to its vio-
lation. Over the course of the year, he modified his views, in light of the
increasingly difficult international situation. Churchill’s speech on the
‘iron curtain’ had been given two months before, and the chances were
vanishing that the wartime alliance would survive in such a way as to
provide the consensus needed for the creation of an enforceable charter
of human rights. A Declaration, Cassin came to believe, was the best
possible outcome, under the circumstances.
That first formal meeting of the new commission took place in New
York on 27 January 1947. Cassin was unable to attend, only arriving in

70 E/HR/13, ‘Commission on Human Rights of the Economic and Social Council, Sum-
mary Report of Meetings, First drafting session’, 6 May 1946, pp. 1–2.
New York three days later. Laugier, who had had a car accident, infirm
but in charge,71 told the delegates that theirs was a task of supreme
importance:
The mission of the HRC consists of continuing in peacetime the struggle of the
people begun in wartime repelling every attack against the rights and dignity
of man, and in drafting, according to the principles of the Charter of the UN,
an international declaration of human rights which can be strong enough to
overcome all obstacles.
Eleanor Roosevelt was elected president; Charles Malik of Lebanon, vice-

president, and P.-C. Chang of China, rapporteurs of the new HRC.72
Cassin was present for the second meeting of the HRC. On 1 Febru-
ary 1947 the HRC established a drafting committee ‘in charge of the
International Declaration of Human Rights’. The Australian delegate,
Colonel Hodgson, a veteran of Gallipoli who had attended the Versailles
peace negotiations, suggested that:
the Secretariat was the most competent body to draft an international bill of
rights. The Human Rights Division included as experts in that particular field
international civil servants who had already accomplished excellent work on
related problems. It could continue that task in a more competent manner and
at a lesser cost than a new body of experts created by the Commission.
This proposal had wide support among commissioners, but left unclear
the question as to whether they, the commissioners, could provide advice
to the secretariat. Here Cassin opened the door through which he
passed to join the drafting committee. It was a skilful manoeuvre:
Mr. CASSIN (France) accepted the Australian proposal that the Secretariat
should draft the bill. However, he wished to make it clear that the work under-
taken by the Secretariat should be accomplished under the direct responsibility
of the Commission and under the supervision of the Chairman. Moreover, the
Secretariat should be invited to consult with experts from other continents.73
Colonel Hodgson and Malik accepted Cassin’s suggestion, and the HRC
adopted Cassin’s formulation:
The Commission on Human Rights entrusts the Secretariat with setting up the
first draft of an International Bill of Rights, to be submitted to the Commission
at its next meeting, and taking into account in this respect the directions given by
the Commission during its present session. This drafting task will be carried out
under the high authority of the Chairman of the Commission with the assistance
of experts designated with the approval of the Chairman.74
71 On Laugier at this time, see Morelle and Jakob, Henri Laugier, pp. 249ff.
72 E/CN.4/SR.1, ‘Commission des droits de l’homme, première session’, 28 Jan. 1947.
73 E/CN.4/SR.10, 3 Feb. 1947, pp. 3–5. 74 E/CN.4/SR.10, 3 Feb. 1947, p. 6.
Thus Cassin’s first exercise in diplomatic drafting was probably his most
important. Eleanor Roosevelt knew exactly what was at issue. If the
drafting committee was limited to the president, vice-president, and rap-
porteur respectively American, Lebanese and Chinese, Europe would be
left out. As one of the ‘nucleus’ of the HRC, Cassin left it in the hands of
the president and vice-president to remedy the omission. This they did
immediately. On 3 February, the HRC set up a drafting committee of its
members, on which Cassin sat. Its writ was to work with the secretariat
in producing a declaration of human rights.75 The secretariat had been
demoted to serving, rather than acting on behalf of, the HRC.
Right from the start, Cassin’s position within the Commission was as
an advocate of social rights, that is, the right to a free associative life
within society. Freedom of the individual conscience was inviolable. But
individual rights were embodied in groups, without which they could not
exist. This is how he put it in the first substantive discussion as to what
were human rights, on 3 February 1947:
Mr. CASSIN (France) shared Mr. Duke’s views and propounded the principle
that the human being was above all a social being. Parallel with the list of the
rights of the individual, they ought, no doubt, to draw up a list of the rights of
the community. He warned against the danger of placing too little importance
upon social rights.
Malik accepted this view, since the ‘human person’ was expressed fully
in social life. He went further and announced, in terms Cassin shared,
that ‘the human person had not been created for the State, but that the
State existed rather for the sake of the human person. The Bill of Rights
ought, therefore, to subordinate everything to the interest of the human
person, even the State.’76
At this early stage, the HRC addressed the thorny problem of what
would follow the declaration. It was unclear what would be the best
way to ensure that the principles underlying such a document would be
implemented. But how and when were entirely open questions. This is
Cassin’s initial position:
He thought however that the resolution could contain an invitation to States to
incorporate in their constitutions or their national laws the points in the Decla-
ration which were not already there. He recommended as well the adoption in
principle of a fundamental act which could be modified by a two-thirds majority
and which would have a certain autonomy, open to amendment by the General
Assembly, in future session. He called on members of the Commission not to
resort to the old school of Conventions, but at the same time not to rest content
with an enthusiastic declaration, which lacked substantial value.77
75 E/CN.4/SR.11, 3 Feb. 1947, p. 2. 76 E/CN.4/SR.14, 4 Feb. 1947, pp. 5–6.

77 E/CN.4/SR.14, 4 Feb. 1947, p. 8.
Roosevelt shared Cassin’s view. A binding convention, supported by the

Australian and Indian delegates, was impossible to realize. The HRC
could then work on a future convention. The director general of the ILO
suggested that the HRC work on the lines developed for well over twenty-
eight years by his institution. Once again, Cassin pointed to a diplomatic
way out of this impasse. The HRC, he said, ‘was not forced to choose
between the drafting of a theoretical Bill that could not be Implemented
and the preparation of an International Convention entailing juridical
obligations for the States, which would have to be ratified by them’.
Their charge was
to see that the obligations undertaken by the United Nations were respected.
The Commission therefore had not only to draft a Bill recognizing certain inter-
nationally accepted rights, but it had also to study means of implementing this
Bill. He considered that the Drafting Committee could prepare a provisional
draft incorporating as much information and documentation as possible on the
establishment of Human Rights. This method of procedure, avoiding specific
directives, would doubtless have the advantage of meeting the objections put
forward by certain members of the Commission, and would accelerate its work.
Eleanor Roosevelt welcomed Cassin’s intervention, which the HRC

adopted.78 Here we can see the careful preparation Cassin and Roo-
sevelt had taken before the meeting, in consultation with both Humphrey
and Laugier. We can also see Cassin’s role as chief draftsman emerging.
Whenever there was a compromise to be sought, Cassin found the words
appropriate to secure the approval of the HRC.79
Cassin’s membership of the drafting committee arose out of his con-
tribution to the early work of the Commission. He pointed out certain
errors in the French text of key documents, and consequently was del-
egated by the Commission to have full power to introduce necessary
corrections into the document.80 His suggestion that the next full ses-
sion of the HRC be held in Geneva was also accepted.81 He offered
useful minor revisions of documents the Commission considered. Hence
when the time came on 28 March 1947 to extend the drafting committee
from three members to a broader group of eight, it was hardly a surprise
that Cassin’s name was among them.82 In liaison with the secretariat, it
was this larger drafting committee that was charged with preparing the
International Bill of Human Rights.
78 E/CN.4/SR.15, 5 Feb. 1947, pp. 6–7. 79 E/CN.4/SR.16, 5 Feb. 1947, p. 6.

80 E/CN.4/SR.22, 10 Feb. 1947, p. 5. 81 E/CN.4/SR.22, 10 Feb. 1947, p. 8.
82 E/383, letter of Eleanor Roosevelt, 24 March 1947; E/CN.4/AC.1/2, 29 May 1947,
‘Memorandum sur l’historique du Comité’. For Roosevelt’s letter to Cassin asking him
to join the drafting committee, see 382AP128, Roosevelt to Cassin, 24 March 1947 and
8 April 1947.
Humphrey’s role was to provide the drafting committee with a set of

documents drawn from constitutions and other instruments worldwide.
He did so in record speed, and thereby framed the work of the Commis-
sion from the start.83 When this annotated draft declaration was tabled, a
British resolution was placed alongside it, differing from the first in being
a legally binding convention. To resolve the differences, and to mould the
secretariat’s document into shape, a drafting sub-committee was set up,
with Cassin in the chair. On 20 June, Cassin’s sub-committee presented
its revised International Bill of Rights to the HRC.84 As Morsink points
out, three-quarters of the provisions of Cassin’s draft were drawn from
Humphrey’s.85 Here is the product of the first part of the drafting effort,
which provided the HRC with the core elements to be hammered into
shape over the next year and a half of work.
As Cassin had hoped, the next stage of work was held in Geneva in
December 1947. Here Cassin was on home ground, as it were. He drew
on his rich experience in the League of Nations and the ILO, and in
particular in his capacity to bring into the discussion numerous non-
governmental organizations whose views were pertinent. Many Jewish
groups made representations to the HRC, including the Consultative
Council of Jewish Organizations (CCJO), a body he himself had helped
create to represent Jewish opinion in France, Britain and the United
States. Defending Jewish rights was defending human rights; to Cassin,
there was no difference between the two.86
Once again, Cassin played a key role as jurist and draftsman in the
sub-commission designed to further refine the International Declara-
tion. The secretariat was careful to keep informed all member states
of the work of the HRC, and to field any criticisms or suggestions
they offered. Individuals and associations offered their thoughts as
well.87 In fact there were so many commentaries that the HRC brushed
aside a thoughtful presentation of philosophical approaches to human
rights, edited by Jacques Maritain, under the auspices of UNESCO.88
83 Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Origins, Drafting and
Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 6. For Humphrey’s
document: E/CN.4/AC.1/3, 4 June 1947.
84 E/CN.4/AC.1/W.2/Rev.2, 20 June 1947. ‘Déclaration internationale des droits de
l’homme, Textes suggérés par le représentant de la France pour les articles du pro-
jet de Déclaration internationale des droits de l’homme’.
85 Morsink, Universal Declaration, p. 8. Where Morsink goes wrong is in endorsing
Humphrey as the father of the declaration. See p. 29: ‘Cassin did not really enter
the room until after the baby was born.’ These paternity tests must stop.
86 See chapter 11 for the Conseil Consultatif des Organisations Juives (CCJO).
87 See UN archives, Geneva, SOA 317/1/01 (1) A, Comments from Governments.
88 UNESCO, Human Rights. Comments and Interpretations, UNESCO/PHS/3 (rev.), 25 July
1948, with an introduction by Jacques Maritain.
The pace of events had accelerated too rapidly for reflection on first
principles.
The story we tell here is that of Cassin’s role in the international
diplomacy of the HRC. There is no need to focus on the drafting pro-
cess, since Morsink has already done that task for us, article by arti-
cle. He has documented carefully the painstaking draftsmanship Cassin
deployed in his work throughout the two years’ effort to frame the Uni-
versal Declaration.89 But what we need to add is the sense of urgency
in his work. Cassin believed that time was not on their side, and that if
the sub-committee did not strike while the iron was hot, it would not
get another chance. The intention of the HRC to place the principle of
human rights above that of absolute state sovereignty was evident; so
was the hostility of foreign offices around the world, including the Quai
d’Orsay.
This is the origin of one crucial setback suffered by the leadership of the
HRC. Their initial mandate was to serve as independent members of the
Commission. But in the summer of 1947, ECOSOC was forced to change
that remit. From then on, Cassin, like all others, was a delegate serving
as a representative of his state. Many decried this fact, but it was not one
Cassin could change.90 As always, he worked with the instruments at his
disposal, even if they were not the optimal ones for the job.
This decision had a direct bearing on Cassin’s efforts in the final year
of work on the Declaration. He felt isolated, without the support of
the French government, seemingly uninterested in the entire project.
He told Parodi he was working virtually alone, and the French Foreign
Office seemed unwilling to send another delegate to ease his burden.91
Some help arrived in the end, but Cassin was maddened that the gov-
ernment had withheld nominating him as its representative for the 1948
session; the delay was so long, and so embarrassing, that he felt unable
to continue the heavy, detailed and daily preparatory work in which he
was engaged. He wrote to his old friend, former Prime Minister Paul
Ramadier, saying he intended to resign as French delegate to the Human
Rights Commission.92 He withdrew the threat, but it was a portent of
things to come in the way the French government approached imple-
menting the document on which he had worked so long and so hard.
Without support from his own government, and considering the weight
of his other primary obligations to the Conseil d’Etat, other men might
89 Morsink, Universal Declaration, passim.

90 For a trenchant critique of this decision, see A. Loveday, ‘An unfortunate decision’,
International Organization, 1, 2 (June 1947), pp. 279–90.
91 382AP128, Cassin to Parodi, 26 March 1948.
92 382AP128, Cassin to Paul Ramadier, 20 Sept. 1948.
have collapsed under the burden of the drafting and diplomatic effort he
put into the Universal Declaration. He was supremely well organized and
able to compartmentalize the various facets of his public life. But even
he had his limits, as his outburst to Ramadier suggests.
Two developments made Cassin’s work even harder during this last
phase. First Charles Malik was elected chairman of ECOSOC. This was
a strategic gain for the HRC but a practical problem, because Malik’s
available time to work on the document would be reduced. Secondly,
P.-C. Chang’s health had deteriorated.93 His interventions had been of
great importance, and his withdrawal as vice-president created a void
difficult to fill.
One positive change was that the final work needed to complete the
Universal Declaration in 1948 occurred in Europe. The HRC opened
its third session in Geneva on 24 May 1948. At this time, more than
ever, Cassin’s role as draftsman was vital. The Commission was minded
to reduce the Declaration to a laconic set of statements, transparent in
their meaning, and available as a guide for teachers as well as statesmen.
The intense pace of work continued through the second half of the year,
culminating in the presentation of the document in time to be put on the
agenda of the Plenary Session of the Third General Assembly in Paris in
December 1948.
It was in May 1948 that the delegates took the decision not to move
towards a covenant. Cassin played an important role in these discussions.
On 15 June 1948 he faced the matter directly. The Declaration, he said,
would be a recommendation, not a legal obligation. This might sound
like a return to the impotence of the League of Nations, but it was
nothing of the kind. ‘The events preceding the Second World War, in
which millions of men lost their lives, have proved that the organization
of peace may require some limitation, on the basis of reciprocity, of the
traditional sovereignty of States in this respect.’
I was personally present at the dramatic debates which took place at Geneva
between March and October 1933. At that time the only way in which the
criminal actions of Hitler’s Germany towards her own nationals could be brought
to the notice of the Council of the League of Nations was to resort to the indirect
procedure of invoking the Polish–German treaty on the protection of minorities
concluded in 1922. On the day on which the Assembly dared to refer to the
general principles authorizing the legally organized international community to
protect human rights, even in a sphere not covered by some special minority
treaty, Hitler took advantage of the Third Reich’s absolute sovereignty over its
93 Morsink, Universal Declaration, p. 123.

citizens and denied the League of Nations any right of inspection; and on 11
October 1933, Germany left the League.
Now, in June 1948, that position had been rendered untenable. ‘The legal
competence of the United Nations is therefore, in principle, incontestable
under the Charter.’ Now that the individual was an active subject of
international law, ‘any programme for the international implementation
of human rights must, at the present stage of the law of nations, be in a
form acceptable to States’.
Until this point, Cassin had the delegates with him. But he went fur-
ther still, urging that the HRC be empowered to investigate individual
complaints, and eventually even to create ‘a United Nations Attorney-
General’.94 Here Cassin went beyond the consensus of the Commission,
and faced the combined opposition of the Soviet Union and the United
States. Still, he did stake out his position, and his paper did answer
those of his critics, like the great British jurist Hersch Lauterpacht, who
argued vehemently that Cassin and the HRC had betrayed the principle
of human rights by choosing an unenforceable declaration instead of a
convention.95
In essence, this document represents Cassin’s thinking on the Decla-
ration. It was a first and by no means the final step towards the con-
struction of a new international legal order. It was path-breaking, but the
path ahead had to be broken by others in due course. That would take
time. To stand on the ground of principle and demand a convention and
nothing but a convention in 1948 was to ask for the impossible. That
kind of high-mindedness was not the kind of gesture he wished to offer
to the world.
What the Declaration offered was a way to move ahead. Such will be the case,
when it calls on member states gradually to bring their legislation into conformity
with the principles formulated in it, and to set up, within the sphere of their
Jurisdiction, systems of appeal to judicial and administrative bodies, in order to
prevent and, if necessary, correct or suppress such violations of human rights as
may have been committed within their territory.96
The Declaration pointed the way towards both national and trans-
national action in defence of human rights.
Cassin was responsible for many other features of the final document
as adopted. One in particular stands out: it is the substitution of the word
94 E/CN.4/147, ‘Exposé de M. René Cassin, représentant de la France, sur la mise en

œuvre des droits de l’homme’, 16 June 1948, pp. 1, 2, 7.
95 Hersch Lauterpacht, ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, British Yearbook of
International Law, 25 (1948), pp. 354–81.
96 E/CN.4/147, ‘Exposé de Cassin’, pp. 1–2.
‘universal’ for ‘international’. It appears in a list of amendments agreed

on 15 November 1948. Following a Haitian recommendation, Cassin
on behalf of the French delegation framed this amendment, which was
agreed by seventeen votes to eleven, with ten abstentions.97 This change
in terminology was non-trivial. The document now represented a state-
ment of human rights not as something limited to relations among states,
but as a matter defining the relationships of individuals to each other and
to the groups they formed for their benefit and well-being. A univer-
sal declaration not only places the dignity of the human person above
the writ of any individual state, thereby truncating state sovereignty in
important respects, but also gives notice that the struggle for human
rights entails vigilance by non-governmental organizations too. Being
universal, human rights are everybody’s business.
After nearly three years of work, at last, on 9–10 December 1948,
and with intense lobbying continuing behind the scenes, the Universal
Declaration was put to the vote. Imagine the moment. The General
Assembly was seated in the Palais de Chaillot, just a few steps from the
spot where, in 1940, Hitler had surveyed his new dominions. Eight years
later, Cassin rose to speak. ‘I have the honour’, he began, ‘to report the
firm support of France’ for the Declaration,
which, 100 years after the Revolution of 1848 and the abolition of slavery on all
French territory, constitutes a global step in the long struggle for the rights of
man.
Our declaration represents the most vigorous, the most essential protest of
humanity against the atrocities and the oppression which millions of human
beings suffered through the centuries and in particular during and after the two
world wars . . . In the midst of the struggle, heads of state, President Roosevelt
and President Beneš, two great men recently departed, proclaimed the meaning
of this crusade: and in the name of France, then imprisoned and unable to speak
freely, I had the honour at the St James’s conference of 24 September 1941 to join
my voice to theirs, in proclaiming that the practical recognition of the essential
liberties of man was indispensable to the establishment of a durable international
peace.98
At a staggering cost in human lives and effort, that just war had been
won. Now, the delegates were asked to vote on a document which aimed
to form the basis of a just peace. Forty-eight countries voted yes, eight
97 A/C.3/339, ‘Projet de la Déclaration internationale des droits de l’homme: France:

Amendements’, p. 1. On the vote, see Morsink, Universal Declaration, p. 33.
98 382AP/128, dossier 3, ‘Discours de René Cassin, Délégué de la France à l’Assemblée
Générale des Nations Unies à Paris’, 9 Dec. 1948.
abstained, and there were no ‘no’ votes. The wartime Alliance had held,
if only for this one, very last time.
Cassin could rightly take some pride in the outcome. He was not
the sole nor even the primary author of this triumph, but one of the
leaders of a remarkable collection of people from all over the world who
made it happen. Yes, an American stateswoman, a Lebanese Thomist
and a Confucian scholar had joined Cassin, Humphrey and Laugier in
plotting an unlikely journey that – probably to their collective surprise –
had indeed reached its destination. But the survival of their mission
depended on the work and support of many others, especially in the
Latin American delegations. Even getting the Soviet delegates to abstain
was a triumph, enabling Cassin to say that the document represented
world opinion as a whole.
The final vote was taken late at night. For Cassin it was a bitter-
sweet moment. ‘I was cordially invited by the Anglo-American press to
celebrate the event, and I had the chance, that evening, when the memory
of so many martyrs was in my mind, to be seated next to the great
black artist Katherine Dunham, whose company was enjoying success in
performing ballet in Paris.’99 Indeed, both could take a bow.
The European turn

René Cassin was elected vice-president of the HRC in 1949, under the
presidency of Eleanor Roosevelt. He continued to serve as a delegate to
the HRC, and in 1955–6 he presided over the Commission. These were
years of frustration and increasing difficulty for him, both as a leader in
the effort to turn the Universal Declaration into enforceable international
treaties, and as a spokesman for France. It took seventeen years for the
HRC to formulate and the UN to adopt two separate covenants, one on
economic, social and cultural rights, which came into force on 3 January
1976, and another on civil and political rights, which came into force on
23 March 1976, just four weeks after René Cassin died.
It was not only the slow and painful progress in drafting the covenants
which troubled Cassin. It was also the attitude of France towards them
and towards the European Convention of Human Rights, signed by
France in 1950, but not ratified until 1974. The French government
withheld its ratification of the UN covenants until October 1980.
Clearly Cassin’s commitments were not shared by a series of French
governments, including those formed during the presidency of Charles
99 René Cassin, ‘Historique de la Déclaration universelle de 1948’, in La pensée et l’action,

p. 117.
de Gaulle. Right from the start, the problem of colonial power compli-
cated discussion of French compliance with any future United Nations
covenants respecting human rights. Cassin urged his colleagues to recog-
nize that it was impossible to separate the rights of those in metropolitan
France from those rights in territories under French administration. The
principle was applicable to ‘everyone or to no one’, he liked to say.100 The
breaking point came over considering the right of individual petition, to
which Cassin was firmly wedded. Not so his colleagues in the French
Foreign Office, who saw it as a device which would prove useful for those
protesting against human rights abuses in France’s colonies.
Already in January 1949, British and Belgian diplomats asked their
French colleagues to act in concert to block the right of individual peti-
tion, which was, in their view, a danger to all three colonial powers.101
The Quai d’Orsay wanted to postpone the question until the covenants
were ready for a vote, which they knew was in the distant future. Cassin
was sensitive to these objections, and said that ‘if France had to move
forward’, on the question of individual petition, ‘she should not become a
target’.102 He tried to incorporate safeguards against the use of the right
of petition for purely political ends, but these compromises were not
enough for his colleagues at the Quai d’Orsay. They objected forcefully
when Cassin went ahead anyway and tabled at the HRC in 1949 a draft
including the right of individual petition. Cassin tried to find middle
ground, leaving the right of petition to governments, and opening the
door to individual petition later on. He also agreed to argue that the
covenant would come into force only when two members of the Secu-
rity Council agreed to ratify it. Seeing that the USSR and the US were
against it, for very different reasons, this meant that France would be in
a favourable position to protect its interest at that time. In June 1949,
Cassin presented this compromise to the Foreign Office. The Secretariat
of Conferences rejected it, and instructed Mendès France, France’s head
of delegation to ECOSOC, to vote to defer or abandon the right of peti-
tion. Cassin was dismayed. On 10 December 1949, precisely a year to
the day since the UN had accepted the Universal Declaration, he wrote
to the Quai d’Orsay:
100 Georges Soutou, La France et la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme du

10 décembre 1948 (Paris: Les Editions du Diplomate, 2008), p. 80, and Soutou,
‘France and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948’,
www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france-priorities 1/democracy-human-rights 1101/events
2128/60th-anniversary-of-the-universal-declaration-of-human-rights 6615/
france-and-the-universal-declaration-of-human-rights-of-10-december-1948
11983.html.
101 Soutou, La France et la Déclaration universelle, p. 71.
102 Soutou, La France et la Déclaration universelle, p. 72.
The future pact on human rights will remain less than the law of the League of
Nations, and the only debate which, with reference to the Jews of Upper Silesia,
through the complaint among others of the Council of the League in Geneva,
managed to put Hitler in a difficult position, in 1935 [sic], would be impossible
today, if the French position following from the lessons of the Second World War
were rejected or abandoned.103
They were unmoved, and once again issued instructions for the French
delegation to block any move in the direction of individual petition.
Cassin’s effort failed.104
Consider Cassin’s dilemma: his nomination as the French delegate to
the HRC was renewed for three years in 1950, but he was at loggerheads
with the civil servants who were his masters. He was there to speak for
France, but he could not be assured of the vote of the French delegation
on issues he believed were of major importance. The problem of not
being an independent member of the HRC, but solely a representative
of his government, came back to haunt him.
Worse still, the Cold War was turning the UN into a site of confronta-
tion and paralysis. The State Department refused to give a visa to Alma
Myrdal, the Swedish author and wife of Gunnar Myrdal, whose Ameri-
can Dilemma, published in 1944, was a devastating critique of American
racial prejudice. She was one of Laugier’s key aides. She got it, but only
after a major diplomatic effort.105 American politicians fled from contact
with human rights activists, frequently tarred by the brush of crypto-
communism. The Soviet Union used blocking procedures to delay and
frustrate efforts it felt were not in its interests or were covers for Amer-
ican plots. Both great powers were determined to stop any progress on
reaching agreement on the covenants or on ways to enforce them.106
Throughout this difficult period, Cassin soldiered on alongside
Humphrey, keeping to the key assignment of drafting covenants on
human rights treaties with binding legal force. This was a huge task,
overseen by Humphrey. He said he would have preferred to develop par-
ticular conventions on particular rights than to create a huge basket of
rights, but that was not to be.107 He served as director of the Human
103 ‘Note du Président Cassin concernant la mise en application des Droits de l’Homme,
10 décembre 1949’, as cited in and reproduced facsimile in Soutou, La France et la
Déclaration universelle, pp. 79 and 81.
104 UN Archives, Geneva, SOA 317/1/02, Schwelb to Humphrey, on French opposition
to right of petition, 17 March 1954.
105 382AP129, Alva Myrdal to Humphrey, 30 May 1950.
106 382AP129, 2nd Report of HRC, 17 May 1949, and 3rd Report, 5 June 1949.
107 SOA 317/1/01 B, Humphrey to Guillaume Georges-Picot, 14 Jan. 1953.
Rights Division, and had cordial relations with Cassin, until 1966, when
the drafting marathon was done.
It was clear, though, that the momentum, the urgency of human rights
work at the UN had been lost. Decolonization came first. The HRC
seemed to lose direction. It certainly faded from the headlines. During
Cassin’s tenure as president of the HRC in 1956, he tried to get the
secretary general, Dag Hammerskjöld, to attend the opening of that
year’s session, in order to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the setting
up of the ‘core committee’ which had framed the HRC. His hope, he
said, was to end the Commission’s evident ‘eclipse’; the invitation was
declined.108 The eclipse continued.
It is hardly surprising that Cassin began to think of other ways in which
he could serve the cause of human rights. In May 1948, before the adop-
tion by the UN of the Universal Declaration, a group of centre-right
political groups had met at The Hague determined to create a Council of
Europe.109 The following year that body was formed, and in turn drafted
the European Convention on Human Rights.110 This Convention estab-
lished a Commission on Human Rights, which would examine petitions,
and a European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which would
have the right to hear and judge them.111 John Humphrey had attended
the Hague convention and was well informed about the project.112 Cassin
had other political allies there too. Edouard Herriot was the president of
the consultative assembly of the new Council of Europe.113
The ideological tilt of many of the founders was further to the right than
that of Cassin, Humphrey and others in the HRC. Winston Churchill was
the key figure in the European movement, assisted by David Maxwell-
Fyfe, former Nuremberg prosecutor, and Conservative jurist. This was
108 SOA 317/2/01, Cassin to Humphrey, 14 Feb. 1956.

109 Council of Europe, Historical Archives, CE (MIN) P.8 Final 4th May 1949, Confer-
ence for the establishment of a Council of Europe. Communiqué.
110 Council of Europe, Historical Archives, dossier 12124, vol 1. European Court of
Human Rights.
111 On the establishment of the European Court, see Marco Duranti, Human Rights and
Conservative Politics. The History of the European Convention on Human Rights, 1945–
50 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Pierre-Henri Teitgen, Aux sources de la
Cour et de la Convention européenne de droits de l’homme (Bordeaux: Editions Confluences,
2000); Jean-Pierre Marguénaud, La Cour européenne des droits de l’homme (Paris: Dalloz,
1996); Jean-Paul Costa, ‘La Cour européenne des droits de l’homme: un juge qui
gouverne?’, in Gérard Lyon-Caen (ed.), Etudes en l’honneur de Gérard Timsit (Brussels:
Bruylant, 2004), pp. 67–88.
112 UN Archives, Geneva, SOA 317/1/02(4), Humphrey to Cassin, 18 Oct. 1949.
113 Council of Europe Archives, Documents of the CM (1949–72) bound volumes, 1949,
CM (49) PV 1 (1st section of ministers), statement of Edouard Herriot, 10 Aug. 1949,
president of the consultative assembly of the Council of Europe.
primarily a Cold War initiative, determined to protect the rights of Euro-

peans against any Soviet encroachment. And yet, in their championing of
the cause of human rights and in the act of creating the court, these Con-
servatives and their allies set up a system which reached a much wider
constituency. What they had to offer was a trade-off: states would cede
some sovereignty for greater political stability.114 This was an essential
step in the judicial construction of Europe.
The European Convention of 1950 set in motion the creation of the
European Court of Human Rights. Once eight states had ratified the
Convention, the Court was constituted and began its deliberations in
1959. Cassin was nominated as a judge by France, and elected on the
first ballot as one of the founding judges of the court.115 He served as
vice-president from 1959 until 1965. The first president was Sir Arnold
McNair, whom he had known from the days both had served on the Allied
Commission on War Crimes. When McNair retired, Cassin succeeded
him as president of the court. Another justice, Henri Rolin, was a friend
from the League of Nations and from London. Continuities abound.
In Cassin’s years on the court, its rules, procedures and competence
were established, and he played an important role in doing so.116 It is
important to note, though, that he suffered from an unstated disadvan-
tage. He served on a court not yet recognized by the French government.
France had signed the Convention of 1950, but had not ratified it by the
time the court held its first sitting. This left Cassin in an awkward posi-
tion, one which galled him considerably. He spent valuable time lobbying
successive governments to ratify the European Convention, but he failed
to persuade them to do so. It was only in 1974, six years after Cassin
had stepped down from the court, that France ratified the European
convention.117
In his decade on the court, Cassin presided over three landmark rul-
ings, which helped establish the court as a recognized and authorita-
tive agent for the hearing of complaints of alleged violations of human
rights. The first of these cases was the Lawless case of 1961. The facts of
the case were straightforward. The government of Ireland had detained
without charge or trial Gerard Lawless, a renegade member of the Irish
114 Andrew Moravcsik, ‘The origins of human rights regimes: democratic delegation in
postwar Europe’, International Organisation, 2 (2000), pp. 217–52.
115 A. H. Robertson, ‘The European Court of Human Rights’, International and Compar-
ative Law Quarterly, 8, 2 (1959), pp. 396–403.
116 On his work as a judge, see the abundant documentation in 382AP137. See Louis-
Edmond Pettiti, ‘René Cassin, juge à la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme’,
Revue des Droits de l’Homme (Dec. 1985), pp. 106–17.
117 382AP137, dossier 4, contains dozens of letters and petitions on this effort.
Republican Army (IRA), in 1957, when IRA violence was endemic in

the Irish Republic as well as in Northern Ireland. The man in question
asked for review of his case by a Detention Commission, which held its
sessions in camera and considered secret evidence not available to Law-
less or his attorneys, including the distinguished jurist Sean MacBride.
He had been Foreign Minister in a previous government, and had helped
draft the European Convention on Human Rights. When Lawless had
his petition for review rejected, and when appeals to all Irish courts
were exhausted, MacBride turned to Strasbourg, where, after procedu-
ral wrangles, the case was admitted and heard by the European Court of
Human Rights.118
This was the very first case heard by the court and the very first case
arising from the action of a single individual against his own state. Lawless
alleged that the Irish Free State had violated his rights under the Euro-
pean Convention, by holding him in detention and by denying him a
fair trial. The Irish government argued that under article 15, sub-section
1, it had the right to derogate from its obligations under the Conven-
tion, ‘In time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of
the nation . . . to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the sit-
uation, provided that such measures are not inconsistent with its other
obligations under international law.’
Under Cassin’s presidency, the court took two decisions of great impor-
tance. The first was to take upon itself the responsibility of establishing
the facts surrounding the Irish government’s case. In doing so, they con-
firmed that the IRA had engaged in a long-term armed campaign to
subvert the established government. The second decision was to find
that the Irish government did indeed have the right to suspend its obli-
gations under the European Convention during the IRA campaign, in
order to secure the safety and well-being of the Irish population.119
The balancing act here was both subtle and significant. On the one
hand, governments throughout Europe, including France embroiled in
the Algerian war, could see that the European Court of Human Rights
recognized the duty of constituted authorities to preserve public order
under violent challenge from an armed group and from individuals within
it. On the other hand, the court took it upon itself to examine the Irish
government’s claims that such an emergency existed and that it justified
derogation. Here is a clear warning to states: sovereign rights to maintain
public order at a time of emergency were respected, but the court and not
118 John Maguire, ‘Internment, the IRA and the Lawless Case in Ireland: 1957–61’, Journal
of the Oxford University History Society, 2 (2004), pp. 1–17.
119 Decision of 14 Nov. 1960, Case of Lawless v. Ireland (no. 3) (Application no. 332/57).
the state in question would decide whether such an emergency existed.

Here is a clear rejection of the theory of absolute sovereignty Cassin had
faced in the League of Nations, and of the post-war view, most famously
developed by Carl Schmitt, that the sovereign was he who decided on
the state of emergency.120 On the contrary; Cassin and the court made
that judgment. This is a path-breaking decision, accepting detention
without trial, a conservative position, while affirming the court’s authority
in determining the conditions under which such an exception to the
European Convention could be deemed lawful. Here was a warning to
states that they were not the sole, nor the final, arbiters of the legality
of measures taken to defend law and order in their own countries. This
first judgment was decisive in making the court a constituent part of the
European judicial world.
The two other landmark cases in which Cassin presided both involved
Belgium as a respondent. The first was the de Becker case.121 This case,
heard in 1962, concerned a Belgian citizen, Raymond de Becker, former
editor of the newspaper Le Soir, who was convicted of collaborating with
the Nazis during the Second World War. In 1946 he was sentenced to
death by the Brussels Conseil de Guerre, but due to extenuating cir-
cumstances – he had turned against the Nazis in 1943 and had been
sent to a concentration camp – his sentence was reduced to imprison-
ment. In 1961 he was released, subject to certain conditions, including
a ban on working as a journalist. This was a violation, he claimed, of his
right of free expression, and was, in legal terms, a matter of ‘continuing
violations’, or the introduction of a permanent state of affairs.122 Dur-
ing the course of the hearing, the relevant Belgian law changed, to de
Becker’s advantage, enabling the court to cease its deliberations. There
was, though, a firm dissenting opinion here, by Professor Alf Ross of
Denmark, saying that the court should have given its judgment on the
legality of the measures taken before the change in the law.
Once again, we can see the measured nature of the judgment. A set-
tlement had been arranged outside of court as to the substantive matters
at issue. Consequently, the European Court had declined to proceed.
120 On Schmitt, see Jean-Claude Monod, Penser l’ennemi, affronter l’exception. Réflexions
critiques sur l’actualité de Carl Schmitt (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 2006); Gabriella
Slomp, Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009); John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism. Against Pol-
itics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997); William Hooker, Carl Schmitt’s
International Thought. Order and Orientation (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gopal
Balakrishnan, The Enemy. An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000).
121 Case of de Becker v. Belgium (Application no. 214/5), 1961.
122 Loukēs G. Loukaidēs, The European Convention on Human Rights. Selected Essays
(Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2007), pp. 23ff.
Another marker thereby was laid down that the Strasbourg Court was a
partner and not an adversary working at odds with domestic courts and
legislatures.
The third case on which René Cassin presided also involved Belgium,
and concerned language provision in Belgian schools. Areas were divided
into regions where the majority spoke one language primarily; in those
areas, school instruction would be in that language. Thus some schools
taught only in Dutch; this was deemed unjust by those parents who
wanted instruction to be provided by the state in French in other schools
in the same region. When they were denied such state-funded French
schooling, the parents sought domestic remedies in the courts, and when
these were exhausted they turned to Strasbourg.123
Judgment was issued on 28 July 1968, just before Cassin’s retirement
from the court. In this case, the court said, the question ‘principally con-
cerns the State’s refusal to establish or subsidize, in the Dutch monolin-
gual region, primary school education (which is compulsory in Belgium)
in which French is employed as the language of instruction’. The court
held that the European Convention did not convey a right to be educated
in the language of one’s parents; they had simply a right to be educated.
And since the intent of the framers of these laws was reasonable, namely,
the linguistic unity of areas where one language predominated, those
laws did not contravene the Convention. In essence the court found, as
in the Lawless case, for the state. Handling delicate problems of multi-
culturalism, the court affirmed the fairness of treating different regions,
with different linguistic practices, in the same way.
The Belgian language case was the last major case on which Cassin sat.
He had left his mark on the court, but not through any ringing judgment
as to the nature of human rights. In a way, his time on the court was
subdued; there are no rulings which have the mark of his prose or his
passion. His caution may have been due to his sensitivity to the position
of a judge nominated by a state still dragging its feet over ratification of
the European Convention on Human Rights.
His achievement on the Strasbourg court, though, was substantial. As
in the case of the Universal Declaration, Cassin had helped establish
the foundations of a new kind of international law, one in which the
individual had standing to compel states to account for their actions.
The court was at pains to recognize the jurisdiction of signatory states
in the defence of public order and the protection of citizens from acts of
violence; the Lawless case said nothing less. But it also made it clear that
the court would establish the facts at issue independently of the states
123 Case ‘relating to certain aspects of the laws on the use of languages in education in Belgium’ v.
BELGIUM (Application no. 1474/62; 1677/62; 1691/62; 1769/63; 1994/63; 2126/64).
which were parties to the cases it heard. Law officers throughout Europe
heard the message. In the de Becker case and the Belgian language case,
Cassin’s court showed its intention to work as part of the network of the
domestic courts and legislatures of signatory states. This was important
in giving these national courts added strength; should parties not agree
to a ‘friendly settlement’ at home, there was another court in Strasbourg
which could reach a judgment the parties might prefer to avoid. Better
settle now than face the European Court of Human Rights is indeed a
powerful message.
In sum, Cassin’s time in Strasbourg completed what he had begun in
Paris in 1948. The Latin American states had taken the first regional
approach to human rights’ enforcement; Europe followed that lead. In
his work both on the HRC and in the European Court, Cassin had
established the institutional foundation for developing the European
approach to human rights. He left sites on which others would build in the
future.
The Nobel Prize and after

On 9 October 1968, René Cassin was late in opening the monthly Central
Committee meeting of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris. The
reason was he had just been informed that he had been awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize.124 The General Assembly of the UN had proclaimed
1968 the Year of Human Rights, and it was right and fitting that that year’s
Nobel Prize would go to the man whose name was forever associated with
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then just twenty years old.
The announcement came as a surprise to Cassin. He had had no
inkling of having been named that year’s winner, but it did not come
out of a blue sky. He was one of many public figures who felt that while
the Nobel Committee, meeting in secrecy in Oslo, was a law unto itself,
there were ways of making it clear to them that there were particular
names they might consider. It is an exaggeration to say he orchestrated a
campaign to win the prize, but he did encourage those who believed he
was a worthy recipient of the prize to nominate him for it. He probably
prepared a dossier covering his life’s work up to 1967 for their potential
benefit.125
124 Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), Archives Modernes (AM), AM Présidence 011,
Central Committee, Minutes, 9 Oct. 1968.
125 See the typescript, corrected in his hand, on his work up to 1967, in CAC,
20040382/65, Dossier personnel du Conseil d’Etat, file ‘Autour du Prix Nobel’. Ghis-
laine Bru, who married Cassin in 1975, helped him prepare this dossier and other
documents relative to his candidature. Thanks are due to information provided by
Ghislaine’s daughter Chantal Connochie, 28 July 2011.
Eleanor Roosevelt and Cassin had both been nominated for the prize
in 1949 by Lord Robert Cecil of Chelwood, himself a Nobel laureate.126
Manley Hudson of Harvard nominated him in 1950,127 but the com-
mittee chose John Boyd Orr, director of the UN Food and Agricultural
Organization, and Ralph Bunche, director of the UN Trustee Division,
instead. In 1951, Léon Jouhaux won the Peace Prize, which pleased
Cassin immensely.
The proceedings and reports of the Nobel Committee are closed, and
the committee’s discussions are not recorded. Still it is possible to get
a general idea of what drew their attention to Cassin. He had spoken
in September 1967 at a Nobel Symposium in Oslo, and he had made
a striking impression on members of the Nobel Committee. Everyone
knew he had spent a lifetime in the service of human rights, serving
with the Norwegian Christian Loos Lange in the League of Nations
and alongside Trygvie Lie in London during the war. It was common
knowledge that he had been sentenced to death in absentia by Vichy,
and that many members of his family had been killed in the Shoah. His
opposition to fascism from its first appearance was a matter of record.
These were all matters taken very seriously in Oslo.
Once focused on Cassin, the Committee would have turned to his work
with Eleanor Roosevelt in framing the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. They knew that his drafting skills had been of crucial importance
in bringing the project to fruition, under Mrs Roosevelt’s chairmanship
and guidance. Unfortunately, she had died in 1962, and posthumous
prizes, with one exception, were not awarded.
Once Cassin’s name was considered on its own merits, then they would
have turned to the later work he did on the Human Rights Commission
and on championing the two Covenants agreed by the UN in 1966.
Throughout, they would have recognized his long and consistent cham-
pioning of the cause of placing law above sovereignty. Despite setbacks
and delays, time and again, it is to his ideas that later human rights advo-
cates returned. His commitment, clarity and strength of will made him
a fitting symbol of a wider movement of opinion he had helped create,
both in France and abroad.
They knew how his human rights activism had emerged from his ser-
vice in both world wars, and how, despite all, he remained optimistic
about the future, possessing seemingly limitless energy and belief in the
cause, and an infectious commitment which had particular appeal to
young people. In the Scandinavian setting, they would have appreciated
126 Redegjorelse for Nobels Fredspris, xlix (1949).

127 Redegjorelse for Nobels Fredspris, l (1950).
his attempt to bring together nineteenth-century notions of personal

freedom with twentieth-century notions of social and economic rights.
Knowing that he was still campaigning for French ratification of the
Covenants on Human Rights and for French ratification of the Euro-
pean Convention on Human Rights, they may very well have believed
that awarding him the Nobel Prize would provide him with a micro-
phone, as it were, a way of broadcasting noble ideas worthy of the
prize.
These are speculations, and since the discussions among committee
members are not recorded, they must remain so. Nevertheless, they do
bear a resemblance to the speech of Mrs Aase Lionæs, chairman of the
Nobel Prize Committee, who, in the presence of the King and Queen
of Norway, presented the prize in 1968. Lionæs had been Norway’s
representative at the UN from 1946 to 1965, and knew Cassin and his
work first hand. What is most striking about his life, she began, is how
it embodies ‘respect for human worth, irrespective of nationality, race,
religion, sex, or social position’.
And it is primarily for his contribution to the protection of human worth and the
rights of man, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that the
Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament today awards the Nobel Peace
Prize to René Cassin . . .
In the area of international law, however, the Declaration was a product of new
thought. Whereas earlier treaties had regulated the relationships between nations
and governments, this new Declaration made the individual himself the focus.
The Declaration puts, therefore, a dividing line in history. It breaks away from
the old, set doctrines of international law; yes, it allows us to look out over the
boundaries of the old sovereign states toward a world society.
To the millions of people who live today in the darkness of oppression, this
document was unknown. But a small light was lit, and the moral commandments
contained in the Declaration, like those written on the tablets of Moses, will in
the years to come play a forceful role in reforming the conscience of man and his
understanding of what is right and wrong.
Today, where there is no respect for human rights and freedom, there is no peace
either. Every day youth falls on the battlefield. Every day prisoners are led to
prisons and torture chambers. They fight and they suffer for the ideals which the
Declaration of Human Rights proclaims . . . Peace, like freedom, is indivisible; it
must be captured anew by everyone every single day.128
128 Award ceremony speech, 1968, http://nobelprize.org/nobel prizes/peace/laureates/

1968/press.html.
Who would not be moved by the drama of the moment? Cassin rose to
accept the prize. He was eighty-one years old, and spoke with a firm,
clear voice.
It is with understandable emotion that I receive, in the presence of your Majesty,

and a warm audience, the Nobel Peace Prize which the Norwegian committee
of the Storting has awarded me for 1968, after two years of silence, and which
Madame Aase Lionæs has extended to me with her too generous words.
Cassin then evoked the Norwegian resistance to Nazi occupation, and

recalled meeting the Norwegian King in London when he Cassin was
engaged in struggling for the liberation of France. ‘It is thus a soldier of
the two world wars which stands here today, proclaimed laureate of the
Nobel Peace Prize, here in an eminently pacifist country which, itself, had
to face aggression.’ Evoking his predecessors at that podium, including
the recently murdered Martin Luther King, Cassin insisted on the degree
to which his work was a collective effort. Then Cassin evoked
the innocent victims of the wars alongside those who defended the rights, the
liberties and the dignity of man. I think too of those silent magistrates who apply
with justice and civic courage the rules protecting the rights of individuals in
society. I share with you as well my thoughts concerning all those delegates of
the United Nations who work and alas many who have died in the course of our
common effort to build the Universal Declaration at the end of a war without
precedent.
It is to all of these, the dead and the living, men of good will, artisans of a
human condition less unjust, fervent creator of rules, ancient in their essence,
but expressed in the forms more appropriate to our modern world, that I say to
you, these are the real laureates of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Then insisting on the force of his beliefs, by the cadence of his fist on the
podium, Cassin asked for everyone to recognize that
This prize does not mark an achievement in fact, it does not consecrate a peace
realized, but it glorifies the efforts made to arrive at a peace very difficult to
reach. What it symbolizes, in a different manner but with similar truths as does
the Myth of Prometheus, is the indefatigable will of Man drawn to a fraternal
ideal for which he is prepared to give his life, even should he not reach it, for the
salvation of others living and for the generations to come.129
An ideal for which he was prepared to give his life: what better way to
say what human rights meant to René Cassin?
129 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1968, http://nobelprize.org/nobel prizes/peace/

laureates/1968/cassin-acceptance.html. We are grateful to the Librarian of the Nobel
Institute, Ann Skjelling, for providing us with a recording of his speech.
At the ceremony, Cassin was accompanied by his sister Félice and

two other members of his family. His wife, seriously in decline and with
less than a year to live, watched the proceedings on television, in the
company of their niece, Josette Cassin.130 After his return to Paris, the
rhythms of life returned, but they could never be the same. Cassin was
already a statesman and a distinguished judge; now he was an interna-
tional celebrity. It was not a difficult or an unpleasant role for him to
play.
With part of the prize money he received, Cassin launched an educa-
tional project to introduce students, teachers, people from all over the
world to the current state of human rights problems and human rights
law. It is the International Institute of Human Rights, established in 1969
and located in an Alsatian house within walking distance of the European
Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Cassin’s own books helped form
the working library of the Institute, where annual courses are held for
‘advanced students in law, politics, and the human and social sciences,
teachers and researchers, members of the legal profession and all other
professionals working for human rights, national and international civil
servants, and members of NGOs’. Those who complete the month’s
course are eligible for an examination qualifying them for a diploma
issued by the Institute.131 This course has attracted thousands of people
over more than forty years to Strasbourg, and is the most immediate
byproduct of the Nobel Prize Cassin won in 1968. The work of the Insti-
tute is entirely consistent with Cassin’s view of the essential role education
plays in the effort to help human rights regimes operate throughout the
world.
In later years, there have been voices that have spoken of the awarding
of the Nobel Prize to Cassin and only to Cassin as an injustice. Why
was there no room on the podium for John Humphrey, the international
lawyer and civil servant whose first draft of the Universal Declaration
and whose tireless efforts on behalf of it made its realization possible?132
There is some force in this question. As in the pure sciences, individuals
have been left out of awards they should have shared.
And yet there is a sense in which Cassin’s Nobel Prize was the recog-
nition of a lifetime of work, as a soldier, as a veteran, as a spokesman
for the men and women damaged and disfigured by war. The Nobel
130 AIU, AM Présidence 011b, Cassin to Marcel Franco, 18 Dec. 1968. Thanks are due
to Josette Cassin for her help on this and other points. Interview with Josette Cassin,
9 July 2011.
131 For these courses, see www.ridi.org/adi/special/2006/iidh2006brogfr.pdf.
132 On Humphrey, see Clinton Timothy Curle, Humanité. John Humphrey’s Alternative
Account of Human Rights (University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. ix–x.
Peace Prize went to him in 1968. It was given to the ILO collectively
the following year. Together these two awards recognized the long, hard
struggle since the First World War undertaken by many people of Cassin’s
generation, people born in the 1880s, who came of age before the Great
War and bore arms during it; people who took up the cause of the
disabled and the cause of peace precisely because they knew what war
was; people who suffered the dark years of Nazi ascendency and still
retained their faith in human dignity. People who came to the United
Nations determined to find a way to secure the peace. Their limitations
are evident. They were a generation not of saints but of strivers, men and
women too stubborn to be reduced to silence and cynicism. René Cassin
won the Nobel Peace Prize for his generation, the generation of the two
world wars. That is why the award was a just one.
In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, 1968, Cassin
captured this truth in some words he offered in honour of Henri Laugier,
born a year after him, in 1888. ‘The men of our generation’, he began,
‘those who have forgotten neither 1789 nor 1848, those who lived through
1914–1918, 1940–1944, and 1948, they will have fulfilled their mission
if, in their lifetime, the tribunal of the human conscience, so necessary
today, will be able to flourish, and, following the words of Henri Laugier,
if “the cries of the victims will finally be heard”.’133
133 René Cassin, Préface, in François Perroux (ed.), Biologie et développement (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1968), pp. 36–7.
10 The vice-president of the Conseil
d’Etat, 1944–1960
By tradition in France, the Conseil d’Etat is the highest administrative

body in the land. The nomination of Cassin as vice-president, that is,
as its effective president, would have been inconceivable in other times.
Before him and after him, every vice-president had been a member of this
council. He was the only ‘foreigner’ to be so honoured. The only reason
the Conseil d’Etat did not protest against this imposition was because
it had lost a substantial part of its authority. Nominating as its head
not only a distinguished jurist but also a leader of Free France from the
beginning, de Gaulle made clear his intention of purging and reforming
it.1
While Cassin may not have been welcomed, he wound up being
accepted over time. He was not responsible for the purging of the Con-
seil d’Etat, which was done directly by the Ministry of Justice and by a
committee of which he was not a member. He did not enter into office
until this purge had been completed. It was more severe than in other
high administrative bodies for a simple reason: it was a reservoir in which
ministers found their closest advisors and higher civil servants. Vichy’s
ministers continued this practice and gave to many members of the Con-
seil d’Etat political as well as technical responsibilities. One instance is
that of the general secretary of the Ministry of Justice; another was the
president of the committee which dealt with denaturalizations.
At this time, the Conseil d’Etat was a small body of 120 members.
There were three grades within it, the titles of which were a bit medieval.
At the base were the ‘auditors’, then the masters of requests (maı̂tres
des requêtes), and at the top the councillors (conseillers), some of whom
presided over working groups.
1 On the Conseil d’Etat, see Jean Massot and Thierry Girardot, Le Conseil d’Etat (Paris: La
Documentation Française, 1999); Le Conseil d’Etat, livre jubilaire publié pour commémorer
son cent cinquantième anniversaire, 4 nivose an VIII 24 – décembre 1949 (Paris: Recueil
Sirey, 1952); Jean Massot (ed.), Le Conseil d’Etat de l’an VIII à nos jours (Paris: Adam
Biro, 1999).
265
On 8 September 1944, the Minister of Justice suspended one such

president of a working group, eleven councillors and twelve masters of
requests. Three days later, he placed in retirement the vice-president,
Alfred Porché, while affirming that his retirement was not a punishment.
In total, twenty members of the council were dismissed and lost their pen-
sions; five others, aside from Porché, had to retire. One was suspended for
three years, and six others were sanctioned.2 As Cassin wrote to Tissier,
‘Our house has been cleaned up more severely than any other.’3
This purge left its traces. Some of those affected appealed to the Con-
seil d’Etat, and on occasion won their appeals. Cassin took this badly, and
even considered resignation in light of this disavowal of the judgments
rendered at the Liberation.4 Cassin’s bond with the young auditors and
masters of requests may have arisen from his doubts about some of his
older colleagues, but he tried to turn the page and rebuild the institution
on a new foundation. This is the meaning of his first address as vice-
president, during the ceremony in which the Minister of Justice installed
him in his new post, and in the presence of General de Gaulle. On
23 December 1944, before a frosty audience of members of the coun-
cil, he did not limit his remarks to a conventional set of compliments to
his predecessor, unanimously praised by members of the Conseil, but
he offered a real eulogy. He tried to make reassuring remarks about the
future, beginning with the merger of the Comité Juridique and the Con-
seil d’Etat, and underlining both the council’s importance as guardian
of the Republican legal order and the full confidence the government
placed in it.
New directions for the Conseil d’Etat

Acts came before words. The decrees naming Cassin to head the Conseil
d’Etat were issued on 22 November 1944, but the Council of Ministers
had taken the decision to do so on 3 October,5 and Cassin chaired the
first meeting of a committee on the reform of the Conseil on 31 October.
This committee rejected radical proposals framed by Tissier, to give the
2 Jacques Chevallier, ‘Le Conseil d’Etat à la Libération’, in Deuxième centenaire du Conseil

d’Etat, Journée d’études, 14 Nov. 1997; ‘Le Conseil d’Etat et les crises’, La Revue
Administrative (Paris, PUF, 2001), pp. 46–52.
3 238AP104, letter to Tissier, 7 June 1946. Tissier, who returned to the Conseil, wrote in
a letter of 4 June that it had not been sufficiently cleaned up, and he refused to shake
hands with a councillor who, though ‘whitewashed’, had the blood of patriots on his
hands.
4 382AP128, draft manuscript of a letter never sent, without doubt written in December
1951.
5 382AP100, letter of congratulations of de Menthon to Cassin, 4 Oct. 1944.
The vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat, 1944–1960 267
Conseil the role of recruiting and educating the whole of the higher civil
service.6 Instead, Cassin and the committee opted for minor reforms,7
which left the Conseil more or less as it was. The main proposal was to
interpolate the Comité Juridique within the Conseil, by transferring its
jurisdiction directly to it, and by creating a new permanent section to
consider urgent matters. In addition, the committee proposed to place
the Conseil under the control of the Prime Minister and not the Min-
ister of Justice, and to give the Conseil responsibility for supervising all
administrative courts and to decide matters of conflicts between min-
istries. Members of the Conseil were pleased to hear that the Liberation
government would not suppress it, but would augment its importance
and extend its jurisdiction.
Cassin’s main concern was the future of the Comité Juridique. He
hoped its members would be integrated into the Conseil. After hav-
ing returned to Paris, the Minister of Justice suggested replacing the
Comité by a consultative body composed only of members of the Con-
seil d’Etat, which would have excluded Cassin and three other members
of the Comité Juridique.8 Cassin succeeded in preserving the Comité
with its functions reduced to the revision of the text of existing legis-
lation and the scrutiny of proposed laws and regulations.9 In addition,
in November, he presided over the integration of two members of the
Comité Juridique into the Conseil d’Etat, and the nomination of four
new members of the Comité Juridique, of whom two were members of
the Conseil d’Etat.10
Cassin discussed with de Gaulle the integration of the Comité
Juridique into the Conseil on 14 February 1945. Three days later, he
submitted these proposals to the Minister of Justice, urging him to super-
vise the transfer of powers from the Comité to the Conseil, and to give
6 382AP100, transcript of meetings of 9 and 12 Dec., Tissier’s report, dated 4 Dec. See
Guy Thuillier, ‘Un projet de réorganisation du Conseil d’Etat de Pierre Tissier en 1944’,
Revue Administrative, 225 (May–June 1985), pp. 242–8. Debré himself ‘often wondered’
at the time ‘if it was not necessary to revive the imperial system which allocated future
civil servants to different sections of the Conseil d’Etat’, in ‘Le Conseil d’Etat et l’Ecole
nationale d’administration’, in Le Conseil d’Etat, livre jubilaire, pp. 473–7.
7 382AP100.
8 384AP100, letter of Cassin to Parodi, 28 Sept. 1944, on this proposal which was to be
discussed in the Council of Ministers the following day. The committee at this point
had only four members: Cassin, Coste-Floret and Marion, plus a secretary, Laurence.
9 Law of 17 Oct. 1944.
10 382AP74, ‘L’activité du Comité juridique et de la Commission permanente du 1er
septembre 1944 au 31 juillet 1946’; unsigned and undated note, evidently written
by Cassin, even though he refers to himself in the third person. Alfred Coste-Floret
and Marion were named Masters of Requests by decree on 19 December 1944. The
new members were councillors of state, Andrieu and Oudinot, Professor Julliot de la
Morandière, and the former prefect of the Department of the Seine, Villey.
members of the Comité satisfactory conditions for continuing their work

during the transitional period.11 He returned to this subject on several
occasions in conversations with de Gaulle.12 Evidently, Cassin was pre-
occupied with this question while he awaited the formalization of the
new structure. The Comité Juridique discussed this matter in draft form
on 12 April 1945, and suggested only minor amendments.13 Though
the Conseil d’Etat had no competence in the matter, Cassin brought
together representatives of its different sections, in order to placate their
sensitivities; they did not offer major objections.14 Finally, the law and
its enabling decrees were signed on 31 July. By and large, they remain in
force to this day.
The Conseil’s structure corresponded to its dual function. First it is
the judge of conflicts between citizens and the state; secondly, it is the
juridical advisor of the government. The first task is to judge cases in
which citizens object to decisions and the workings of the administration:
the Litigation Section took responsibility for this matter. The second
task is to offer comments and advice to the government concerning bills
and proposed regulations. The Administrative Section was in charge of
these matters. The Litigation Section was then subdivided into eight
sub-sections, with three councillors in each, plus a non-voting secretary
(rapporteur), and a representative of the government.15 The judgments
are read out either in sub-sections,16 or in a plenary meeting of the
Litigation Section, for the most significant affairs.
The four administrative sections provide advice on texts submitted to
them by different ministries – Home Affairs, Public Works, Finance and
Social Affairs. The most important bills come before the Conseil’s Gen-
eral Assembly, meeting on Thursday afternoons, or more frequently if
necessary. The administrative sections, each with six councillors, have the
same weight as the Litigation Section, but the president of this section, as
the highest official after the vice-president, takes the chair when the latter
is absent. In addition, the administrative sections incorporate as ‘extraor-
dinary members’ civil servants or other competent people, named by the
government. Such individuals are ‘qualified persons whose primary posts
11 A/CE, 9938/1, letter of 17 Feb. 1945.

12 382AP74, sent to de Gaulle on 20 March with a note entitled: ‘Réforme du Conseil
d’Etat et absorption du Comité juridique’; Letter of 18 May on the critical situation of
the Comité Juridique.
13 A/CE, 9938/40, dossier 1171.
14 382AP100, roneographed transcript of this meeting, undated.
15 Government commissioners, generally Masters of Requests, named by ministerial
decree, do not participate in the discussions, in contrast to the secretary or rapporteur.
16 The first four sub-sections, responsible for ‘General Litigation’, proceed independently,
but then to reach a judgment they work in two sets of two sub-sections.
lie outside the Conseil d’Etat’, and who serve the council for a limited
period of time. Without the assistance of these people, the councillors
would be unable to handle the workload they faced. On the other hand,
many members of the Conseil d’Etat served temporarily in ministries or
in the political circle of ministers’ advisors.
The law of 1945 on the Conseil d’Etat attached it formally under the
control of the head of the government. Now the government was obliged
to submit to the Conseil d’Etat all legislative proposals, but the advice the
Conseil provided was simply that – advice rather than binding opinion.
And yet before 1940, the Conseil d’Etat had never succeeded in obtaining
the right to examine all proposed legislation. This new advisory function
threatened to overwhelm the administrative sections of the Conseil and
to delay the required advice; in order to give advice rapidly in cases of
particular urgency, a permanent commission was established, headed by
the president of one of the administrative sections.
The permanent commission proved its utility, and enabled the Conseil
to examine rapidly hundreds of dossiers. But the separation between the
Litigation and Administrative sections presented structural problems for
the Conseil. After Cassin’s departure, there was an attempt on the life of
General de Gaulle. The accused assassins were tried before a special mil-
itary court. The proposal to create this military court had been submitted
to the Permanent Commission of the Conseil d’Etat, which had validated
it, as a measure justified by the situation. The military court sentenced
to death all the conspirators. One of them, named Canal, appealed to the
Conseil d’Etat, the General Assembly of which determined – in contra-
diction to the Permanent Commission – that the court was illegal. Here
we see the difference between the two functions of the Conseil – that of
offering advice to the government and that of pronouncing on a specific
case in law. Hence, Canal’s sentence was set aside and he was returned
for trial in an ordinary (and not a special) court (decision of 19 Octo-
ber 1962). Not surprisingly, de Gaulle was outraged by this decision,
which arose from the separation of the two sides of the Conseil d’Etat.
This incident led to reforms after Cassin’s retirement, bringing closer
together the two sides of the institution.
Despite his many responsibilities in France and in international circles,
Cassin was a very active presence in the Conseil d’Etat. As soon as
he took charge, he frequently approached the Minister of Justice and
the president of the council to obtain the funds and posts needed to
fulfil the mission of the Conseil d’Etat. He worked hard to improve
the level of pay of the members of the Conseil d’Etat, whose status
had been downgraded; and he succeeded in obtaining supplementary
posts in 1950 to staff a ninth sub-section and in 1956, a tenth and an
eleventh.17 Not satisfied with writing to authorities, Cassin went to see

them. In his archives, there are many memos attesting to the agenda of
his meetings.18 He fulfilled formal obligations and accepted numerous
official invitations. He was a very active vice-president indeed.
When he was away, he insisted on being informed of developments.
The secretary general of the Conseil d’Etat kept him up to date. His
personal secretary until 1956, Mlle Lesimple, was a particularly efficient
woman, handling numerous demands for information and solicitations,
acknowledging the receipt of correspondence, or apologies. When Cassin
was abroad, and important decisions had to be taken, he arranged for a
delay until his return, for instance when, in 1952, the president of the
Litigation Section died, and his replacement had to be found quickly.19
Cassin presided over virtually all General Assemblies of the Conseil
d’Etat. Those who were there considered him a very good president.20 He
spoke infrequently, but always effectively; he let others present different
points of view, but he did not allow the discussion to go on endlessly, and
summarized very clearly the different positions at stake and the solutions
available to the Conseil. Transcripts of these meetings confirm the pro-
file his contemporaries drew. He was adept in finding formulae around
which a consensus could emerge, for instance adding a critical note to
a positive opinion to be sent to a minister, thereby transmitting reser-
vations expressed in the meeting. He was reluctant to put a question
to the vote. Evidently, his voice carried considerable weight. When
he was abroad, the General Assembly was chaired by the president of the
Litigation Section, who lacked Cassin’s authority and talent. For exam-
ple in February 1947, when Cassin was in New York at the UN, there
were debates which lacked brevity and ended without a consensus.21
Cassin was preoccupied as well with the efficiency and rigour of the
work of the Conseil d’Etat. When a case was introduced in the Litigation
Section, it was sent to a sub-section, which had to examine it and to reach
a judgment. Hence, it was possible that similar cases would be judged
in different ways by different sub-sections. It was therefore necessary to
17 Law of 4 Aug. 1956. Etudes et Documents 1957, introduction by Cassin. The law created
five new posts for councillors, two for Masters of Requests, and ten for auditors, as well
as other administrative posts.
18 382AP99, twelve meetings with different ministers in 1949. On the pay of councillors,
see the undated note of 1944 in 382AP100 and correspondence in 382AP100 and 104.
19 382AP99, dossier Justice, letter to the Minister of Justice, 24 April 1952, asking him to
await Cassin’s return from New York, planned for 6 May, to consider this replacement.
20 Interviews with Marceau Long, Bernard Ducamin, Pierre Laurent and Nicole
Questiaux.
21 CAC, 19990026/4, dossiers 13, 23 Jan. 1947, on the evolution of the jurisprudence on
the subject of change of names of Jews, and 23, 13 Feb. 1947, on the legality of a law
signed by Thierry d’Argenlieu on legislative powers in Indochina. In this latter case, the
president’s voice prevailed, and the Council was divided into two equal groups.
find a way to assure the convergence of the jurisprudence arising from

the different sub-sections. Cassin insisted that the different parts of the
Conseil d’Etat were made aware of the most important judgments. First,
he made it possible for the Lebon, the annual record of decisions of the
Conseil named for its first editor, to continue to be published, a matter
which was not at all certain at the time.22 Secondly, he created in 1953
a centre of documentation and coordination, as he had done in every
institution he served, and gave it the responsibility of circulating a dozen
or more of the less important decisions each month to key figures in the
Conseil d’Etat. One member of the centre of documentation attended
each meeting of sub-sections, in order to identify those decisions which
had to be circulated, and to ensure that the filing system was up to
date.23
As an outsider, Cassin was particularly sensitive to the image of the
Conseil d’Etat. The internal publications were known to just a handful
of specialists. He decided to go further and to publish an annual volume,
entitled Etudes et documents du Conseil d’Etat, the first volume of which
appeared in 1947. It was of great importance to Cassin, who personally
wrote the introductions of each volume. He was very grateful that his
successor asked him to write the introduction to the 1960 volume, which
appeared after his retirement.
These annual reports provided not only a detailed summary of the
activities of the Conseil d’Etat, but articles on the evolution of jurispru-
dence and on subjects of wide interest, such as the general principles of
law.24 They generally included essays on other countries and on historical
subjects, such as the Conseil d’Etat and the revolution of 1848. Cassin
invited contributions from other members of the Conseil, and starting
in 1951 he also included essays by a university professor of law.25 His
longstanding interest in reaching students and practitioners of the law
led him to foster the publication, first in 1956 of the Grands arrêts de
la jurisprudence administrative.26 His initiatives were aimed at expanding
22 382AP101, report on the activity of the archival commission and on the creation of a
centre of liaison and documentation, 26 Dec. 1946.
23 382AP101, report of 21 July 1953. See also Marceau Long and Guy Braibant, ‘Le
centre de coordination et de documentation du Conseil d’Etat’, Etudes et Documents
1955, pp. 69–74.
24 M. Letourneur, maı̂tre des requêtes, ‘Les “principes généraux du droit” dans la jurispru-
dence du Conseil d’Etat’, Etudes et Documents 1951, pp. 19–31.
25 R.-E. Charlier (1951), Jean de Soto (1952), Georges Vedel (1954), Jean Rivero (1955),
Marcel Waline (1956), J.-M. Auby (1958), André de Laubadère (1959).
26 Marceau Long, Prosper Weil and Guy Braibant, Les grands arrêts de la jurisprudence
administrative (Paris: Sirey, 1956). Cassin, who wrote the preface with M. Waline,
dedicated the volume to General de Gaulle. This volume has been updated and in print
ever since.
not only the geographical and temporal contents, but also its professional
audience.
Here we need to enter a more technical but important domain, that
of the reform of the administrative courts. When Cassin took up his
office, he faced a seemingly insuperable problem: the work the Conseil
faced expanded much more rapidly than its capacity to handle it. Similar
difficulties had plagued the work of the Comité Juridique, but in Algiers
the consequences were less serious; at most, it led to poorly written
texts. Now the danger was greater; the rights of citizens were at stake, in
judgments balancing the interests of the state and citizens. The Conseil
d’Etat had the final word, and if its decisions were in error, then human
rights would be violated. Delay was tantamount to injustice.
The situation at the beginning of Cassin’s presidency was serious,
but it was aggravated by the deluge of petitions arising from the con-
text of Liberation. They had to rule on many delayed promotions for
civil servants, appeals against the dismissals of collaborators, injustices
unrectified, and so on. Given its limited numbers, the Conseil could not
handle this avalanche of litigation. Creating new sub-sections, as Cassin
had done, helped a bit, but more radical solutions were necessary.
Cassin’s idea involved the entire structure of administrative courts.
At its base, there were roughly twenty-four interdepartmental courts at
the level of the prefecture. These courts had jurisdiction over complaints
concerning municipal and departmental decisions. Cassin’s proposal was
to give them jurisdiction on all matters concerning complaints about
ministerial decisions too. For example, it was absurd that the case of a
hospital worker would be treated by the interdepartmental court, since he
was an employee of the municipality, at the same time as a case involving
an employee of the post office, under direct ministerial authority, would
be treated by the Conseil d’Etat. Cassin’s proposal put these cases in line.
The Conseil d’Etat would intervene only in the case of appeal. To realize
this change, a law was required.
On 21 January 1948 Cassin sent to the Minister of Justice a
bill drafted by a commission presided over by the president of the
Litigation Section, which set out this new system of administrative
jurisdiction.27 It is important to note, though, that this change had sig-
nificant consequences for the personnel of the Conseil d’Etat, in par-
ticular the way in which departmental judges could become, at the end
of their careers, members of the Conseil d’Etat. There were financial
27 382AP101, contentieux administratif, correspondance, and 382AP100, Commission

d’études sur la réforme du Conseil d’Etat.
implications too; hence the agreement of the Minister of Finance was

essential.28
In 1950, the Minister of Justice considered this proposal, but the leg-
islature did not examine it before its normal dissolution and the election
of a new Chamber of Deputies. During this time, delays mounted. On
1 August 1951, there were 20,486 cases awaiting decisions of the Conseil
d’Etat. The new National Assembly took up the matter in 1953, but with-
out a decision. Finally, a decree of 30 September 1953 set out the terms
of the reform. Despite Cassin’s efforts to pressure successive ministers
into action, it took five years for the reform to come into force.29
This change was of significance. First, it permitted the Conseil d’Etat
to breathe and to recover its efficiency. Before the reform, the cases sent to
it exceeded the number of decisions it was able to take; after the reform,
the contrary was true. Then, the Conseil had only to take up appeals,
and no longer had to hear cases in the first instance, which were heard
by the new administrative courts. The only matters the Conseil d’Etat
had to judge from the beginning were those involving cases beyond the
jurisdiction of administrative courts and those concerning civil servants
appointed by higher authorities of the state. Exceptions existed, and
they constituted a heavy burden to come for the Conseil d’Etat. This
global architecture of administrative jurisdiction, on two levels, was much
clearer than the one it had replaced.
Cassin’s achievement was to place the council at the centre of this
new system of administrative courts. On 3–4 June 1957, he invited the
twenty-four presidents of the administrative courts of mainland France to
meet in the Conseil d’Etat in Paris. He opened the meeting, but handed
over the discussion to two presidents of administrative courts, one from
Lille, who spoke about the different procedures of the Conseil d’Etat
and the administrative courts, and a second from Marseilles, who spoke
about the first results of the new system.30 On balance, the outcome
was positive, though there were considerable delays in certain courts.
A second meeting took place on 8–9 June 1959, after a modification
of the procedures of administrative courts. It disclosed disparities
between the workload of certain courts, for instance that of Paris, and
others. The remedy was to increase the number of magistrates rather
than the creation of new courts.
28 382AP101, ‘Notes sur la réforme du contentieux 1948–1952’; unsigned ‘Note sur le

projet de loi de la chancellerie non signée’, 16 July 1948.
29 Etudes et Documents 1953, introduction by Cassin.
30 382AP101, for Cassin’s reports and introduction, in a dossier entitled ‘Etude critique
sur la procédure des tribunaux administratifs’. See also Etudes et Documents 1957.
The war in Algeria

Like all other wars of decolonization, the Algerian war posed fundamental
problems for the defence of human rights. Cassin, as we have seen, was
one of the founders of the campaign to install the right of petition as
a fundamental human right, and he was well aware of the risk of the
violation of human rights in a colonial setting. In the French case, as the
Conseil d’Etat had to judge the appeals of victims of state powers, Cassin
was in charge of assuring the respect for human rights within the sphere
controlled by the French state, including Algeria. How did he emerge
faced with this challenge?
It would be absurd to ignore the limitations imposed on him by the
very nature of the Conseil d’Etat. It is a collective body, and we cannot
assume that everything the Conseil did during his presidency reflected his
views or influence alone. Its members were not a small group of political
activists, as was the Comité Juridique in Algiers. They were higher civil
servants, involved at times in policy making, who understood all too
well the force of compromise in the daily work of the state. They were
colleagues of the key advisors of ministers and other high civil servants,
and were preoccupied with not impeaching them.
At this point, we need to separate the two facets of the Conseil d’Etat,
its litigation work and its advisory role vis-à-vis the government. With
respect to litigation, only a few cases were introduced to the Conseil
d’Etat pertaining to incidents in the Algerian uprising.31 In general, as
Jean Massot, former section president, said with heavy understatement,
its decisions were ‘lenient’ and ‘resigned’ to accepting what could not be
altered.32 Under Cassin’s presidency, the Conseil d’Etat even accepted
violations of fundamental principles, by giving military authorities and
justice wide powers. In a notorious case, a meeting of the general assem-
bly of the Litigation Section, at which Cassin presided, endorsed the
legality of ‘internment centres’ in Algeria which had been explicitly for-
bidden by a law of 1955.33 These centres were well known for being
places where torture was routinely practised.
31 Sylvie Thénault, ‘La guerre d’Algérie au Conseil d’Etat’, in Jean Massot (ed.), Le Conseil
d’État et l’évolution de l’outre-mer français du xviiie siècle à 1962 (Paris: Dalloz, 2007),
pp. 199–220. See also her book Une drôle de justice. Les magistrats dans la guerre d’Algérie
(Paris: La Découverte, 2001).
32 Jean Massot, ‘Le rôle du Conseil d’Etat’, in Jean-Pierre Rioux (ed.), La guerre d’Algérie
et les Français (Paris: Fayard, 1990), p. 271.
33 The Zaquin case, Assemblée Générale, 7 March 1958, Lebon, p. 150. The Conseil
decided that the law of 1956 on the basis of which internment was ordered did not
violate the provision of the law of 1955 prohibiting internment camps.
On less fundamental subjects, the Conseil d’Etat was more vigilant,

concerning matters of circumstance and dates, in order to ensure that
special police powers were not used abusively against journalists or civil
servants and that they would not become permanent. That said, its main
concern was not to limit the freedom of action of the army and the police.
And there is the nub of the problem.
The second facet of the work of the Conseil d’Etat was to oversee
legislation proposed by the government. The Conseil was certainly not
severe when considering matters touching on Algeria. The law of 3 April
1955 defining the state of emergency was examined by the permanent
commission of the Conseil d’Etat. It considered that the provisional
status of this law reduced its gravity: the state of emergency lasted only
for six months, and its prolongation required a new law. The permanent
commission imposed a geographically explicit limit on those zones in
which the state of emergency operated, recognizing that ‘such measures
constitute dangers of an incontestable gravity for public liberties’. The bill
proposed to displace cases normally heard in ordinary courts to military
courts. The permanent commission said that such a shift would be only a
possibility and not a rule, which did nothing to limit recourse to this form
of military justice. The permanent commission did not require systematic
control over administrative internments, but only gave internees the right
to appeal to a consultative commission against this measure, which had
the option of hearing the appellant, should it so choose.34
The law of 16 March 1956 on special powers was passed by the per-
manent commission of the Conseil as well.35 Later on, the renewal of
these two laws on the state of emergency and on special powers were
but formalities. The Conseil was somewhat more strict about the law of
7 October 1958, extending the possibility of administrative internment to
metropolitan France. Such a measure would be subject to the control of
a supervisory committee, as was the case in legislation of 1944, but with
longer delays – one month in place of a fortnight – to render its judgment,
and a purely written procedure. The General Assembly of the Conseil
d’Etat accepted that the supervisory committee could hear the internees
and provide them with an interpreter, but such was not established as a
right for the internees.36 On this crucial issue, the contrast between the
Comité Juridique of Algiers and the Conseil d’Etat is striking. We can
34 CAC, 19990025/367, dossiers 266–502 and 503, Decree, 23 April 1955; CAC,
19990025/371, dossier 266–734. Sylvie Thénault, ‘L’état d’urgence (1955–2005). De
l’Algérie coloniale à la France contemporaine. Destin d’une loi’, Le Mouvement Social,
218 (Jan.–March 2007), pp. 63–78.
35 CAC, 19990025/409, dossier 269–058. 36 CAC, 19990025/526, dossier 275–410.
see the great weight the Conseil gave not to substitute its thinking for
that of the legislators and not to tie the hands of the government.
We are dealing here with a matter fundamental to human rights.
The Conseil refrained from condemning administrative detention with-
out review by a judge; it thus even stood back from affirming what in
the Anglo-Saxon tradition is the rule of habeas corpus. Cassin’s legacy
as vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat cannot be measured fairly or
fully without recognizing this glaring contradiction in his commitment to
human rights.
Why was he so restrained? One possibility is that he thought that the
majority of the Conseil d’Etat was not prepared to give human rights so
much importance. Another is that if he had stood his ground on this issue,
and had resigned, the practice of administrative detention would not be
affected at all. It was better to remain within the Conseil, as in London in
1941, or as in Algiers in 1943, than outside the institutions of state. Yet
another possibility is that he shared the opinion of the majority. Cassin
believed that decolonization was inevitable, but he may have opposed the
uprising in Algiers as the way to achieve it.
Cassin had a strict idea of the reserve a judge had to maintain. As he
said to a professor of law who wanted to keep his freedom of expression:
‘In so far as you exercise the function of a magistrate, you must be silent
on those problems posed by this responsibility.’37 He never spoke in
public about human rights in Algeria. In the executive board of ENA
(the National School of Administration), which we will discuss below,
the subject of students sent to Algeria was raised several times, without
comment by Cassin. He refused an invitation to join a committee created
by Guy Mollet in 1957, to investigate cases of abuse of state powers in
Algeria, probably because he thought that his presence would be used to
whitewash government policies.38
Cassin issued only one public statement about the Algerian war. On
7 April 1958, he gave a speech to a meeting held during (but not officially
within) the UF annual conference.39 He had not spoken in an annual
meeting of the UF since 1946. He said nothing about the gangrene of
human rights violations in Algeria, and did not raise the case of a French
37 Discussion about the Conseil Constitutionnel, General Assembly of the Conseil d’Etat,
28 Oct. 1958, Commission des archives constitutionnelles de la Ve République, vol. 1, Octobre
1958 – 30 novembre 1958 (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2008), p. 480.
38 Raphaëlle Branche, ‘La commission de sauvegarde pendant la guerre d’Algérie,
chronique d’un échec annoncé’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’Histoire, 61 (Jan.–March
1999), pp. 14–29.
39 This ‘magnificent lecture’ was published in Cahiers de l’UF, 118 (June–Aug. 1958). It
is striking that it is not listed on the programme of the Congress; the UF gave Cassin
the venue, but did not engage directly in the subject of his lecture.
airforce bombardment of the border town of Sakhiet sidi Youssef in

Tunisia, in which many civilians were killed, despite the evident fact that
this incident was a violation of international law. In his speech, Cassin
spoke as the delegate of France in the Human Rights Commission of the
UN, from which he had just returned. In New York, he had met many
Americans:
With the honest but simplistic mind which inspires a young and passionate peo-
ple, under the influence of the press and elementary feelings, many concluded:
‘After all, it is obvious that the transition to independence of Morocco and Tunisia
did not lead to the disaster some believed would come, and so it would be the
same for Algeria.’
Nothing that he had to say would dissuade them:

This they do not believe: the normal idea of anti-colonialism, of the emancipation
of people is alive in their minds, and whatever information or propaganda you
offer, you will not overcome this idea. Virtually all Americans say: ‘if you do not
want foreign intervention, get your house in order’ . . . The foreigners with the
best intention towards France say, as did the last general assembly of the UN:
‘Let the French handle their own troubles, but let them get on with it’. In this
position, we have the responsibility: we have to accept any necessary sacrifice.
There is much ambiguity in these words. Here he did not specify what
had to be done, but something had to be done, and rapidly, to change
the status quo.
France could not wait too long before voting on a new status for
Algeria, and whatever it would be, this time, as opposed to 1947, it
would have to be applied to the letter, despite the huge forces which
would oppose it. Cassin rejected the idea of separating the oil-rich Sahara
from the rest of Algeria, and French isolation within the international
community. Cassin said that France still had allies, and she would lose
them should she oppose the emancipation movement of colonial peoples.
‘Do not be carried away by those who say: “You can live in isolation
and can withdraw from the UN and NATO”. The newly independent
people see in the UN an ideal . . . It is impossible that newly independent
nations like Togo, the Cameroons, and some states in French West Africa
would abandon the creed of full equality in the international domain,
which made them the equals of France.’ And in conclusion, he said,
‘The first sacrifice is to struggle against violence by the application of
force, and the second is to achieve through justice what must not be
attained through violence. This is precisely what France has to do in
Algeria.’40
40 In bold in the text.

The sense of this compact statement is that the violence of the parties
engaged in the Algerian civil war, on both sides, must be ended through
the establishment of a new legal order. Secondly, France had to make
these new arrangements because they were just, and not because she was
unable to control violence.
Here we see the multi-faceted thinking of René Cassin. 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. How else can we interpret his
silence on the question of internment camps? But it would be unfair to
ignore the way he tried to integrate his concerns about human rights
with his thinking about decolonization and about France’s international
position during this period.
Cassin’s approach was similar to de Gaulle’s on international matters.
In order to preserve her international standing, France had to solve the
Algerian question. Cassin did not believe that full independence was the
only solution. ‘We must underscore that it is in the world’s interest that
France remains in Algeria’, he said, but added ‘in accord with the Muslim
people’.41 One month later was 13 May 1958, and the insurrection of
the French population of Algiers, of which General Massu took the lead.
It is likely that Cassin’s support for de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958
was more than simply loyalty to the head of Free France. He probably
thought that by solving the Algerian question, the General would restore
France’s place in the community of nations.
More generally, Cassin’s speech to the UF shows that he supported
progressive decolonization. However impossible we may think this term
to be, many people at the time adopted it. Cassin’s participation in UN
debates had convinced him that colonization was a thing of the past.
In a discussion about the School of France Overseas in 1956, during a
meeting of ENA’s executive board, he said:
I see from your unanimous reaction, the anguish which we all share because too
many people have put blinkers on. At the end of the war, I believed that a change
was possible, we promised it to the peoples who took part in the war with us, we
promised it and we do not keep our word. What frightens me . . . is that I am a
spectator faced by the growing closure of the Ministry of Overseas France . . . All
that leads to a major explosion . . . Our responsibilities do not extend to this
domain, but we cannot be silent in the face of what is coming . . . You perfectly
well know that one part of the African civil service will be in African hands.42
Cassin’s signature can be seen here in his reference to the past. His
experience led him always to place the present in a longer time period,
41 See note 39. 42 382AP88 and CAC, 19900256/3, Conseil of 17 Feb. 1956.
which frames both continuities and abrupt change. His work for ENA
was rooted in this conviction.
Chairing the executive board of ENA

As vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat, Cassin presided ex officio over
the executive board of the National School of Administration (ENA).43
Cassin took on this task with passion, and set aside some other obligations
to fulfil it.44 In fifteen years, from November 1945 to September 1960,
he attended all but fourteen of the 140 meetings of this board.
ENA was but one element in the general reform of public service set in
motion in 1945 by two friends from the pre-war period. Michel Debré was
a Resistance leader, who later served as Prime Minister under de Gaulle
from 1959 to 1962. Jean-Marcel Jeanneney was later a Minister under de
Gaulle as well, and was then the principal advisor to his own father, Jules
Jeanneney, the former president of the Senate, and Minister of State in
the provisional government. These two men, Debré and Jeanneney, met
and chaired a small workshop on 14 and 21 April 1945. They drafted
the first proposal for a comprehensive reform of the civil service. They
began to work on this task even before officially taking office.45 After
four redrafts, the texts were discussed by the General Assembly of the
Conseil d’Etat on 14 June, and by the ACP on 21 and 22 June. After
the summer holidays, the council of ministers approved the measure on
14 September, and it came into effect on 9 October. This was very rapid
progress indeed.46
This was an ambitious reform. The same legislation which created
ENA also set up the central board and the head of the civil service, as
well as new personnel who would work in all the ministries. Other decrees
divided the pre-war Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques into two bod-
ies: the Institute of Political Studies (IEP), which was a teaching body,
and the National Foundation of Political Science, which took over con-
trol of relevant libraries, reviews and publications. This set of measures
constituted a coherent plan for the modernization of the public service,
controlled by a director appointed by the Prime Minister. There were
to be several inter-ministerial corps of civil servants, recruited by com-
petitive examination, and trained in three institutes of political studies
in Paris, Strasbourg and Lyons. At the heart of this system was ENA.
These measures defined its remit, and also created alongside it a Centre
43 On ENA, see Jean-Michel Gaillard, L’ENA: miroir de l’Etat. De 1945 à nos jours (Brussels:
Editions Complexe, 1995).
44 CAC, 19770009/1 and 19900256/1, Conseil of 20 June 1946.
45 Decree of 1 May 1945. 46 CAC, 19790447/1.
for Advanced Administrative Studies (CHEA) in charge of the continuing

education of higher civil servants.
Cassin was not the founder of this new system, though he had been
consulted by his former student, Michel Debré,47 and it bore the hall-
marks of his thinking and his lifelong experience. He was twenty years
older than Debré and Jeanneney, and had a deep knowledge of adminis-
trative practices throughout the inter-war years. He was savagely critical
of those he knew before 1940: ‘We knew some directors of ministries in
1939–40 who were competent only to serve as deputy chief clerk. I can
say this because I saw it.’ Until 1929, low salaries discouraged candidates,
so that at times there was only one candidate for ten available posts. ‘In
some cases, we scraped the bottom of the barrel.’ During the economic
crisis, the public service was more attractive, but stopped recruiting.
When they started again, there were few candidates. ‘I chaired selection
committees of ministries between 1919 and 1939 and I can attest to the
lamentable conditions and arbitrary choices made in these recruitment
efforts.’48
This anarchy and mediocrity cost the country dear:
The contempt in which the civil service was held by the country between 1919
and 1929 had its bitter price in 1940. We suffered not only from a military defeat
but from a national defeat, in the sense that the higher administration of the state
was not up to the task, at least in many ministries.49
Cassin’s diagnosis recalls that of Marc Bloch in his Strange Defeat.50 After
the war, Cassin said, the time had come to return France to her grandeur:
‘The great periods of a state are those in which the central administration
was of exceptional quality.’51
In order ‘to recreate the public service’,52 reform had to have three
aims: the first was to break down the barriers between administrations;
the second was to democratize recruitment; and the third was to improve
the quality of higher civil servants. At the heart of the civil service are the
most prestigious bodies: the Conseil d’Etat, the Court of Accounts, the
Finance Inspectorate and the Diplomatic Service. The aim now was to
47 Michel Debré, Trois républiques pour une France. Mémoires, vol. 1, Combattre, avec la
collaboration d’Odile Rudelle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984), p. 369.
48 382AP87, conference on ENA, organized by the Centre de Recherches Administratives
de Sciences Politiques (directeur H. Puget), 27 Nov. 1954, and in particular, the essay
of M. Ribas on ENA since its creation.
49 CAC, 19900256/3 and 382AP88, CA/ENA, 28 July 1957.
50 Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, trans. Gerard
Hopkins (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).
51 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA, 15 June 1956.
52 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 20 June 1946.
bring up to the same level the new corps of civil administrators (adminis-
trateurs civils). The graduates of ENA were permitted to apply to work in
all of these bodies. The democratization of the civil service was to emerge
from a second competitive examination for civil servants already in lower
posts, and to end the quasi-monopoly of Parisians through the creation
of provincial institutes of political studies.
The raising of the quality of the civil service was the task of ENA
itself. Recruiting students who had finished their first degrees, ENA was
intended to be a school of practical studies, organized around three years
of work, one of internships, and two of lectures and seminars, adapted
to the future tasks the students would face.
ENA was divided into four sections: general administration, economic
and financial administration, social affairs, and foreign affairs. Candi-
dates applied for one of these four sections, and the examination included
both general and specific questions. On graduation, they were ranked by
their standing in the whole year’s entry and by section. Only the Conseil
d’Etat was recruited from all four sections; the Court of Accounts, from
the first three. The Foreign Office was open only to graduates of the
foreign affairs section, and the inspectorate of finance only from the eco-
nomic and financial section. This pathway to future work complicated
the entry examination, the structure of studies, the ranking of students,
and their placement.
Cassin and the executive board of ENA took their work very seriously.
Here met the highest levels of the French administrative elite: Debré and
Jeanneney, then professor at Grenoble’s Faculty of Law; Roger Grégoire,
director of the civil service, and his successor Pierre Chatenet; André
Ségalat, chief advisor to de Gaulle and later general secretary of the
government; François Bloch-Laı̂né, one of the heads of the Ministry of
Finance; Pierre Laroque, the father of the social security system. There
were also the heads of the National Foundation of Political Science,
André Siegfried and Pierre Renouvin; the directors of the Paris Institute
of Political Studies, Roger Seydoux and Jacques Chapsal; the director
of ENA, Henri Bourdeau de Fontenay, a former Resistance leader; and
Pierre Racine, director of internships in ENA. When Cassin stepped
down from the presidency of the executive board of ENA, he said justly,
‘I have participated in many committees, and I believe I have rarely
found a group of men so profoundly attached to the great cause in their
charge.’53
This was, of course, only the first step. ENA had to deal with the
particular interests of different ministries, and its history until 1960 was
53 CAC, 19900256/4, CA/ENA, 16 Sept. 1960, last session presided by Cassin.

marked by continuous conflict to achieve its aims. As soon as it was

created, it had to deal with the chronic shortage of posts available to
its students. After 1951, it fell foul of political attacks, and a govern-
ment commission for its reform was set up under Victor le Gorgeu, a
deputy and former member of the Resistance. The accusation was made
that ENA, created shortly after the Liberation in 1945, was disseminat-
ing among civil servants a ‘communist-progressive’ spirit.54 From this
charge, a witch-hunt emerged, to which we shall return below. Later on
was the headache of the Algerian war, and the sending of ENA students
to Algeria. Other political plots included the possible suppression of the
four sections of ENA and the reform of the curriculum. In short, this was
a turbulent period, in which both Cassin and the executive board had to
work hard to preserve their notion of what ENA should be.
First, for ENA to survive, its students had to find jobs at the appropriate
level. Admission to ENA did not automatically give the student the right
to become a high civil servant. Each year, the government published
a list of available posts, the number of which could be lower than the
number of successful candidates who had passed the examinations of
ENA. This was the reason why a number of ENA students held a press
conference in 1947, on the very day they were to meet the Minister of
the Civil Service, Pierre-Henri Teitgen. The Minister was outraged, and
went to ENA to tell the students that this was not the way to behave; he
treated them to a high-minded speech on the duty to serve the state and
to reform France’.55 Recognizing the legitimacy of their claims, Cassin
and the board still had to call them to order. He did so in a diplomatic
manner, saying ‘After all, this was not a death sentence; we must adopt
a civilized tone.’56
It was difficult to open a sufficient number of posts to ENA graduates
for three reasons. First, there were the austerity measures taken by the
government which reduced the number of posts in the higher civil service.
Secondly, there was the increase in the age of retirement by between three
and five years, which diminished the number of vacancies. Thirdly, many
ministries resented recruiting ‘Enarques’, graduates of ENA, because
each of them was used to recruiting its own civil servants through its own
examination. Some ministries refused to give posts to Enarques, and
others proposed boring positions. For instance in the Ministry of Home
Affairs, one Enarque was responsible for looking after the files.57 Only
54 382AP86, declaration of Pierre July, former Secretary of State, to the Congress of

Independent Republicans, passed on to Cassin by Fontenay, 18 Dec. 1956.
55 382AP85, Fontenay sent the text of this speech to Cassin on 11 July 1947.
55 CAC, 19770009/1, CA/ENA, 26 June 1947.
57 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 21 Nov. 1947.
three Enarques were appointed to the Ministry of Public Works between

1947 and 1955, but two of them left, ‘disgusted by the harassment they
received and the refusal to be considered for promotion’.58 In the Min-
istry of Agriculture, there were in 1954 only two Enarques out of 148
administrateurs civils.59 One of the earliest Enarques, Jean Sérisé, wrote of
these difficulties. He had been in the tax department, and had been dis-
couraged from applying for admission to ENA, ‘because the future of the
school seemed to be uncertain. It is hard to grasp the shock which struck
central administrations – and the most prestigious corps; for them, the
birth of ENA represented the end of their private and exclusive control
on recruitment.’60 Politicians pressed for the recruitment as administra-
teurs civils of members of their staff not in the public service, and trade
unions did the same with respect to lower civil servants. Both tended to
reduce the number of posts Enarques could get.61 The executive board
of ENA, supported by the head of the civil service, fought against these
obstacles, but the number of places in the entrance examination of ENA
also fell, to below forty in 1949.
To Cassin, this was an injustice arising out of jealousy. He believed the
welcome given to Enarques was warmer in the better civil service sec-
tors than in the worse ones: ‘Appointing as administrateurs civils those civil
servants who did not deserve it resulted in a kind of vengeance of the infe-
riors, against their betters, whose presence disclosed their inferiority.’62
Over time, he did see an evolution. Initially, the prestigious corps were
suspicious of ENA, but the ministries were favourable to it. Then the
situation reversed, ‘but the less efficient ministries, for whom the reform
was intended, continued to pretend not to understand it, and put a kind
of barrier in front of our young graduates, who in their eyes constituted
a danger to them’.63
Until 1954, all Enarques were given posts, some better, some worse;
sometimes they were appointed to positions outside of their specialities.
In 1954, the director of public service announced that there were only 104
posts for 109 Enarques.64 One reason for the shortage of posts was that
58 382AP87, letter of Cassin, dated 19 March 1955, to the president of the Finance
Commission of the Council of the Republic, opposing confirming as civil administrators
senior agents of the Ministry of Public Works.
59 382AP87, contribution of M. Ribas to the colloquium on ENA, 27 Nov. 1954, already
cited.
60 Comité pour l’Histoire de l’ENA, Cahiers pour une Histoire de l’ENA, 1 (2007), p. 214.
61 Odon Vallet, L’E.N.A. toute nue (Paris: Editions du Moniteur, 1977), p. 105, for the
figure of 2,619 as the total number of civil administrators in 1952.
62 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 19 Nov. 1949, and Fonds Debré, 1 DE 17.
63 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 16 March 1951.
64 CAC, 19900256/2, CA/ENA, 18 June 1954.
between sixty and eighty civil servants had been promoted from within
the corps as administrateurs civils. The five missing posts were finally
found. The following year the total posts advertised for the entrance
examination fell to sixty per year, and it would remain at that level for
five years. Cassin had reason to fear for the future of ENA:
It is painful for an executive board to accept a reduction in the number of
graduates, while it sees in the ten years after the legislation of 1945 [setting up
ENA] the existence of a bastille in which not a single Enarque was admitted. You
[the director of the civil service] say, you are facing harsh realities, but is it not a
harsher reality to see, in the ten years since the legislation of 1945, one Ministry
which has not a single graduate of ENA? How can you ask reasonable people to
accept such insubordination and such a violation of the spirit in which the school
was founded?
This policy was in fact a disavowal of the reform of 1945. Not without
vehemence, Cassin foresaw a move towards recruiting from within the
civil service growing stronger as against the recruitment of Enarques.
After having given very low estimates of their needs, to be satisfied by
ENA, some services suddenly discovered much greater ones, for which
they hoped to recruit separately.
Cassin asked the board of ENA to instruct him to write a letter to
the Minister denouncing such practices. ‘As against the sporadic ten-
dencies of those who only serve their particular interests, there must be
someone who speaks for the general interest.’65 The Conseil d’Etat was
more effective than the executive of ENA, and recognized in 1957 that
Enarques had a right to a post.
One of the most irritating subjects for ENA was the recruitment of the
chiefs of staff of prefects. This was the entry position into the prefectorial
corps. Normally these posts should be given to Enarques, but since these
people were likely to leave their positions rapidly, prefects preferred to
choose their chiefs of staff through a special examination. Here there was
direct competition with ENA; for instance in 1957, of twenty candidates
in the special examination, eighteen succeeded who had been turned
down by ENA.66 We can imagine that Cassin was somewhat surprised
when the Minister of Home Affairs asked him to name a member of the
Conseil d’Etat as president of the jury to run the special examination
for prefectorial chiefs of staff. The Minister replied that Enarques were
65 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA, 20 May 1955. See also Cassin’s letter of 19 March 1955
to the president of the Commission of Finances of the Council of the Republic, against
the naming as civil administrators of senior agents of the Department of Public Works,
to the extent of 70 per cent of those named in 1945, adopted by the deputies. This
Ministry was particularly hostile to former students of ENA.
66 CAC, 19900256/3 and 382AP88, CA/ENA, 23 March 1957.
refusing such posts, which to Cassin was a ‘skilfully contrived legend’.

While six Enarques were offered posts of chief of staff, twenty others
succeeded in the special competition the Home Minister had separately
arranged.67
This problem was resolved at the beginning of the Fifth Republic.
The Home Minister decided to recruit chiefs of staff only from ENA.
Cassin expressed his satisfaction: ‘For many years he protested without
success against a system which was unjust for the graduates of ENA; we
now state with pleasure that the Minister normally will appoint to the
prefectorial corps graduates of ENA.’68 It took ENA twelve years to be
fully recognized.
Cassin’s role as head of the Conseil d’Etat helps in part to account for
this success. The Conseil d’Etat did not shun Enarques, who had full
legitimacy. Cassin said so on several occasions. And from the Conseil
d’Etat they spread out into all the ministries, which finally came around
to the view that what was good for the Conseil d’Etat was perhaps not
bad for them.
But the quality of their education and training counted for more. The
executive board attached great importance to this, discussing the pro-
grammes of lectures, choosing the professors and examiners, scrutiniz-
ing the reports of their chairmen, and so on. It gave great importance
to economic and social questions, in order to end the tendency of many
administrations to adopt a purely legalistic approach.
Two matters recurred time and again: internships and the distinction
among the four sections in ENA. Internships had a central position in
its curriculum. The creation in 1945 of the director of internships shows
that this was so. The reformers of that period were well aware of the
limits of the professorial lectures. The decree of 1945 took special care
to provide, alongside lectures on general topics and technical courses,
practical exercises. These were intended as introductions to modes of
investigation, to the handling of administrative questions, and to the
preparation of decisions.
These students were more than undergraduates; they had their
first degrees, and they needed preparation for their public functions,
which required a broad definition of their training. Cassin noted too
that physical education was to be part of the entrance examination,
as ‘a test of character, of temperament, complementting the test of
knowledge’.69
67 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA, 19 Dec. 1958.

68 CAC, 19900256/4 and 382AP91, CA/ENA, 18 Dec. 1959.
69 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 11 July 1946.
Internships were an essential element in this training. During the first

year in ENA, students were placed in a prefecture, and served the prefect
in many ways. From there they went to a mayor’s office or an embassy
or elsewhere for three months. Cassin, though a professor of law, whose
lectures took place in large amphitheatres, still was deeply convinced
of the importance of internships: ‘The most important element, which
fulfilled the goals of the school’s founders, is that it not only gives an
intellectual education, but it forms the man or the woman; if we can say
that this training succeeds, we will have done our duty.’70
The innovation of internships was not well received. The director of
internships within ENA, Pierre Racine, later chief of staff of Prime Min-
ister Michel Debré from 1959 to 1962, regretted that, for many Parisian
civil servants, this humane training served no purpose, lacking either
interest or need. Internships were taken to be useless and costly prom-
enades, and were among the first attacks against ENA. The Le Gorgeu
report directly addressed this question. With some surprise, he admitted:
‘I must say, however, that when we questioned individuals, and especially
former students, their responses were extremely favourable to internships
in their current format and length.’71 Still, in 1953, the government, in
order to reduce the budget, cut three months from the programme of
ENA, in particular the internships, and in 1955 the government reduced
its weight in the examination of Enarques.
This measure caused further difficulties. The general situation was
unfavourable. The Treasury intended not to pay the chairmen of exam-
iners, and not to give ENA professors the same level of payment as those
of members of the faculties. They refused to create a post of deputy direc-
tor of internships, and so on. These were annoyances which announced a
climate, during which the government decided to assert a kind of political
control.
At the beginning of 1952, the government dismissed from the faculty of
ENA, because he was a communist, Jean Dresch, a talented geographer
admired by his students. For Cassin, this was extremely serious, since the
decision concerned activities outside of Dresch’s teaching.72 Even worse
was the refusal of the government to admit to the competition of 1953,
despite the favourable advice of ENA, seven candidates on the grounds
that they were suspected of being communists. The affaire Barel, as it was
70 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 19 Jan. 1951.

71 CAC, 19900256/2, CA/ENA, 16 May 1952.
72 CAC, 19900256/2, CA/ENA, 21 March 1952, for positive views of his teaching, and
16 Jan. 1953, for his dismissal.
called, ended on 28 May 1954 with the decision of the Conseil d’Etat
annulling this ruling.73
Emotions were high in public opinion as well as among higher civil
servants. One colleague in the Conseil d’Etat, who was an examiner
of candidates for admission to ENA, wrote to Cassin: ‘I never thought
we would see again, under whatever form, that discrimination among
Frenchmen of which we have not lost, I suppose, our sad memories.’74
The administrator of the Collège de France reported the discomfort
of the examiners’ board which he chaired. The director of the Ecole
Normale Supérieure refused to become an examiner.75
The executive board of ENA held an exceptional meeting on 5 October
1953, after a first effort to reverse the decision had failed.76 Renouvin
summarized the general opinion of the board: ‘That the state does not
give certain posts to communists is its own affair, but when it blocks
access to a competition for only this reason, this is inadmissible.’77 Henri
Wallon, an eminent psychologist and a professor in the Collège de France,
himself a communist, added ironically: ‘It is unfortunate that the first
examination for admission to a school is a police examination.’ The board
instructed Cassin to write to the Minister a letter of protest which the
board discussed and adopted on 16 October 1953. This letter presented
‘some remarks on certain matters of interest to the public law of the
French republic’. These views were clear enough, though diplomatically
stated: ‘A discriminative measure enforced at the moment of admission
to the school, on the grounds not of acts but of opinions, is this not only
a limitation on the exercise of a right, but also a negation of this very
right which goes beyond what might be said to be the legitimate defence
of a democratic state? If the government wanted to bar certain functions
to communists, it must be at the moment of their application, and it
would require a law to give it the power to do so.’78 This protest, which
announced the future decision of the Conseil d’Etat, received no answer.
In this context, the shortening of schooling by three months and the
strengthening of the weight of the examinations in the final evaluation
of students appeared to be a ‘sabotage’ of ENA, as Debré said. With-
out any alternative other than accepting it, the executive board ‘regrets
73 Lebon, p. 308. 74 CAC, 19900256/2, CA/ENA, 5 Oct. 1953.

75 382AP86, letter of 24 Oct. 1953.
76 The Lingois judgment, Litigation Commission, 29 July 1953, Lebon, p. 413.
77 CAC, 19900256/2, CA/ENA, 5 Oct. 1953.
78 CAC, 19900256/2, CA/ENA, 16 Oct. 1953. The note addressed by the executive board
of ENA to the Secretary of State, with handwritten corrections by Cassin, can be found
in 382AP86.
having been faced unexpectedly with a harmful decision without hav-

ing been consulted or even informed’.79 Later on, Cassin never ceased
to criticize these modifications in the final evaluation process, which he
found too heavy and too scholastic: ‘One should not propose to men
of 27 years of age the same examinations which one offers to those just
finished with their high school studies . . . We cannot make a mockery of
them.’80 The reduction from 25 to 20 per cent of the final classification
derived from the grade given to on-the-job training seemed to Cassin to
be unacceptable, though minor. This was a lost cause.
In contrast, he successfully resisted the proposal to make a committee
responsible for the grade given for on-the-job training. In the French sys-
tem, a grade given by someone with personal knowledge of the candidate
and because of such knowledge is an incongruity leading to questions of
fairness. For Cassin, and for the directors and executive board of ENA,
the contrary was true. It was impossible to grade someone without having
knowledge of the candidate and of the people who directed his work. The
proposal rejected by Cassin was adopted neither in 1953 nor in 1959,81
but it demonstrated the entire absence of understanding outside of ENA
of what was a major innovation: on-the-job training.
These debates illustrate as well the limits to the school’s independence.
Upon taking office, Cassin had declared: ‘Personally, I am rarely disposed
to take orders . . . We are not a service institution, but a Graduate School,
with our own administration and executive board, which are responsible
for it.’82 He was, however, obliged to compromise with the government,
and his negotiations were not always successful.
Indeed, it happened that the government was minded to impose its
views on ENA whatever the objections. This was the case with respect to
the decision to send ENA students to Algeria for seven months in 1956.
This was entirely contrary to the statutory rules defining the structure
of studies of ENA. Once again, the executive was neither consulted nor
informed, and the students learned of a decision affixed to a notice board
in the school’s hall telling them that the head of the government had
decided that they had to go to Algeria.83 The following year the same
problem arose. The relevant order had been submitted to the Conseil
d’Etat, without having been sent to the executive board of ENA, as was
79 CAC, 19900256/2, CA/ENA, 9 May 1953. The executive board received only during
its meeting the letter giving them notice of the decision already taken.
80 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA, 16 Sept. 1955. The phrase in French is ‘bête à concours’.
81 CAC, 19900256/2 and 4, CA/ENA, 20 March 1953, on the proposal of the Le Gorgeu
Commission, and 18 Dec. 1959 on the critique of the president of the jury, Louis Joxe.
82 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 6 April 1946.
83 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA, 19 Oct. 1956.
required legally. For Cassin, ‘here is a question of principle involving the

dignity of the board’. He had a meeting with the Secretary of State. In
his capacity as head of the Conseil d’Etat, he said to him that, should
there be an objection to this order on the grounds that ENA had not
been consulted, such an objection would undoubtedly be accepted and
the order nullified. All was in vain. The next day, Cassin reported to the
executive of ENA his unsuccessful meeting with the Secretary of State.
The board voted almost unanimously, with one no vote: that ‘without
entering into the issue itself, we protest against the fact that we were not
asked officially for advice on a matter of fundamental importance to the
education of the students of ENA’.84 Once more, these words of protest
had little effect.
This measure seemed completely unjust to ENA students, when com-
pared with the situation of those of other state institutions, like the Ecole
Polytechnique, whose students were soldiers, and who were not sent to
Algeria. It seemed even more unjust when they discovered that ENA
students were not really needed in Algeria. We can see here some hints
of deeper disagreements which came to the surface in May 1958, when
the insurrection of Algiers broke out. At that time the army seized power
in Algeria, and the Fourth Republic fell. These events led ENA to order
back home sixteen students since it was ‘practically impossible’ to ask
them to ‘serve under the orders of those who had dismissed the supervi-
sors of their training under at times humiliating conditions’.85
These events slowed down the reform of ENA which had been initiated
by the Le Corgeu report. Finally, it was promulgated on 13 December
1958. This decree shortened by six months the length of the ENA pro-
gramme of instruction. It separated the first stage of eleven months of
on-the-job training, from a second of seventeen months, including lec-
tures, written work, on-the-job training and seminars, and it established
a form of sequential examination.
The principal element was the suppression of ENA sections. Here
was a matter which the executive discussed at practically every meeting.
Cassin thought the sections were necessary for two reasons. The first
was the very definition of ENA as an applied school of learning devoted
to preparing students for service in different administrative branches.
Efficiency required recognizing differences, the retention of which would
act to prevent the return of special examinations, the end of which was
one reason for the existence of ENA itself. Here is another instance
of Cassin’s pragmatism; he knew that the administration had accepted
84 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA, 20 Dec. 1957.

85 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA, 6 June 1958, report of the director of on-the-job training.
ENA students more easily, since they had received specialized training in
sections.
The second reason was the commitment to turn civil administrators
into another grand corps, like the Conseil d’Etat or the Inspectorate of
Finance. This form of organizing the ranking of students through a sys-
tem of sections enabled them to avoid a complete hierarchy of placement
as in the case of the Ecole Polytechnique.86 When these students finished
their studies, they were given the choice of placement by rank order in
the examinations. In the case of ENA, adopting this approach would
deprive some ministries of the best graduates. In order to attract the best
students, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs requested the right to recruit
from all four sections and not only from those who had studied in the
foreign affairs section of ENA. In 1958, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
got what it wanted. This decision put an end to the system of sections,
an outcome which Cassin painfully had to accept.
The decree of 1958 also modified the second way to enter ENA open to
civil servants. This was a major innovation, justified by the undemocratic
character of the educational system. But the merging on equal standing of
young graduates and older but less educated civil servants was somewhat
difficult. ‘We are well aware’, Cassin said in 1948, ‘that this competition
is fragile.’ ‘We have to succeed in giving young men from modest back-
grounds the possibility to get the same qualifications as others.’87 He
wrote in 1951 to the Minister of Education that ENA could not achieve
its aim without the democratization of the school system.88
The key objective was to democratize the higher civil service: ‘I do not
need to remind you that one of the aims of our school is to facilitate
access for those of modest means to the highest functions of the state,
in whatever way possible.’89 Cassin was most interested in recruitment
to ENA. In 1955, there were seven sons of workers or farmers out of
eighty students, ‘which is a very interesting figure’, he noted, ‘but I do
not think it suits what we believe is equitable’. Equally unacceptable to
86 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA 18 Nov. 1955. Jeanneney opposed the recruitment of

diplomats from all sections with this argument: ‘There could be emerging from this
school two kinds of careers: for the top students, careers destined for the high flyers of
whom one does not demand more than being intelligent, without encumbering them
with all kinds of studies they had already done [sic], and then the others, destined
for the poor fellows who can do no more than plough the furrow of their technical
specialization. This would be entirely at odds with what one hoped for when ENA was
founded.’
87 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 17 Jan. 1948.
88 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 15 June 1951.
89 CAC, 19900256/1, CA/ENA, 29 Jan. 1949.
him was the fact that 45 per cent of all civil servants had been born in
Paris.90
There were limits to this initiative, but the replacement of special
competitions within different ministries, by one national examination,
which was much clearer to students, made it possible for more students
from the provinces and from relatively modest origins to enter the higher
civil service. This change towards openness was undeniable, but its limits
were more restricted than the reformers had hoped in 1945.91
In this process of limited democratization, civil service examinations
played a central role, though they also posed perennial problems to the
executive board. It was necessary to change these examinations in order
to evaluate the candidates on matters of general culture which they would
not be expected to have. Even so, examiners found that the candidates’
performance was below expectations, and they did not pass as many
candidates as there were posts available.92 There were as many posts
available to those taking the second pathway from within the civil service
to enter ENA. Hence places not given to those who had applied in this
second pathway were given to the first. ENA tried to attract candidates,
notably from the provinces, who if successful would have to come to
Paris, at times with their families. The executive bought a house for
them. Cassin insisted on covering their costs of relocation, and providing
to them the same supplementary benefits they had had before. Some civil
servants, for instance those from the local offices of the Treasury, did not
pass through ENA, since to do so would lead to less well paid posts in
future. From his position as head of the Conseil d’Etat, Cassin was very
well aware of this uneven situation: ‘I know of members of the Conseil
d’Etat who came from the civil service through ENA, and who are of
the highest quality; they have been in my office for six years, but they
do not command the same payment as they would have had had they
stayed in their earlier posts. Is this a moral situation?’93 Constant effort
90 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA, 18 Feb. 1955.

91 A report based on ENA statistics done by a student of the National School of Statistics
and Economic Administration, entitled L’évolution des profils des candidats et des admis à
l’ENA depuis 1945, s.l., n.d. [Malakoff, 1995], showed the limits of this democratization
process. Between 1952 and 1964, 72.3 per cent of those successful in the external
examination came from higher social classes, and 10 per cent from farmers, workers
and employees; in contrast, of those who passed the internal examinations, 38 per cent
were from higher social classes, and 31.2 per cent from other sectors of the population.
But ENA in its early years was more democratic and less Parisian than it would become
later.
92 CAC, 19900256/1, twenty-five passed in 1950 when there were fifty posts open in 1949.
CA/ENA, 17 Dec. 1949.
93 CAC, 19900256/3, CA/ENA, 15 June 1956.
was required to avoid making the second pathway into ENA a dead end
created solely for the purposes of symmetry.
Once in ENA, other problems emerged. Students coming from within
the civil service were less well educated. Cassin saw the implications. ‘We
do not want to create just average civil servants, but to draw out of the
population young people of value and make higher civil servants out of
them. Since they had not had enough time to acquire the needed level of
general culture, we must give it to them. It is our duty to do so.’94
The first idea was to replace part of their on-the-job training period
with a complementary course, but in fact they were given help to prepare
for the examinations. This proposal was first adopted in March 1950, giv-
ing candidates chosen through a preliminary examination four months’
paid leave to study.95
The reforms of 1958 went further still, creating a preparatory period
whose length depended upon the level of education of the candidate. The
best educated were given three months’ leave, but others had between
one and two years of preliminary training.96 In 1960, there were forty
people in this preparatory programme. Here too the Minister of Finance
was reluctant to give them the same financial benefits they had had in
their previous work in the civil service. In his last months, Cassin took
this matter up with the Minister of Finance, Antoine Pinay, but without
success.
In sum, the achievements of these fourteen years as head of the exec-
utive board of ENA were positive. The higher civil service was more
unified, and the main innovations in the functioning of ENA, on-the-
job training and the second pathway to entry, were realities. Recruitment
was somewhat democratized and provincialized. Issues of gender equality
would come to the fore only in the future. Paradoxically, Cassin and the
reformers of 1945 prepared the ground for those of subsequent decades,
the so-called ‘Trente Glorieuses’, and provided for those years a mod-
ernized higher civil service. The price they paid for this success was the
progressive abandonment of some of their objectives. Without any illu-
sions, Cassin recognized this fact in these words he spoke at the last
meeting of the executive board of ENA over which he presided: ‘The
creative enterprise in which we have participated is very important; it has
not yet acquired deep roots and the extensions it requires, but we retain
the hope that it will continue to live and prosper.’97
94 382AP91 and CAC, 19900256/4, CA/ENA, 18 March 1960.

95 Decree of 1950.
96 The statute relative to public service classified the employment of civil servants in these
four categories.
97 CAC, 19900256/4, CA/ENA, 16 Sept. 1960.
From the Fourth to the Fifth Republic

Cassin did not publicly intervene in the crisis which broke out on 13 May
1958 in Algiers, when the army created the Committee of Public Safety,
in order to prevent the National Assembly from handing power over
to a government which was not committed to keeping Algeria French
forever. The more the crisis unfolded, the greater were the risks that it
would degenerate into a civil war. Cassin did everything in his power to
ensure that the crisis would be resolved with de Gaulle legally returning
to power. To reach this goal, he asked de Gaulle not to break legal
procedures, and he asked his own circle not to oppose de Gaulle.98
Cassin was not very close to de Gaulle at that time. They exchanged
formal letters and season’s greetings. De Gaulle thanked Cassin when he
offered both the first and second volumes of de Gaulle’s war memoirs
to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1954 and 1956, and
when Cassin sent him articles on the 18 June 1940 speech and the Grands
arrêts de la jurisprudence administrative.99 Such exchanges were no more
nor less than loyalty from one side and courtesy from the other.
On 18 May 1958, on the eve of de Gaulle’s press conference during
which he exclaimed ‘Do you believe that at sixty-seven years of age I
will begin a career as a dictator?’, Cassin wrote to him on his personal
letterhead, to avoid any misunderstanding that he was speaking as an
individual and not as head of the Conseil d’Etat. He began by stating his
belief that the nation ‘has confidence in your capacity to reach a decision,
both about Algerian affairs and to rehabilitate our political system, in the
spirit of respect for the Republic’. He hoped that the press conference to
come would eliminate the fear that he would ‘start out’ as a prisoner of
illegality and of those who intended to make him ‘a battering ram against
the Republic’.
Here is Cassin’s analysis of the situation, with his own underlining:
The major issue is avoiding that civil war which both extremes hope for; one of
your most distinguished titles is that of having saved liberated France from this
danger in 1944.
To do so, it is necessary that national opinion calls you; that it demands that the
President of the Republic respond to this call by giving you the possibility to be
regularly invested in power by the National Assembly as soon as the previous
98 The typed copies of three important letters may be found in 383AP103. They consist
of letters to General de Gaulle of 18 and 29 May, and a third to Daniel Mayer, as
president of the League for the Rights of Man, dated 17 June, and Mayer’s response of
24 June.
99 382AP99.
government is dissolved; that you accept power, after having publicly stated the
central points of your programme, including constitutional measures . . .
If, from the outset, you have on your side the state apparatus – which is the oppo-
site of your position in 1940 – you will be able to consecrate all your legitimate
authority to the pursuit of the great objectives for which you are awaited and for
which you will be followed by the country.
Without this, in the actual state of things, the majority of the country, because it
remains attached to the Republic (I do not have in mind political parties, which
benefit from it), would refuse to give you unlimited power and would eventually
oppose you. Would it be in conformity with the national interest and worthy of
your dignity, to voluntarily let things get worse, in order to get from anarchy and
national humiliation – even without civil war – what would be offered to you
immediately, though with very harsh, but less cruel, conditions?100
On 29 May, after the President of the Republic had announced that he

had asked de Gaulle to form a new government, Cassin wrote to him
more briefly:
At the very time when extreme tension revives all the threats of civil war, I beg
you instantly to accept those forms which will give your taking power full legality,
and which will rally to your side the mass of good citizens.
The arbiter you will become cannot add to an explosion like that of Algiers,
excessive humiliations to those who are ready to dedicate themselves under your
leadership to the great task of French unity.
In order to reach a positive outcome, I place all that is in my power and my
ingenuity in the service of the Republic you must restore a second time.
With all my anxious and confident devotion.101
We do not know if the General read these lines. In any event they were
extremely skilful in their brevity. On the one hand, his informal tone
reflects a solidarity born in London which enabled him to be frank and
make formalities superfluous. On the other hand, his words play on the
themes of French unity and grandeur so dear to de Gaulle. Finally, in
taking as given the return of the General, Cassin developed an argument
about effectiveness: the need to rally the masses, not to alienate poten-
tial collaborators, among whom he himself implicitly stood. In placing
himself at the service of a Republic de Gaulle had to restore, he implied
that he would not serve it should it not be restored. He wrote to Daniel
Mayer some weeks later: ‘I was completely clear that I would not remain
100 382AP103.
101 382AP103. The original of this letter may be found in the de Gaulle archive in 3AG/105.
in the Conseil d’Etat, if de Gaulle had not come to power through regular
procedures.’102
De Gaulle was indeed invested as head of the last government of the
Fourth Republic by the National Assembly. Then Cassin thought that
the duty of all Republicans was to support him. His logic returned to
Free France. He wrote to Daniel Mayer that one must avoid the error of
those honest Republicans who, in London, criticized de Gaulle, harming
France by weakening her in the eyes of the British and the Americans
through their criticisms. Certainly, conditions then were very different,
and in 1958, the return of the General to power was ‘a demand of rebels
against the regular authorities of the Republic’. But the essentials were
different:
We must defend our ideas, but not only by words. Above all, let us not forget the
essential, to support and if needed to handle de Gaulle so that he will weaken
then dissolve the Algerian rebellion, without being forced to retreat. Let us not
create the vicious circle where we would say to de Gaulle: ‘We will criticize and
fight you as long as you do not follow our political line’; to which de Gaulle would
reply: ‘How can I break the subversion of the right, if I am deprived of effective
support against it?’103
Daniel Mayer replied very kindly to Cassin while stating his objections.
A non-communist left, outside of the new regime, would be useful to
help Cassin and those who supported de Gaulle, to protect him against
‘the pressures of those less reasonable and less loyal to the Republic
than Cassin himself’. Later on Cassin had a similar exchange with Pierre
Mendès France. After he had published an article in Le Monde about
the line Republicans must follow, Cassin begged him to develop a con-
structive policy, in place of focusing on revising the Constitution, to limit
the President’s powers. For instance, we must not neglect other issues,
such as balancing the representation of cities and towns in the Senate.
Here again, Cassin returned to the precedent of Free France. Mendès
France answered with courtesy, but stressed how the government had
given much to the right.104 Obviously, there is a clear division between
Cassin, who worked with the new government, because it had respected
legal forms just as he had asked it to do, and those Republicans who
condemned it because it was a child of insurrection.
It was hardly surprising that Cassin was eager to collaborate in the
drafting of the new Constitution, a task in which he would be involved
102 382AP103, capital letters and underline in the text. 103 382AP103.
104 382AP108, draft of a letter of Cassin, dated 28 Sept. 1958, and the response of Mendès
France, dated 20 Oct. 1958.
due to his high office. As this story is relatively well known,105 it is

sufficient for us to specify, as precisely as possible, Cassin’s role.
He participated in two early meetings at the Matignon Palace, the
seat of the government, on this subject. The first was presided over by de
Gaulle, on 13 June. Present were: de Gaulle and Michel Debré; Ministers
of State Guy Mollet, Pierre Pflimlin, Félix Houphouët-Boigny and Louis
Jacquinot. Cassin spoke against the idea of a Constitutional Court, which
he believed could seem useless to the vice-president of that institution,
the Conseil d’Etat, which then did that job. Cassin pointed to the need to
protect the head of the government from the encroachment of the powers
of the President. On 23 June, at the second meeting, one subject was how
the President would be elected. De Gaulle was not there. Cassin was
opposed to a two-phase election, which Debré believed would weaken
the President. Cassin thought however that it was necessary to limit to
exceptional periods the wide powers of the President of the Republic.
His attachment to parliamentary tradition was evident.106
Once the draft of the Constitution was ready it was submitted, in the
second half of July, to a ministerial committee and to a committee of
experts, and in the first fortnight of August, to the Consultative Consti-
tutional Committee created by the law of 3 June and presided over by
Paul Reynaud. Cassin was there, but it is difficult to know what proposed
modifications he offered. Probably, he was in favour of making it com-
pulsory that the government take the advice of the Conseil d’Etat before
the government proposed a bill to the legislature. The decisions of this
committee were transmitted to de Gaulle on 14 August.
At the end of August, the bill came to the Conseil d’Etat. Cassin
was on the front stage. He met the General, and he had chosen as a
105 The National Committee charged with the publication of preparatory documents relat-
ing to the institutions of the Fifth Republic and Didier Maus produced three volumes of
Documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’élaboration de la Constitution du 4 octobre 1958; vol. 1,
Des origines de la loi constitutionnelle du 3 juin 1958 à l’avant-projet du 29 juillet 1958; vol. 2,
Le comité consultatif constitutionnel. De l’avant-projet du 29 juillet 1958 au projet du 21 août
1958; vol. 3, Du Conseil d’Etat au referendum. 20 août–28 septembre 1958 (Paris: La Doc-
umentation Française, 1987, 1988 and 1991). We cite them here as Maus. Documents
relative to the laws which followed were published by the same group: Commission des
Archives Constitutionnelles de la Ve République, vol. 1 Octobre 1958 – 30 novembre 1958,
2008. In the abundant bibliography on 1958, useful material is found in Didier Maus,
Louis Favoreu and Jean-Luc Parodi (eds.), L’écriture de la Constitution de 1958, Actes
du Colloque du XXXe anniversaire, Aix-en-Provence, 8, 9, 10 Sept. 1988 (Aix-en-
Provence: Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille/Paris, Economica, 1992), and Didier
Maus, Olivier Passelecq et al. (eds.), Témoignages sur l’écriture de la Constitution de 1958.
Autour de Raymond Janot, Actes de la journée organisée le 1er oct. 1993 (Paris: La
Documentation Française, 1997).
106 The transcripts of these meetings may be found in 382AP103 as well as in Maus, vol. 1,
pp. 245–9 and 277–9.
colleague to introduce and comment on the draft, a committed Gaullist,

André Deschamps.107 Thereafter the debates within the Conseil d’Etat
began in the smaller setting of the ad hoc Constitutional Commission
on 25 and 26 August, and then continued in the General Assembly of
the Conseil on the two following days. Cassin was at the centre of these
deliberations. He was more qualified than anyone else to urge them not
to refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which would have
raised difficulties, since France was reluctant to accept the pacts which
were then slowly emerging in the UN.
France has shown her colours; her past suffices to establish that fact. The Uni-
versal Declaration is not a covenant, it is a proclamation. No one should argue
that France was rejecting the Universal Declaration due to the fact that it is not
mentioned in the Constitution.108
Cassin’s position on the question of the President and the Prime Minister
was very balanced. He wanted clearly to give the President greater pow-
ers, though only to a certain point. He rejected that nominations made
by the Prime Minister be understood to be Presidential ‘delegations’:
‘the “delegate” is humiliating to the Prime Minister who himself held
responsibility’.109 But he accepted that special powers could be given to
the President under exceptional conditions. Here he recalled how the
King of Norway and the Queen of the Netherlands had been considered
in London ‘to incarnate the legitimacy of their States, carrying the spark
of their sovereignty with them’.110 In the General Assembly, he returned
to June 1940 and recalled how the President of the Republic had been
denied the right to leave France, thereby keeping the legitimacy of the
Republic with him, and the consequences that followed therefrom.111
One of the most highly debated questions was the definition of the
domains of law and of regulations. This matter could be seen as tech-
nical, but it had a profound meaning. The real question was whether
there was a limit to the authority of the representatives elected through
universal suffrage? Before 1958, the answer was no. Hence the domain
of regulations was that which the legislators left to the government. The
107 Deschamps served in the Resistance, and was named to the Conseil d’Etat in 1948.
De Gaulle appointed him to the Constitutional Council in 1964, and he served in it
until 1968.
108 Commission Constitutionnelle, Maus, vol. 3, p. 42. See also, Assemblée Générale,
27 August, morning session, p. 290.
109 Commission Constitutionnelle, Maus, vol. 3, p. 73.
110 Commission Constitutionnelle, Maus, vol. 3, p. 77.
111 Assemblée Générale, Maus, vol. 3, p. 234. The secretary, Deschamps, said that in
1940 Cassin saw Lebrun, and that, had he been a responsible leader, he should have
left for Algiers.
new Constitution listed those precise subjects covered by law. Opening

the discussion, Cassin stressed this difference. The authors of the draft
Constitution ‘thought that it would be necessary to use the occasion of
the new Constitution to reverse this custom, and to say that the law was
the exception and regulations, on the contrary, were the rule’. Cassin
himself was in two minds here, for to limit the power of the legislator was
tantamount to abandoning the principle of the sovereignty of the peo-
ple as expressed by its representatives. But he knew perfectly well how
this principle led to abuses, and he tried to find a middle ground. ‘Is it
not possible for the Constitution to find a remedy for the old practices,
without such brutal means?’112 In the General Assembly of the Conseil
d’Etat, the majority supported the view of Dean Julliot de la Morandière:
it was impossible to truncate universal suffrage. Cassin did not object to
this position and, after an extensive debate, put the point to the vote. The
government’s draft was rejected. Cassin did not contest this vote, but he
added: ‘We are not exempt from continuing our work, and we must try to
find another formulation of this principle to present to the government,
and it is not certain that the government will reject it.’113
Here is Cassin in full flow. A solution was actually found which per-
mitted parliament to suppress these limitations of its powers by adopting
a specific law. La Morandière praised this solution and wrote to Cassin
on 1 September applauding it: ‘In any case, the discussion was exciting
without being excited. As always, you presided over it, with a master’s
hand, with authority, courtesy, flexibility . . . and endurance. I admire the
work which you and Deschamps have done.’114
Cassin chaired the debates which followed on the laws concerning
the elections of the Chambers and the organization of the Constitu-
tional Court, which, for a transitional period, would take the form of a
commission presided over by Cassin himself. He paid particular atten-
tion to the wording of the law establishing the Constitutional Court,
with an eye to avoiding giving it too many matters to address, thereby
crippling it.115
Ironically Cassin, who did not believe that the Constitutional Court
was necessary, was nonetheless ex officio chair of the provisional commit-
tee, which authorized the first elections of the Fifth Republic. He was
physically present between René Coty and Charles de Gaulle, when the
112 Assemblée Générale, 25 August, p. 97.

113 Assemblée Générale, 27 August, afternoon session, p. 407.
114 382AP/103, Letter of 1 Sept. 1958.
115 Cassin noted to the secretary that the Senate itself had to validate the powers of its
members. The Council could only decide on unresolved problems. 16 Oct. 1958,
Maus, vol. 1, p. 451.
passage from the last President of the Fourth Republic to the first Presi-
dent of the Fifth Republic took place. Cassin proclaimed de Gaulle duly
elected and gave him the titles of office.
On 18 June 1960, he was named member of the Constitutional Court
by the president of the Senate. He was renominated in 1962 and served
until 1971. At that time, the Constitutional Court did not have the same
power as it does today (2012),116 and Cassin’s role in it was limited.
He joined the majority in expressing to de Gaulle in 1962 their total
opposition to the referendum de Gaulle used to reform the Constitution
to elect the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. He also
favoured the extension of the right of the Court to express the grounds
for its decisions and not only its conclusions.117
In sum, Cassin retained his old principles throughout these delibera-
tions. Astonishingly present for a man in his seventies, even when debates
went on into the evening, he gave careful attention to objections and to
finding room for compromise without ceding his principles. In this man-
ner, he did justice to the government’s business. This, in his view, was
the precise role of the Conseil d’Etat. To one councillor hostile to the
draft Constitution, he replied in the General Assembly: ‘You have the
right to state your opinion: but truly when the government has chosen
to adopt great political measures, the Conseil d’Etat must not exceed
its legal function and become itself a political assembly.’118 Cassin put
his energy and his intelligence into helping General de Gaulle realize
his political programme. His attitude was that neither of an adversary
nor of a partisan, but of an unshakable ally. Daniel Mayer captured this
precisely, ten years later, when he wrote of Cassin: ‘He is, in France, at
the crossroads between the majority and the opposition. He belongs to
one by sentiment towards its leader, and to the other, by his attachment
to Republican principles.’119
On 29 September 1960, Cassin stepped down from his post as vice-
president of the Conseil d’Etat. Exceptionally, he was named honorary
116 On the Constitutional Court: Léo Hamon, Les juges de la loi: naissance et rôle d’un
contre-pouvoir, le Conseil constitutionnel (Paris: Fayard, 1987); Pierre Avril and Jean Gic-
quel, Le Conseil constitutionnel (Paris: Montchrestien, 1992); Conseil Constitutionnel,
Cinquantenaire du Conseil constitutionnel: Actes des colloques du 3 novembre 2008 et du
30 janvier 2009 (Paris: Dalloz, 2009), special number of the series Cahiers du Conseil
Constitutionnel.
117 Jacques Robert, ‘René Cassin au Conseil constitutionnel’, in De la France libre aux
droits de l’homme, pp. 93–9.
118 9 Oct. 1958, Maus, vol. 1, p. 78.
119 CAC, 20040382/65, personal file of Cassin, speech to Unesco, during a meeting on 16
Dec. 1968 organized by the Comité Français des Organisations non Gouvernementales
pour la Liaison et l’Information des Nations Unies.
president of the Conseil.120 His multi-faceted political career was far

from over, but his official functions after his retirement, either in the
Constitutional Court or in the European Court of Human Rights, were
no longer at the centre of administrative life in France.
In practical terms, this meant that Cassin had to find a new secretariat,
after sixteen years at the Conseil d’Etat. His new base of operations was
across Paris in the 9th arrondissement home of the Alliance Israélite
Universelle. It is to the work he did with and for this institution, and as
an international Jewish leader, that we turn next.
120 CAC, 20040382/65, decree of 29 Sept. 1960, personal file of Cassin, Conseil d’Etat.
11 A Jewish life
For Cassin, as a Republican jurist, being a Jew was not a matter at the
centre of his life before the war of 1939. In this domain, war and the
Shoah turned Cassin’s work and thinking in a new direction. To be sure,
Cassin’s life as a Jew antedated his Jewish life as a public figure. We
have traced the early contours of his family life, in which his parents’
relationship to Judaism was a source of conflict, possibly contributing to
his parents’ divorce. When, before 1914, Cassin made it clear that he
lived with a non-Jewish woman, Simone Yzombard, he was telling his
family more than that he had started his adult life. He was saying that his
choice of partner was made outside the faith, and, like his father before
him, that his life and its contours would not be defined by it. He did not
attend synagogue, and did not engage in Jewish community life; there is
no record of any participation in active Jewish circles, and he was not a
Zionist.
Cassin’s standpoint was shared by most Jewish Republicans at this
time, including Marc Bloch. Bloch was a man of his generation – he
was born in 1886 and Cassin in 1887. He was a soldier of the Great
War too, and in his testament of 1943 he refused any ‘cowardly denial’
and continued: ‘Remote from any religious form as well as any so-called
racial solidarity, I have felt, through my whole life, above all, simply a
Frenchman.’1
Anti-Semites thought otherwise. For them Jews could not shed their
Jewishness. As long as such voices were heard, being a Jew in pre-1914
France was never entirely a private matter. Anti-Semites came in many
colours, and their febrile rhetoric about Jewish conspiracies and Jewish
cupidity was endemic. And yet Dreyfus had been exonerated, and the
Radical party in power had reinforced the divide between religion and
the Republican state. When Cassin joined the colours in 1914, he served
with one soldier, Samama, also a Jew, and also a man who knew that
1 Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaite (Paris: Albin Michel, 1957 (1st edn 1946)), p. 224.
301
a Jewish soldier had to be particularly valiant to earn the respect of his

fellow men in uniform.2
These were the burdens of prejudice borne quietly and without much
fuss by Jewish Republicans, proud of their country and of their military
service in its defence. We have already spoken of Cassin’s engagement
after demobilization. His Jewishness made him a target of verbal aggres-
sion, such as this venomous letter he received during the electoral cam-
paign of 1928, and which he preserved, as if he did not want to forget
that in public life being a Jew was invitation to insult.
The people of this region are beginning to know your titles and qualities. You are
only a dirty little Jew without importance.
Signed: A real disabled man3
Before 1940, the Jewish question was not of central importance to Cassin.
Certainly, he was aware of the persecution of the Jews under the Nazi
yoke. Here was one of the origins of his thinking on the rights of individ-
uals and the limits of state sovereignty. Certainly, he was fully aware of
the rise of anti-Semitism, which had echoes even in the UF, and above
all among his colleagues in the Paris law faculty. He knew very well in
June 1940 that the future was dark for Jews. But it was the fall of the
Republic and the rise of the Vichy regime which transformed men like
Bloch and Cassin, against their will, from being Jewish Republicans into
being Republican Jews.
Both men resisted this diminution of their Frenchness, and yet they
wore their Jewish identities with defiance and even pride. As Bloch wrote,
‘I announce my Jewish origins only when face to face with an anti-
Semite.’4
Like Bloch, Cassin remained a Republican patriot for whom France
was a unique country. This is what he wrote in his 1974 testament: ‘If
all my life I have fought for the existence and brilliance of France, it has
been for the France of human rights and not for an ordinary nation.’
And later he added: ‘I have always acted on the level of humanity.’ But
having presided over the Alliance Israélite Universelle from 1943 on, he
continued: ‘I would lose the confidence of thousands and even millions
of Jews [Israélites], as well as that of the persecuted masses with whom
I stand in solidarity, if I were to refuse to be buried in the Jewish rite.’5
Here we see a new identity born out of the war, an identity which inspired
a new form of social and political engagement.
2 382AP1. 3 382AP11. 4 Bloch, L’étrange défaite, p. 31.

5 382AP194, documents testamentaires de Monsieur René Cassin, 25 août 1974 [dated
by the context].
A Jewish life 303
The legacy of the war

It is not our aim to write a history of the Shoah in France or elsewhere.
London was well informed, and from early on, as to the dimensions of
the crime the Nazis were methodically carrying out. From the middle of
1942, political and intellectual circles had proof of the crime. Cassin had
been alerted from early on about Nazi practices. He had been struck by
Goebbels’s statements at the League at the end of 1933. He tried to alert
his comrades in the UF about the brutality of the Reich, especially after
Kristallnacht. Among the Free French, he was one of the best informed,
due to his relations with Sikorski. He was also one of the firmest voices
on the BBC to denounce the way Vichy was imitating its masters. The
fate of the Jews became of central importance to him, and was at the core
of his work on behalf of human rights and the punishment of war crimes,
subjects which the Allied leadership was initially reluctant to discuss.
However, these crimes were monstrous not only for him as they were
for any other moral being, but now he was personally implicated. The
persecution hit his family directly.
Cassin’s large family was in France, at the mercy of the anti-Semitic
laws of Vichy and German round-ups. Cassin evidently felt concern for
his father and mother, for his elder brother Fédia and his four children,
for his sister Félice and her four children, as well as for her second
husband Emile Cahen, who died in November 1941. He was worried
too about his younger sister Yvonne, her husband, Henri Bumsel, and
their daughter.6 He sent them all messages and received some too by
diverse channels.
His family was larger still, and the circle of affective ties went beyond
the limits of his nuclear family. René’s father had eight brothers and
sisters, along with many cousins. The closest of them to him were Max
and Yvon Cassin, who were twice cousins: their father and René’s father
were brothers, and their mothers were sisters. A wise businessman and
French consul in Ciudad Real in Spain, Max occupied a unique position
during the war: he was the only member of the family (aside from René)
living outside of France, and therefore was an essential intermediary.
René Cassin had full confidence in him; after the war, he chose him as his
representative in all family affairs, and shared with him his investment in
the journal Ici-Paris.7 On his mother’s side, there were no other cousins,
but there were more distant relatives. His grandmother Rachel had had
6 Personal details on national identity (état-civil) may be found in BSM 23448, Central
Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem.
7 See chapter 8.
four children, who themselves had families. The family fortune had been
invested in farms in the surrounding area of Bayonne, on one of which,
the Landribet farm, was a large house attached to a building named
Rachel Cottage. It was attractive dwelling to which the family came for
summer holidays and for which they shared a deep affection.8
From this green paradise spawned by children’s love, many happy
memories remained. René Cassin was very attached to a young cousin
married to a Polish-born tailor naturalized French in 1910, Albert Mon-
tag. Both couples were very close. Neither had children, and they lived
near one another: the Cassins at 53 boulevard Saint-Michel, and the
Montags at 34 boulevard Saint-Germain. All four fled Paris together in
June 1940.
The fate of this family during the dark years illustrates that of many
other Jewish families well integrated into French society, people of good
reputation, and thereby less exposed than were poor families of recent
immigrants, whose French was limited and whose accents were pro-
nounced. Despite these advantages, the tragedy struck them too.
Cassin’s mother died of natural causes on 2 April 1944 in Le Can-
net near Marseilles. Her granddaughter Suzy was with her; her grand-
mother’s last words were ‘my prayer book’ and ‘my children’. Through
a Catholic nurse and family friend, Suzy was able to arrange for the
burial of Gabrielle according to Jewish rituals, clandestinely in the crypt
of the nurse’s family.9 His father was arrested, but survived, through the
help of a doctor who took him to safety in an ambulance.10 After the
deportation of his wife’s parents, Fédia lived clandestinely near Guéret
in the Creuse and dispersed his four children in the Jura and in the Alps.
All survived, as did his sister Félice and her children. But René’s other
sister Yvonne Bumsel and her husband were arrested, and deported to
Auschwitz on 7 March 1944. The Montags, arrested at home, had been
deported one month before, on 3 February. René’s uncle, Abraham, was
arrested despite his age – he was eighty-eight years old – and he was
deported on 10 February together with one of his daughters, his son-
in-law and three members of his family. One daughter and one son of
another uncle, Rabbi Honel Meiss, whose role we have noted in René’s
education, were also deported with their spouses. On the Dreyfus side
of the family, aside from the Montags, René was close to the Pereyres
(he wrote to them from London), and they also were deported. None of
8 See chapter 1. 9 Interview with Suzy Abram, 27 July 2011.

10 382AP73, letter of Cassin to Dr Lattes, 17 Nov. 1944. Interviews with Suzy Abram, 27
July 2011 and with Josette Cassin, 12 August 2011.
A Jewish life 305
these relatives returned from deportation. The Cassin family had been
literally decimated.
Cassin was profoundly shaken by these losses, and in addition he had
to take responsibility for a range of family concerns in 1945. Naturally,
French bureaucrats were more immediate in their response to the vice-
president of the Conseil d’Etat than they were to other such requests.
Hence Cassin’s cousins and nephews asked him to intervene by passing
on their requests to discover the fate of deported members of their fami-
lies. He was at the centre of a family in mourning, who were in search of
some trace of those who had not yet returned. The war of 1914–18 had
created among veterans bonds of solidarity which Cassin still shared.
The grief of those who lost loved ones in the Shoah created a similar
solidarity, rooted in family ties and losses, but which went beyond them.
Cassin went through this difficult reckoning in both world wars.
Wartime persecution struck Cassin’s family members in many ways.
Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation did not apply to Cassin, since he had
been sentenced to death in absentia on 2 April 1942, and all his property
had been confiscated and deposited in the public administration. His
portfolio included stocks, which were restored to him with dividends
after the war, and a house in Antibes, ‘Ma Cassinette’, purchased in
1935 for 56,000 francs. This house had been rented out during the war
for 540 francs per trimester, and this too was returned to him after the
Liberation.11 However, the property had fallen into disrepair, and had
to be renovated. As to his apartment at 53 Boulevard Saint-Michel, in
Paris, there was no question of title, since he had rented it before the
war, and by chance he was able to move back in on his return. It had
probably not been stripped of its possessions, and we do not have any
claim for damage from Cassin for German compensation after 1957. It
is true, though, that his library and his papers had been searched, some
had disappeared, and the plumbing was in need of repair.
Cassin’s father also seems to have escaped the loss of his business assets.
His wine business had closed down twenty years before. His mother,
on the other hand, owned three properties inherited from her parents.
The first was a building in Biarritz, which housed two shops and two
apartments, with an annual revenue of 20,500 francs. This building was
valued at 150,000 francs. Together with her son Fédia, she owned a
second building in Biarritz. This was a small hotel in poor condition,
the rent from which amounted to 17,500 francs annually. The third
property, owned by the two Dreyfus sisters, included Rachel Cottage,
and two farms on the outskirts of Bayonne rented for over twenty years
11 382AP158.
to the same farmers. The sisters hardly invested in the modernization of

these buildings. The farms had neither running water nor electricity. The
ground floor of one of them was regularly inundated from a source under
the house. The other had a clay floor. Rachel Cottage had electricity, but
there was running water only in the kitchen. These farms were rented at
a low level, respectively 3,500 and 1,700 francs per year. Their capital
value was much more impressive than their rental value. The properties
were valued at 252,500 francs for an 8.5 hectare farm, and at 240,600
francs for a 4.15 hectare farm, which included Rachel Cottage. René’s
aunt Cécile also possessed in the same district three other farms, and two
buildings in the centre of Biarritz.12
These properties fell under the jurisdiction of the law of 22 July 1941,
which ordered the dispossession of properties owned by Jews. The Sous-
préfet of Bayonne placed them under the control of an administrator in
the autumn of 1941 and, after receiving an expert valuation, ordered that
they be sold. The procedure laid down by the law required that those
who wanted to buy such properties had to submit an offer in a sealed
envelope, which had to be at least at the level of the valuation. Once
the bids were opened in the sub-prefecture, it was often the case that
no one wanted the property at that price. In such a case, the procedure
began once more, with a price at 20 per cent below the initial valuation.
If there was a buyer at that price, the sale went through, but that was
not the end of the procedure. Now a notary had to vet the contract, after
which the German authorities had to approve it, alongside the Commis-
sariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ), and the administrator who
handled the sale had to present his accounts. This was a long road. In
the case that there was no purchaser, the local company of notaries was
instructed to sell the property to the highest bidder. After this sale, the
administrator had to go through the same long route to secure official
approval.
Since these procedures were extremely lengthy, at the Liberation it was
evident that businesses and stock holdings were seized much more fre-
quently than was domestic property. One estimate has it that in the occu-
pied zone (Paris excluded) 22 per cent of Jewish property held in build-
ings was formally spoliated, and only 12 per cent in the non-occupied
zone in the south, where the Aryanization process began later.13
By chance the Cassin-Dreyfus family benefited from the fact that an
old friend defended their interests and that the provisional administrators
were honest. Their long-standing place in the Bayonne community no
12 The dossiers of Aryanization may be found in AJ38/4235, dossiers 3550–5, and

AJ38/4237, dossiers 3640–3.
13 Prost, Skoutelsky and Etienne, Aryanisation économique et restitutions, p. 124.
A Jewish life 307
doubt helped them here. One of the provisional administrators did not
charge any fees for his work. Another was asked by Max Cassin after
the war to manage the three farms he had administered during the war.
The notary handling these procedures in Bayonne was not particularly
zealous in his work. In one of the Cécile Dreyfus-Cassin properties, sold
after her death, he refused to register the sale, since it was unclear who
had rights to inherit it. Punctiliousness meant precious delay.
There were also ways in which the victims could resist despoliation.
Cassin’s mother wrote to the provisional administrator contesting his
powers to dispose of Rachel Cottage. Thereafter, a long correspon-
dence ensued between the administrator and the Sous-préfet, who finally
ordered that the property be sold, since it was not her primary residence.
This protest gained three more months’ delay. Finally, the houses in Biar-
ritz were damaged by Allied bombardment on 27 March 1944, which
led the people who had acquired the properties to withdraw or to ask the
Sous-préfet who would pay for the repairs. No answer or a slow answer
was all to the good. Consequently, at the time of the Liberation, not a
single one of these enforced sales had been completed.14
There was one significant exception. Rachel Cottage was indeed
sold to two purchasers who offered 302,000 francs for it, well over the
estimated value of 240,600 francs. The purchasers offered to restore it to
the Cassin family in 1945.15 Restitution dragged on, though, on account
of the deportation of René’s sister, Yvonne, who was co-proprietor
of Rachel Cottage. In addition, this property had been occupied by
German soldiers, who stripped it clean. Fortunately, the friend of the
Cassin family who looked after their interests had asked the notary to
establish an inventory of possessions before this intrusion, and a second
inventory when the soldiers left. Furthermore, this friend had taken out
an insurance policy on the contents of the house at the sum of 90,000
francs in August 1942, which was the sum listed in the first inventory.
In this manner, the extent of pillage was recognized. This claim resulted
in a payment for damages from the French government. Under the
German Restitution Law of 1958 (loi Brüg), 30 per cent of all such
claims were paid by the German government.
It is evident that, even in the case of a family which did not lose sub-
stantial property through Nazi and Vichy despoliation, the war certainly
did not end at the Liberation. Fifteen years later, there was still business
to conduct with respect to indemnification, including the collection of
personal documents, supporting letters from witnesses, the replacement
14 Dossiers of the provisional administrators, in AJ38: Edouard Pinatel and Jean Marcel,
carton 5458, Jean Fourniol, carton 5457.
15 382AP73, letter of notary, 23 Jan. 1945.
of documents lost by the administration, and so on. For instance, one of

Cassin’s nieces in 1970 wrote to the competent authorities that she had
given up her demand for indemnification from the German government:
‘The outcome of the claim would be unpredictable, since we do not pos-
sess any proof of the existence of stolen objects. Furthermore, the most
valuable treasures for us were our parents, whose role in educating our
children is gone forever.’16
Whether he wanted or not, Cassin was swept up in a family tragedy
with durable traces, a disaster which changed his self-perception. What
he himself faced, aside from his family, marked him in the same way.
In effect, Cassin’s Jewishness posed for him problems he had never
confronted before, since, for a number of people in Free France, to be a
Jew was not a minor matter. For some of them, it was enough to make
him expendable. He got wind in March 1941 of moves afoot within the
inner circle of France Libre to get rid of him: ‘for the second time, I have
heard that some people wanted to put Escarra in the Defence Council,
in place of the Jew I am’.17 In September, Cassin refused to join in a plot
against de Gaulle, planned by Admiral Muselier, who told him: ‘Thank
God, I did not include your name in the list of my ministers.’ Muselier
added that, as a Jew, Cassin was persona non grata among the Bretons
‘who are at the heart of Free France’.18 In a post-war letter to Lucien
Dreyfus, Cassin wrote:
It is only too true that among those who voluntarily rallied to de Gaulle were
fervent patriots coming from all parts of the nation. There were former cagoulards,
members of Action Française, reactionaries who were not entirely free of the anti-
Semitism of their early years. In the military units and in the administrative
services, there were all too often serious incidents of which, alas, I was well
aware.19
Cassin watched while his rivals stepped on the toes of his, Cassin’s,
subordinates, thereby reminding him that he was after all ‘only’ a Jew.
And yet to Cassin these insults paled into insignificance when set against
the higher cause, because de Gaulle, he wrote, never stooped to anti-
Semitism, whatever political advantage he might have accrued from it.
From 1940, de Gaulle spoke out strongly on the persecution of the
16 Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, BSM 8254, letter of
Mme R. Bumsel to the office of spoliations of the FSJU, 29 Nov. 1970.
17 382AP27, Diary, 10 March 1941.
18 Israël, René Cassin. La guerre hors-la-loi, p. 142.
19 AIU, AM Présidence 007b, letter of 3 Feb. 1955. The Cagoule was a clandestine
movement of the extreme right, and was responsible for some violent incidents in the
period of the Popular Front.
A Jewish life 309
Jews.20 He opposed any compromise on the question of the status of

Jews in Algeria, and supported Cassin wholeheartedly in his work to
pursue Nazi war crimes after the defeat of the Axis powers. This is one
reason why Cassin was one of the most loyal followers of de Gaulle. To
Cassin, de Gaulle remained immovable on the question of Jewish rights.
De Gaulle never took account of Cassin’s Jewishness, except positively,
in 1943, when he named Cassin as president of the AIU.
Cassin knew very well that by placing him in the centre of Free France,
de Gaulle was taking a political risk, by fulfilling the Nazi lies that the
Jews were manipulating the war in their own interests. That is why Cassin
told de Gaulle that he was a Jew at their first meeting. Cassin needed
to be cautious: to be too prominent could compromise the cause. It
would have been absurd, however, not to draw upon his standing as a
jurist and the influence he could exercise among the veterans. Cassin
frequently spoke on the BBC. In light of this tension, he had to present
himself on the BBC as a law professor and a soldier of the Great War,
and to keep silent on his Jewish identity. For instance, when he insisted
that those who benefited from despoliation had to return their ill-gotten
gains, he consciously avoided specifying that the victims were Jews.21 In
many ways, therefore, living through the war was decisive for Cassin:
henceforth he could not see himself as other than a Jew.
The President of the Alliance Israélite Universelle

In 1948, René Cassin received many letters of congratulation on his
election to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. One was from
an admirer who rejoiced in the honour Cassin had brought to the Jewish
people. Cassin protested that this ‘immense praise’ was gratifying though
unjustified. He went on:
I will say only that I have been given virtues that I do not have. In particular my
loyalty to Judaism is quite specific, for I do not attend synagogue frequently. Only
since the persecution of 1933 have I stood in solidarity among the persecuted.
But if one day they become the persecutors, I will no longer be with them.22
20 Maurice Perlzweig met de Gaulle and spoke to him on behalf of the World Jewish
Congress; this meeting was the origin of de Gaulle’s address at Carnegie Hall in New
York in November 1940. The event, chaired by Rabbi Stephen Wise, was held to
protest the maltreatment of Jews in occupied Europe. See AIU, Présidence 016, Maurice
Perlzweig, ‘The de Gaulle statement on the Jews of 1940 and its background’, 2 April
1974.
21 Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘La France libre et le “problème juif”’, Le Débat, 5 (Nov.
2010), pp. 53–70.
22 AIU, AM Présidence 001e, Cassin to Sam Lévy, directeur des Cahiers Sfaradis, in
Neuilly, 12 April 1948.
Cassin’s commitment to Free France and to human rights brought him

to a position of prominence within French and world Jewry, and not the
other way around. Once installed as a major Jewish leader, Cassin spent
the last thirty years of his life as the president of the most important
secular Jewish institution in France, the Alliance Israélite Universelle.
He had little idea of what would follow when de Gaulle asked him to be
president of it in 1943.23
The AIU was founded in 1860 by a group of French Jews dedicated
to Jewish emancipation within the wide crescent of French influence
and control from Morocco to Persia. It ran an archipelago of schools in
which students, Jews or non-Jews, were educated in French. It was the
prerogative of the Central Committee of the AIU, and not de Gaulle, to
name him president, but the Central Committee had been forced into a
kind of hibernation.24 De Gaulle filled the vacancy with an incontestable
choice.
This act achieved several objectives. The AIU represented a part of
Republican culture which was still very much alive, despite the break
with Vichy. At the beginning of 1942, Cassin had visited the Middle East
and French organizations, prominent among which were the Alliance and
its schools.25 For de Gaulle, who was incensed at steps taken by British
authorities which seemed to threaten French hegemony in the Levant,
Alliance schools were evidence of long-standing French interests in Syria,
Lebanon and Palestine, and the more they were tied in with France Libre,
the better. They were one of the pillars of French influence, and de Gaulle
defended these schools in the same manner as he defended the Alliance
française, of which 69 of 108 committees had sided with London rather
than with Vichy.
In March 1943, control of the leadership of the AIU played a significant
role in the conflict opposing de Gaulle and Giraud. The heart of the work
of the AIU was in North Africa, then under the authority of General
Giraud. He had confirmed Vichy’s abrogation of the Loi Crémieux, under
which the status of Jews in Algeria as full French citizens had been
established in 1870. De Gaulle promised to restore it. In this context,
to take control of the AIU was to consolidate de Gaulle’s position as
leader of Free France. Who could object to the nomination of Cassin?
He was Commissioner – Minister – of National Education and Justice
23 AIU, Comité Central, Minutes, 1941–6, 11 Sept. 1944.

24 AIU, AM Présidence 006a, for the rules governing the election of the president of the
AIU.
25 François-Joachim Beer, ‘René Cassin et le judaı̈sme’, in Cassin, La pensée et l’action,
p. 283; André Chouraqui, ‘René Cassin devant l’aventure d’Israël’, Les Nouveaux
Cahiers, 45 (1976), p. 21.
A Jewish life 311
in the French National Committee. As such, he represented France in

the inter-Allied educational conference, and he had made great efforts to
preserve those elements of the university world not under the control of
Vichy.
Cassin decided to form a small committee of the AIU, which met
in London on 3 April 1943. Two months later, he installed the office
of the AIU in Algiers, in rue Bab-el-Oued. The next step towards the
restoration of its normal life was after the Liberation of Paris. There the
provisional executive committee of the AIU met in its old headquarters
on rue Labruyère, in the ninth arrondissement on 11 September 1944.26
Cassin remained president of the AIU for thirty-three years. This was
the one post among the many he occupied in which he served without
interruption for the longest time. He was vice-president of the Conseil
d’Etat for sixteen years; French delegate to the League of Nations for
fourteen years; honorary president of the Union Fédérale for longer, but
playing no direct part in the work of the organization after the 1950s.
The parallel period of commitment to the UF and the AIU was no acci-
dent. Both were dedicated to healing the wounds of war and to affirming
the dignity of those who suffered, not only during war but long after-
wards. It is not surprising, therefore, that the only active post he kept
until the day he died was the presidency of the AIU.
He was no figurehead. As president, he attended to the great questions
as well as to the small matters of everyday life. He wrote condolence
notes to the widows of deceased colleagues; he wrote hundreds of letters
soliciting funds for Alliance projects; he was a font of nominations for
honours due, and frequently received, by his colleagues in the Alliance.
To take but one example, he personally wrote in support of the nomina-
tion for the Légion d’Honneur of Emmanuel Lévinas, and he personally
bestowed the insignia of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur on him.27
He supported applications for naturalization by Alliance teachers. He
attended meetings of the Central Committee religiously, in the evenings
following the daily rigours of his work in the Conseil d’Etat. He met
visiting dignitaries and journalists, and his elbow must have been sore
from the all too frequent efforts he made to raise his glass to salute the
latest in an endless queue of honourable colleagues who came to pay
their respects or to ask for his assistance.
26 AIU, Central Committee, Minutes, 18 Oct. 1943, René Massigli, Commissioner for
Foreign Affairs, ‘expressly recognized the legal existence of the Central Committee and
that the Central Committee of Algiers was authorized to manage its moral and material
interests’. See also the Chouraqui archive in Jerusalem: Cassin, ‘L’Alliance pendant la
guerre et le retour à Paris en 1944’, minutes, Central Committee, 11 Sept. 1944.
27 AIU, AM Présidence 007c, Circular of 11 April 1956.
When he became president of the AIU in 1943, the Alliance was split
in two. The head office in Paris had been brought effectively to an end.
Its library had been seized and transported to Germany; it would be
recovered and reconstructed piecemeal between 1946 and 1950.28 The
central committee of the Alliance ceased to function as such, and the
core administrative staff, carrying their archives with them, moved suc-
cessively to Lyons, Marseilles, and then the small market town of Felletin
in the department of the Creuse, where many Jewish children were hid-
den in farms and other institutions.
The domestic life of the Alliance was virtually at a standstill. Danger
lurked everywhere, since the offices of a Jewish organization were ready-
made targets for round-ups of deportees. In addition, the creation of
UGIF in November 1941 as a portmanteau organization for French Jews
presented the threat of confiscation of Alliance funds.
Fortunately, the Alliance was still alive. Outside of France, the work
of its network of schools extended from Morocco to Iran. They contin-
ued to function, even at the worst moments, thanks to the dedication
and care of its teachers and its administrative personnel. In addition,
the Service des œuvres françaises à l’Etranger (SOFE) continued to sup-
port AIU schools financially, despite the fact that this service operated
within the French Foreign Ministry. Ironically, Vichy supported the AIU
while France Libre slowly took it over.29 Nevertheless, the organization
faced an unprecedented financial crisis. It was necessary to draw up an
accounting of the damage caused by the war, to bring the Alliance out
of the shadows of wartime fear and poverty, and to breathe new life into
and to turn to the problems of the post-war world.
The provisional Central Committee was small but distinguished.
Alongside Cassin, Louis Kahn, Inspecteur Général des Construc-
tions Navales, and Bernard Mélamède, later Inspecteur Général de
l’Economie Nationale, served as provisional vice-presidents of the AIU.
Their role was clearly limited to planning for the post-war challenges the
institution would face. The daily work of the AIU was the responsibility
of others. Central to the AIU was Jules Braunschvig, born in 1908, from
an Alsatian family which made a fortune in Tangiers, and then moved
between North Africa and the mainland after 1914. He was active in the
Alliance before the war, and spent four years in a prisoner of war camp in
northern Germany. His direct knowledge of the Maghreb was essential
28 Jean-Claude Kupferminc, ‘La réconstruction de la bibliothèque de l’Alliance Israélite

Universelle, 1945–1955’, Archives Juives, 34 (2001), p. 103.
29 Laurent Grison, ‘L’Alliance Israélite Universelle dans les années noires’, Archives Juives,
34 (2001), pp. 9–22.
A Jewish life 313
to the Alliance. Eugène Weill was the organization’s tireless secretary,

constantly in touch with Cassin about Alliance business large and small.
Marcel Franco was a Turkish-born graduate of one of the Alliance’s
schools, whose marriage to an American brought him to New York,
where he was an essential interlocutor with the American Jewish com-
munity. Cassin had, from 1947 on, the assistance of André Chouraqui,
a young Algerian lawyer, poet and man of letters for whom Cassin
had great esteem. He served as Cassin’s personal emissary and became
something like an adopted nephew, protected by Cassin when others in
the Alliance doubted his usefulness to the organization.30 With Cassin’s
backing, Chouraqui occupied an unusual position in the AIU, working
to build the organization’s international ties six months a year, and on his
‘personal work with respect to Hebrew and Judaic matters’.31 He trans-
lated the Bible into French; but he was a difficult colleague, despite his
evident talents. Finally, there was the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas,
who had returned like Braunschvig from a prisoner of war camp, and
who ran the Ecole Normale of the Alliance, training the organization’s
teachers in Paris before dispatching them abroad.32 Together these indi-
viduals formed an inner circle of the Alliance, and gave it a cosmopolitan
and varied outlook, secular, Republican and Jewish in equal measure.
The AIU’s schools were a rich and complex mixture of thriving institu-
tions and those which were barely surviving. A lot depended on personal-
ities. The centre of the Alliance’s network was in North Africa, and there
its Moroccan programme was the most important. Its forty-seven schools
there provided education for approximately 15,000 students, who were
looked after by 180 teachers and 160 assistant teachers. The school in
Casablanca had 300 pupils studying trades including ironwork, wood-
work, tailoring, leatherwork and electricity. There were forty pupils in
Fez, fifty in Rabat, thirty-six in Marrakesh, and the beginnings of an agri-
cultural school in Meknes. Ruben Tajouri was the head of the Alliance’s
Moroccan operation. He was evidently a very able administrator, and
enjoyed the trust of everyone concerned.33
Fully 70 per cent of all students educated in Alliance schools after
the Second World War were Moroccan. Between 1956 and 1964, when
France relinquished its formal protectorate in Morocco, the population
attending Alliance schools dropped by half, as a substantial part of the
30 AIU, AM Présidence 007a, Chouraqui to Cassin, 26 Feb. 1954.

31 Chouraqui archives, Jerusalem, Cassin to Chouraqui, 14 October 1947; AIU, AM
Présidence 005a, Cassin to Chouraqui, 23 May 1952; AM Présidence 030, Chouraqui
to Cassin, 21 Aug. 1957.
32 AIU, Central Committee, Minutes, 25 May 1945.
33 AIU, AM Présidence 001c, report by J. Rudnansky, 29 April 1946.
Table 11.1 Students in the schools of the Alliance

Israélite Universelle, 1952–1971
1952–3 1963–4 1968 1971
Egypt 427
Israel 3997 5253 4828 5044
Lebanon 1260 1301 1109
Morocco 24,788 13,525 8054 7652
Syria 386 447 431 480
Libya 100
Tunisia 3355 3797 1366 147
Iran 5933 5158 4034
Total 34,313 30,256 20,946 17,357
Of which, Morocco 72% 48% 38% 44%
Sources: AIU, AM Présidence 005b, Budget pour 1952,

28 May 1952; André Chouraqui, L’Alliance Israélite Uni-
verselle, Annexe 4, pp. 498–506; AIU, Jewish virtual library,
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud 0002 0001
0 00834.html; AIU, AM Présidence 013a, Cassin au Comité
de Liaison des amis de l’AIU, 3 Jan. 1971.
Jewish community emigrated to Israel. The number fell further in the

later 1960s and early 1970s, though Alliance schools in Israel contributed
to the assimilation of Moroccan Jews who settled there.
Until the 1970s, there were significant numbers in schools and students
in Tunisia too. While the total attending Alliance schools remained stable
in the first post-war decade, the situation was troubled. There, personal
conflicts and administrative muddles produced less impressive reports
and results. Deep animosities divided teachers in schools elsewhere too.
In monthly meetings of the Alliance’s Central Committee in Paris,
Cassin immediately took time to get into the details of school affairs.
He dealt with questions as to the training of the Alliance’s teachers in
Casablanca and in its Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris, directed
by Emmanuel Lévinas. He showed here his interest in teaching and in
the education of elites that he showed in ENA. In 1950, forty-two boys
and thirty-eight girls were in training in the Ecole Normale Israélite
Orientale.34 In 1952 he declared in Lévinas’s presence that this college
‘did not maintain the level of instruction it should attain, and students
felt isolated’. He urged Lévinas to do something about it.35 He explored
problems of parity between teachers’ pay in the Alliance schools and in
34 AIU, AM Présidence 003a, comité central, 4 Oct. 1950.

35 AIU, AM Présidence 005a, Commission des Ecoles, 13 May 1952.
A Jewish life 315
other schools in the area in question, as well as provisions for pensions

for retired teachers and administrators abroad. He received reports for
his approval of the organization of the teaching day. In Isfahan, the day
was divided into classes on ‘reading in Persian, writing in Persian, dic-
tation in Persian, arithmetic, Hebrew, writing style, gymnastics, music’,
all in French.36 He oversaw repairs and building plans for the Alliance’s
schools. He read of squabbles among administrators and teachers in Isfa-
han, who personally wrote to him, defending themselves vigorously and
hurling calumny at their accusers.37 He scrutinized the financial accounts
time and again, alongside educational matters of every kind. In short, in
1944, Cassin entered a still robust trans-national educational project
filled with life, evident even in its most ferocious internal conflicts.
It was, and is, a unique institution, with a record of which anyone
would be proud. In June 1951, he provided this profile to the secretary
general of UNESCO: the AIU ran 130 primary, secondary, technical,
and agricultural schools serving 52,000 students in Muslim countries
from Morocco to Persia. ‘The Alliance is unique and one of the great-
est educational enterprises in the world.’ Alliance schools, he pointed
out, were open to children of all religions, and the organization ‘has
longstanding and the most cordial ties with all the sovereigns and gov-
ernments of Muslim countries and enjoys a first-rate moral reputation in
these countries’.38
While the institution had survived the war, its financial future was
much more uncertain. There were three primary sources of support for
these schools. The first was local authority and national subventions; the
second was the central funds of the Alliance; the third was the contri-
bution of the families of the pupils and the local Jewish community. For
example, roughly one-sixth of the cost of the Alliance’s schools in Tunisia
was provided by the Tunisian state; thus financial worries about where
the rest would come from were endemic. To lead the Alliance was to be
a fund-raiser, alongside many other things. From 1945 on, fortunately,
there was a new way of assuring the financial stability of the schools:
American philanthropy. We will turn below to the international diplo-
matic efforts Cassin led, to help make certain that this new flow of funds
continued efficiently and generously in the first decade after the war.
There were two other national sources of both fixed and recurrent
expenditure which were of considerable significance to the Alliance.
36 AIU, AM Présidence 001b, Isfahan, emploi du temps, 1944–5.

37 AIU, AM Présidence 001b, letters and telegrams of Jan. 1945.
38 AIU, AM Présidence 005a, Cassin to J. Torres-Bodet, director general of UNESCO, 8
June 1951.
The first was the aid given by the French Foreign Office to the sup-
port of French-language education outside the Hexagon. This assistance
had gone on during the war, as we have already noted, and contin-
ued throughout Cassin’s long presidency. The second was funding for
Alliance schools in Israel through the Israeli Ministry of Education and
urban local authorities supervising schools. This too was a source of real
importance to the Alliance, though it required considerable diplomatic
skill to secure and define. The diplomatic problem was twofold: how to
preserve its teaching in French, and how to preserve its independence
with respect to the state in which the schools operated.
The first problem was resolved without much difficulty. The new Israeli
Ministry of Education had an understandable interest in building up the
primary and secondary school systems of the state, and their commitment
to Hebrew as the mandatory language of instruction. Here some French
language instruction could be and was interpolated into the new system
in which the Alliance’s Israeli schools operated.
Of greater importance was the need to keep the Alliance free from the
charge that it was an agent of the Israeli state. That charge threatened
the entire edifice of educational provision it had so carefully constructed
over three generations. The Alliance had to affirm and reaffirm its com-
mitment to the education of Jews as good citizens of their states outside
of Israel. Again, we shall return below to this matter which clearly shaped
the Alliance’s attitude to Zionism.
The AIU was not only a network of schools. The words ‘Alliance
Israélite Universelle’ are a French equivalent of a Hebrew expression
which means ‘all Jews are brothers’. Cassin took on the presidency of the
AIU in part to speak for his murdered brothers, to protect and transmit
their heritage. Once more his mission was to heal the wounds of war.
At the outset of his career as president of the Alliance, he wrote to a
British colleague, S. D. Temkin, the British secretary of the Anglo-Jewish
Association, about the daunting task ahead of him:
As to French Jewry, it will be more difficult to recover from the terrible blows it
suffered. We do not know on which personalities we will be able to count to take
charge of its destiny and to raise it up from the abyss in which Hitler sank it. We
know nothing about its former leadership. The only point we can state clearly is
that, as you have mentioned, the desire to see the activities of the AIU in Paris
revived has already been achieved.39
39 René Cassin to S. D. Temkin, 25 Sept. 1944, Anglo-Jewish Association papers,

AJ37/6/6/5/2, Parkes Library, University of Southampton. Thanks are due to Maud
Mandel for drawing our attention to this source.
A Jewish life 317
The mission Cassin took on, with the complete support of the Central
Committee, was larger than education alone. The first step after the
Liberation had been to ask for reports on the state of the Alliance’s
schools from each of its directors, but as early as 29 November 1944
he created a Committee for External Affairs, as well as a new centre
of documentation to aid the Alliance in its future work and to provide
evidence for war crimes trials to come.40 There was much work to do in
the field of public relations and propaganda, in order to dispel the clouds
of hatred Vichy and the Nazis had generated during the war. Here was
the charge: education, engagement in the defence of Jewish rights, and
public outreach.
In a way, this assignment was not very remote from that of the pre-war
period. And yet the Commission for External Affairs recognized that the
Shoah had changed everything, and in particular it gave a new meaning
to the defence of human rights. Here is its language:
The Commission believes that, under the circumstances, it must revise its foreign
policy. The Alliance must fight against anti-Semitism and safeguard the rights of
Jews in France, as well as in other countries.
But on the other hand, the Commission’s position is that the defence of the rights
and the interests of Jews in France must be placed in the hands of lay associations
and committees of lawyers who do not separate Jews from other victims of the
enemy and his collaborators.
The role of the Alliance is to ensure that the rights of Jews are not sacrificed.41
Here is the Alliance at the very moment René Cassin put his mark on it.
To him, the defence of anyone’s human rights anywhere was at the core
of the defence of Jewish rights. Cassin’s achievement was to show that
the universalist objectives of the founders of the Alliance at that moment,
just after the Holocaust, lay precisely in the field of human rights. From
the time he assumed the presidency, everything the Alliance did was
intended to be a step towards a new rights regime.42
This is how Cassin reinterpreted the emancipation motif of the
founders of the Alliance. To them education was the first step towards
freedom. Cassin concurred, but his generation faced another emancipa-
tory task, that of freeing men and women from the depredations of what
he termed the Leviathan state. The potential for destruction of such a
40 AIU, AM Présidence 005a, Cassin note, 5 June 1952.

41 AIU, Paris, AM Présidence 001A, Commission des Affaires Extérieures, 29 Nov. and 9
Dec. 1944.
42 On this period in the history of the AIU, see Catherine Nicault, ‘L’Alliance au lendemain
de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale: ruptures et continuités idéologiques’, Archives Juives,
34 (2001), pp. 23–53.
state was so evident in 1945 that emancipation meant limiting the power
of the state – any state – to abuse the rights of its own citizens or those of
other countries.
By making the Alliance into a carrier of the message of human rights
after 1945, Cassin was clearly extending the vision of its founders into
another and even darker period of history. But he managed through his
work for the Alliance to give a new coloration to his own form of Jewish
identity: that of a French Jew, a patriot, a soldier, a resistance leader, a
man whose Jewishness was defined less by the injunctions of the Torah
than by the emancipatory messages of the French Revolution, of Abbé
Grégoire and the Declaration of Human Rights of 1789 and 1793. The
great Polish historian Isaac Deutscher liked to call himself a ‘non-Jewish
Jew’.43 Cassin’s personality is better captured in seeing him as a secular
Jewish universalist, a man whose Jewishness arose out of his heritage, but
it was not initially at the core of his personal identity; it was made so by
racists and killers.
In June 1947, Cassin chaired the lecture of Jean-Paul Sartre on ‘Reflec-
tions on the Jewish question’, given under the sponsorship of the AIU. In
his introduction, Cassin observed that the catastrophe of the war ‘which
led to the extermination of two-thirds of European Jewry, can provoke
among the survivors two attitudes: one towards forgetting, which is nor-
mal, or the vow not to forget, to uncover the sources of the disaster,
which is a more dignified response. Jean-Paul Sartre has chosen the sec-
ond attitude.’44 Cassin did not endorse Sartre’s view that it was the
anti-Semite who defined the Jew; he, Cassin himself, also rejected the
view that the synagogue defined his Jewishness.45 In sum, Cassin was a
man who listened to the prophets more than to the rabbis, and thereby
stood in a line of Jewish-born freethinkers from Spinoza to Marx and
Freud, who drew inspiration from but who lived primarily outside the
Jewish tradition.
Cassin devoted his energy and passion to the Alliance, and in doing so
he realized one of his ambitions. As president of the AIU, he became a
Jewish statesman, at the very moment he was catapulted into work for the
nascent United Nations and its Human Rights Commission. There was
too an element of great pride in his standing as president of the Alliance.
In effect, he was the foreign minister of Francophone Jewry, speaking for
a persecuted and endangered population in Europe, in North Africa, in
43 Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 1968).
44 ‘Conférence de Jean-Paul Sartre’, Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (May–June
1947), p. 3. We are grateful to Samuel Moyn for drawing our attention to this text.
45 Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: P. Morihien, 1946).
A Jewish life 319
the Middle East and beyond. In 1944, when his presidency effectively
began, he was finally able to operate on the level of world affairs at which
he had hoped in vain de Gaulle would place him in 1941 in Free France.
Three years later, he took on a new role as spokesman for an institution
imbedded in the Republican tradition in France and abroad.
As president of the Alliance, he could affirm the significance of French
language and culture as the carriers of the message of universal freedom.
The schools of the Alliance, after all, were there to hand the torch of
emancipation to whoever sought it. He was a French cultural patriot and
proud of it, assuming ‘en toute sérénité’, as he liked to say, that France’s
mission civilisatrice was to bring progress and enlightenment to the world
at large. The schools of the AIU were carriers of excellence, and gateways
outside of France for Jews and others to the kind of citizenship the
Revolution had brought to the Jews of France. The schools were emblems
of French culture abroad, and deserved the financial and diplomatic
support the French state provided for them. He defended the interests
of Francophone Jews in North Africa and in the Middle East protected
in part from the worst of the Shoah. After 1943, he had a constituency, a
Jewish world to represent, and he did so in Paris, in Casablanca, in New
York and in Jerusalem. The war made him a Jewish statesman.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the balance of numbers
and power in the Jewish world moved westward, over the Atlantic, to
New York. There the World Jewish Congress (WJC), founded in Geneva
in 1936, exercised considerable authority in the coordination of inter-
national efforts to reconstruct Jewish life after the Shoah. The driving
force of this organization was Nahum Goldmann, a German-educated,
Lithuanian-born firebrand who had been the Jewish Agency’s represen-
tative at the League of Nations in the 1930s. He probably met Cassin
there. The Jewish Agency was the chief instrument of Jewish immigra-
tion to Palestine, and after 1948, to Israel. Goldmann was a Zionist in
a way Cassin never was. For Goldmann, Jews had to learn Hebrew, not
French,46 though, like Cassin, he never believed that all Jews had to
emigrate to Israel.
Goldmann’s base of operations was New York, where he acted both as
president of the WJC and after 1956, as president of the World Zionist
Federation. In October 1951, as chairman of the Jewish Agency, Gold-
mann helped found the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against
Germany, arising out of a long-term reparations agreement he negoti-
ated secretly with Konrad Adenauer for payments to Jews in Israel and
elsewhere. ‘Elsewhere’ included France and North Africa, opening up
46 Joseph Frankel, ‘Dr Nahum Goldmann’, Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 9 July 1954, p. 6.
an important conduit for financial aid for the Alliance. Alongside the
‘Claims’ conference, there was the ‘Joint’, the American Joint Distribu-
tion Committee (JDC), which provided funds for Jews in need and for
the restoration of Jewish educational life, including that undertaken by
the AIU. In 1950, the Joint allocated $250,000 for use by the Alliance
‘in such a way as to bring about the largest possible enrolment of Jewish
children in the schools, and the best type of service’.47 From 1949, the
JDC provided social and educational support earmarked for the Jews of
Morocco. In 1952, for example, the Joint provided 95 million francs to
the Alliance, covering two-thirds of the deficit registered for that year.48
In the first post-war decade, those who held the purse strings Cassin
needed to prise open for the Alliance were either American or working
in New York. In the elegant surroundings of the suite he inhabited as
a French delegate to the United Nations, in the Waldorf Astoria or the
Biltmore Hotel, Cassin entertained the elite of world Jewry and joined
them in their efforts to repair some of the damage done to the Jewish
people as a whole during the war. His standing as a Jewish statesman
came not only out of the Alliance, but also out of his years as a leader
of Free France, as well as his position as vice-president of the Conseil
d’Etat. He had many friends in high places, including Eleanor Roosevelt.
Here is where his work as president of the Alliance intersected most
clearly with his commitment to the human rights instruments of the
newly founded United Nations. Cassin was able to make the case for
international aid for the Alliance, as one of the oldest Jewish organizations
engaged in education as the pathway to emancipation. It mattered not
one iota that the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East had been
spared the worst of the persecution. They had been sentenced to death
by the Nazis just as he had been. Persecution of Jews anywhere was an
affront to human rights everywhere. To provide North African Jews with
the education they needed to live productive lives as full citizens of their
countries was an even more essential task than ever. When he spoke on
behalf of the Alliance, Cassin did so with the confidence of a man whose
various commitments formed one integrated whole.
This period of Cassin’s life was hectic, fruitful, but not always easy. He
secured ‘Joint’ funding of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contem-
poraine, founded in 1943, and instrumental in collecting and preserving
evidence of Nazi persecution used in later war crimes trials.49 He helped
set up a portmanteau group to represent French, British and American
47 AIU, AM Présidence 003a, Joseph Schwartz to Cassin, 16 Aug. 1950.

48 AIU, AM Présidence 005b, budget for 1952, 28 May 1952.
49 AIU, AM Présidence 005a, Cassin to Jacob Blaustein, 7 March 1952.
A Jewish life 321
Jewish opinion in the UN and in UNESCO. This body, the Consultative

Council of Jewish Organizations (CCJO), acted as an international Jewish
NGO. Not surprisingly, it spoke out strongly in favour of the implemen-
tation of enforcement mechanisms for the international human rights
regime which Cassin had done so much to foster. In September 1951,
the CCJO presented to the UN a memorandum supporting the right of
individual petition and calling for the creation of a UN Attorney General
for Human Rights;50 both measures were part of Cassin’s programme.
The CCJO was also able to benefit from funds provided by the ‘Claims’
conference both in Israel and in France, thereby channelling German
reparations money into the AIU, among other beneficiaries.51
The independence of the CCJO from Zionist organizations at times
drew down the wrath of Goldmann, intent on orchestrating Jewish inter-
national efforts on his own. In 1955, Goldmann went incognito to
Morocco to negotiate with the king in secret, and established his own
network there, cutting right across already existing Alliance lines of com-
munication established for years.52 He was an Israeli official, whose inter-
ests overlapped but did not coincide with Cassin’s. As Chouraqui put it
to Cassin, ‘Nahum is only interested in the North African problem from
the broader perspective of Arab–Israeli relations.’53
There was never the slightest doubt what Goldmann was up to. He
wore one hat as an Israeli statesman, chairing the Jewish Agency, and
another as a spokesman for International Jewry. Cassin’s outlook was
different. He wanted to make it possible for the work of the Alliance to
continue, not to bring it to an end by mass emigration from Morocco or
elsewhere. To Goldmann, such emigration was a good in and of itself;
Cassin thought otherwise, though he believed that everyone had a right
to emigrate. Cassin was a French statesman sympathetic to Zionism.
Goldmann was a Zionist sympathetic to the needs of Diaspora Jews.
The problems facing Moroccan Jews were a constant preoccupation of
Cassin in these years. Funding Alliance schools was a perennial headache.
Braunschvig was the Alliance man on the spot, and he wrote time and
again about the financial tightrope walk the organization faced. There
were other issues at stake aside from financial ones. Chouraqui provided
an expert report on the legal situation of Moroccan Jews, giving Cassin
the chapter and verse he needed not only to protest against the limitations
Moroccan Jews faced in the exercise of their citizenship, but also to
50 AIU, AM Présidence 004b, Moses Moskowitz, memorandum on human rights, 15 Sept.

1951.
51 AIU, AM Présidence 005a, memo on Israeli–German negotiations, 16 March 1952.
52 AIU, AM Présidence 007b, Braunschvig to Weill, 4 April 1955.
53 AIU, AM Présidence 007a, Chouraqui to Cassin, 3 Sept. 1956.
secure the continued support of the king and the political elite for the
work of the Alliance in Morocco.54 If the Alliance were undermined, they
argued, there would be fewer reasons for Moroccan Jews to stay in the
country their ancestors had lived in for centuries. Until 1956, this was a
persuasive argument, but it lost purchase in the subsequent decade when
Jewish emigration to Israel accelerated.55
Cassin’s presidency of the Alliance spanned a period when French
Jews, under the impact of the Shoah, became more and more sympathetic
to Zionism. The pre-war Alliance had been active in Palestine, but its
leadership was either neutral or hesitant about Zionism, seeing it as a
potential destabilizing element in their work. By the mid-1940s, French
Jewish opinion had changed, and the Alliance changed with it.
Cassin, the AIU, France and Israel

In late 1944, Edmond Fleg, Louis Kahn and Maurice Leven drafted a
statement of the Alliance’s principles which was signed by Cassin among
others, as well as by the Chief Rabbis of France and of Paris, and by
Léon Meiss, president of the Consistoire.56 Here the secular and reli-
gious leaders of French Jewry restated the mission of the Alliance. ‘The
essential aim of the founders of the Alliance’, Leven wrote,
was to liberate Jews from oppression and to develop among them the sense of
their dignity . . . To raise up the population of Jews downcast by centuries of
oppression, both in the eyes of the world and in their own eyes, the Alliance
Israélite Universelle opened schools in the Mediterranean basin and in the Near
and Middle East.
There, from Morocco to Persia, in spite of the abominable policy of Vichy and
the disarray the war brought about, there was not a single day during the whole
course of the war, that the 100 schools of the Alliance closed their doors to their
more than 50,000 students.
Surviving the worst moments in its history, the Alliance, in the spirit of the new
United Nations, asks its members to dedicate themselves to the service of the
conscience of Humanity.
54 André Chouraqui, La condition juridique de l’Israélite marocain, preface by René Cassin

(Paris: Presses du Livre Français, 1950).
55 Yaron Tsur, ‘L’AIU et le judaı̈sme marocain en 1949: l’émergence d’une nouvelle
démarche politique’, Archives Juives, 34 (2001), pp. 54–73.
56 On the drafting of this document, see Nicault, ‘L’Alliance au lendemain de la Seconde
Guerre Mondiale’, p. 29. Her interpretation is that Fleg and Kahn drafted the text,
and Leven edited it. Our hunch is that Leven did more than editing it, but we defer to
Nicault’s expertise on this point.
A Jewish life 323
To this end, the Alliance demanded for those Jews who could not return
to their homes after the ravages of the war and the Shoah, ‘the right to
enter Palestine’.57
The Alliance, while committed to the complete incorporation of Jews in the

countries where they live, has never ceased to participate in the mutual Jewish
effort in favour of the Holy Land . . . For them it is more than a refuge; it is a
centre of spiritual warmth, the only one in which they are awaited impatiently,
and from which, perhaps one day, the truths of Israel will shine forth once more.58
On the international level, the Alliance did everything it could to foster

the case for partition and the creation of the state of Israel. On 9 June
1947, Cassin himself authored and sent to the secretary general of the
UN, Trygvie Lie, a ‘Memorandum of the AIU on the Palestinian prob-
lem’, which put the case for Jewish statehood in unequivocal terms. After
the Holocaust, expediting Jewish immigration to Palestine ‘is the first
duty of the international community’. The reason was clear: ‘The sur-
vivors of Israel in Central and Eastern Europe desire, by a large majority,
to build a new life in Palestine.’ To the Alliance, ‘this is a right humanity
cannot refuse them’. ‘The Alliance believes’, he wrote, ‘that today the
Jewish community in Palestine aspires to a change in its status, permit-
ting an independence merited by their work and their creative spirit. We
believe that the democratic spirit of the Near East cannot but prosper
through the influence of Jewish accomplishments in Palestine.’59
The Alliance schools in Palestine were caught in the cross-fire in the
1948 war. In Tel Aviv, the AIU school was located between present-day
Tel Aviv and Jaffa. As soon as partition was announced, the school was
under repeated gun and artillery fire. One teacher was badly wounded.
Refugees poured in from surrounding homes. The school’s director wrote
to Paris: ‘Our school today is in the front line.’60 Alliance schools in Beirut
were damaged at the same time. One of the first schools established by
the Alliance in 1870 was in Mikve-Israel, in the southern suburbs of Tel
Aviv. It was a pillar of the Zionist project. In the war of 1948, over 200
of its graduates were killed.
57 AIU, AM Présidence 001b, ‘Une déclaration de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle’, 11 Nov.

1944.
58 AIU, AM Présidence 001b, ’Une déclaration de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle’, 11 Nov.
1944; on this declaration, see Chouraqui, ‘René Cassin devant l’aventure d’Israël’, Les
Nouveaux Cahiers, 45 (1976), p. 22; and for the full text, see Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite
Universelle (June–July 1947).
59 AIU, AM Présidence 030, René Cassin, ‘Memorandum de l’AIU sur le problème pales-
tinien’, 9 June 1947.
60 AIU, AM Présidence 030, A. Silver to Cassin, 3 Dec. 1947.
Once the state of Israel was established, the question of the future
of the Alliance’s schools within the new state rose to the top of the
Alliance’s agenda. Aside from Mikve-Israel, the Alliance ran schools in
Haifa, Safed, Tiberius, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. All were funded by the
French government, and now needed to come to an understanding with
the new government of Israel.61
Cassin engaged in years of negotiation on the future of these schools,
and on their character within the framework of educational provision of
the new state. On the one side, French financial support made sense only
if French were the language of instruction at least in part in these schools.
The priorities of the Israeli Ministry of Education were different. First
there was the replacement of ‘teaching in French by teaching French’ in a
country which needed to teach Hebrew, Arabic and increasingly English
to its rapidly growing population of immigrants. Secondly, there was the
need to place the curriculum and timetable of instruction of Alliance
schools within that stipulated by the Ministry of Education.
The key issue was funding. And here Cassin played a crucial role,
in large part due to the close rapport he had developed in New York
and elsewhere with the first Israeli Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett.
On a visit to Israel, Cassin secured agreement from Sharett that Alliance
schools would have a special status in Israel, since they contributed to ‘the
gigantic task of the settling of new immigrants and the expansion of the
national economy’.62 Ultimately, the Israeli Foreign Ministry approved a
measure under which it undertook to pay one-third of the costs of salaries
of Alliance teachers.
Over time, the Alliance schools merged with the Israeli school system.
This was inevitable, not only given the political realities of the new state,
but also because of the financially precarious position of the Alliance, in
light of its responsibilities throughout the Mediterranean basin. Alliance
schools were important in the integration of North African immigrants in
the 1950s and 1960s. What remains to this day is a commitment to social
service and human rights in Israeli schools linked to the Alliance. There
are a school for the deaf in Jerusalem and three schools in Mikve-Israel
Youth Village. There are Alliance high schools in Tel Aviv and Haifa, and
two high schools in Jerusalem, one named for Jules Braunschvig, and the
other for René Cassin.
61 AIU, AM Présidence 030, ‘Memorandum relatif aux œuvres françaises en Terre-Sainte

présenté à la Commission spéciale des Nations Unies pour la Palestine’, 27 July 1947.
There is here a full list of Alliance schools and student numbers in each.
62 AIU, AM Présidence 030, Sharett to Cassin, 10 May 1950.
A Jewish life 325
From 1948 on, the critical question was how the Alliance could con-
tribute to Israeli education while maintaining its independent stance in
the educational system of those Muslim lands in which its schools were
located. The answer was not at all clear. Alliance schools in many coun-
tries were targets for anti-Israeli agitation. On 10 August 1949, the direc-
tor of the Alliance school in Damascus wrote to Cassin about a grenade
attack in the court of a synagogue in Damascus in which twelve people
were killed.63
The position of Moroccan Jews was similarly precarious. In May
1948, the Sultan of Morocco issued a proclamation enjoining Morocco’s
250,000 Jews ‘to avoid all attachments with the new Jewish state’.64
The Alliance spoke out forcefully against this statement and demanded
protection for Moroccan Jews. The French resident general, Alphonse
Juin, was surprised by their firm stance, which arose, said Eugène Weill,
the secretary of the Central Committee and Cassin’s right-hand man,
because the Alliance ‘was concerned not only with education but also
with the protection of Jews’.65
This was Cassin’s position throughout the post-war years, and to fur-
ther it he used his role as French delegate to the UN Human Rights
Commission to great advantage. It was not only that he had access to
statesmen who could pass messages on to higher authorities. It was also
that he could speak with an independent voice, one unconstrained by
instructions from his government on this matter. One illustration among
many is a letter he wrote to Sharett on 13 June 1952, labelled ‘Urgent
and personal’. In it he asked Sharett to reconsider Israel’s provisional
acceptance of a UN General Assembly extraordinary session on Tunisia,
then at the beginning of a nasty two-year war for independence. The
substance of Cassin’s advice is less relevant than the language he used in
giving it. He asked his friend Sharett,
to consider his vigilant friendship as a source of his pleading not only for the cause
of France but for the indivisible cause, in my eyes, of France, Israel and North
African Jewry, of which I believe I am one of the responsible trustees . . . The Jews
of Africa can say nothing . . . they are muzzled by legitimate fear . . . Their terror
of massacres prevents them from speaking out. Moroccan and Tunisian peasants
know that it is only the presence of France which enables them to live and remain
protected from thieving and bloody indigenous masters.
63 AIU, AM Présidence 002a, Rahmani to Cassin, 10 Aug. 1949.

64 Tsur, ‘L’AIU et le judaı̈sme marocain en 1949’, p. 54.
65 Israel State Archives, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2563/14, 26 Sept. 1948, as cited in
Tsur, ‘L’AIU et le judaı̈sme marocain en 1949’, p. 55.
He begged Sharett not to play into the hands of those ‘who, to hasten the
immigration to Israel of 400,000 North African Jews, orchestrate fatalism
and panic, without even hesitating before the prospect of pogroms’.66
This is a revealing document, in that it shows the two essential facets
of Cassin’s Jewish stance at this time. The first is as protector of North
African Jewry, in the face of violence directed at them in the midst of the
upheavals imbedded in the struggle for decolonization. The second is as
an interlocutor between France and Israel, and as someone who could
point out in no uncertain terms the importance of French protection for
Jews not only in Tunisia or Morocco, but in Lebanon and Syria too.
It is clear that insinuations that Cassin and other Jews on French
delegations were really Israeli representatives were without the slightest
foundation. Cassin had interests and commitments which diverged from
those of Sharett and the rest of the leadership of Israel.
Cassin was a Diaspora Zionist, a man who believed that Jews who
wished to live a collective life in Palestine should be free to do so. He was
not among them, but in the post-war years he shared their aspirations and
did what he could to help realize them. Others in the Central Committee
of the Alliance made aliyah; both Braunschvig and Chouraqui ended
their days in Jerusalem. Cassin never considered it, but defended the
rights of those who wanted to join them. He was not one of those who
suffered a sense of disenchantment with the Republican tradition in the
aftermath of the war. He worked to revitalize that tradition, not to discard
or refashion it.67
In 1960, the French government joined in the chorus of praise for
the work of the AIU, then celebrating its centenary in Paris, in New
York, and from Morocco to Iran.68 The Alliance and its president could
reflect with pride on this substantial achievement, maintained despite the
catastrophe of the Second World War.
From that point on, though, the Alliance’s position vis-à-vis the French
government changed, and not always for the better. The problem was
clear: how to maintain the work of Alliance schools in countries severing
their ties with France. The trouble in doing so was both financial and
human. The ending of the French protectorate in Morocco meant the
nationalization of Alliance schools. Their independent character could
66 AIU, AM Présidence 010, Cassin to Sharett, 13 June 1952.

67 For the opposite view, see Muriel Pichon, Les Français juifs, 1914–1950. Récit d’un
désenchantement (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2009).
68 In the basement of the International Institute for the Rights of Man in Strasbourg,
among Cassin’s books and papers, there is a book on the tribes of Israel personally
dedicated to Cassin by Yitzhah Ben Tsvi, President of the State of Israel. Cassin received
the book on this occasion.
A Jewish life 327
not be maintained, though in the case of Morocco their status was recon-
figured, under the title of ‘Ittiahad-Maroc’, to enable their work to go
on.69 Even then complex problems remained; there was, for example,
the question of pensions for Alliance teachers in the Maghreb who were
living in retirement in France. Who would pay their pensions and at what
levels? In Algeria, the choices were starker still. The end of French rule
in 1962, after eight years of civil war, meant the end of a way of life for
the French population of Algeria, who emigrated massively to France.
Among them tens of thousands of Algerian Jews had an additional reason
to leave, either to France or to Israel. The Alliance did not run schools in
Algeria, since the French educational system was installed there, but its
commitment to defending Jews wherever they were persecuted required
action in the wake of the Algerian war of independence. Cassin was well
placed to patrol the corridors of power to this end, and his repeated state-
ments on the need to defend Jews in peril or those in need of assistance
were consistent with long-standing Alliance practice.
More difficult still were the challenges presented by the transformation
of French policy with regard to Israel. In 1956, France and Britain had
colluded with Israel in the failed attempt to overthrow Gamal Abdul
Nasser, and that humiliation, arising from strong objections from the
United States, was one President de Gaulle, in power from December
1958, was intent on avoiding at all costs. That meant taking a different
stance on many international issues, including the conflict in the Middle
East. De Gaulle was determined to play a more neutral role in the Arab–
Israeli dispute than earlier governments had played, while continuing to
arm Israel.
On 18–19 May 1967, U Thant, UN secretary general, withdrew the
peacekeeping troops separating Israel and Egypt, thereby making the
outbreak of war a real possibility. On 22 May, Nasser attempted to enforce
a blockade of Israeli ships in the Straits of Tiran, cutting off the port of
Eilat from international traffic. Despite the illegal status of the blockade,
de Gaulle urged Israeli restraint on 24 May and again on 2 June. The
first to open fire would not have his support.70
It was at this point that Cassin intervened publicly in the discussion of
the war crisis and challenged de Gaulle directly. In an article published
in Le Monde dated 3 June, but which appeared the day before, Cassin
asked ‘What is aggression?’71 He was in a particularly strong position to
pose this question, since he had studied it as a member of the French
69 AIU, AM Présidence 015, Cassin to Léon Benzaquen, 13 June1972.

70 Declaration of de Gaulle after the meeting of the Council of Ministers, 2 June 1967.
71 René Cassin, ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est l’agression?’, Le Monde, 3 June 1967, p. 3.
delegation to the League of Nations in 1933, in the context of the World

Disarmament Conference. It was a question debated time and again in
the United Nations after 1945, and in that respect Cassin followed the
Soviet position, accepted by the UN on 6 January 1952. Fifteen years
later, the USSR backed Nasser, but in 1952 it had defined an aggressor
state as ‘that state which would establish a naval blockade of the ports
and coast of another state’. The same Soviet argument had it that an
aggressor state was ‘that which would provide support to armed bands,
which were trained on its territory, and which invaded the territory of
another state, or despite the demand of the invaded state, refused to take
all measures in its power to deny aid and protection to such groups’.
This Soviet position was restated after the 1956 war, Cassin noted,
adding this time the idea that the category of ‘economic aggression’
includes ‘measures of economic pressure amounting to an infringement
of the sovereignty of another state and its economic independence thereby
endangering the economic life of this state’. Cassin pointed out how crit-
ical these principles of free navigation were for the Soviet navy’s passage
through the Skaggerak in the Baltic Sea or the Bosphorus in the Black
Sea. The implication was clear. Calling Israel the aggressor in the con-
frontation of June 1967 was nonsense. The message to de Gaulle could
not have been more obvious.
Cassin repeated his defence of Israel as the target of Egyptian aggres-
sion in an article written before the war but published in Ici-Paris in its
issue of 6–12 June 1967. In it Cassin scoffed at the view that Israel was an
aggressor. It was as absurd as viewing Czechoslovakia as the aggressor in
its conflict with Nazi Germany, which ended so ignominiously in 1938.
Israel would fight to defend its existence, ‘But this does not make it a
warmonger. It had the instinct and the desire to consolidate long-lasting
roots in the Middle East to reach with the neighbouring Arab peoples a
fruitful agreement’, including a just settlement of the refugee problem.
To him the Palestinian refugees were ‘pitiable instruments of those who
ordered them in 1948 to flee from Palestine’.72 Later scholarship would
prove this assumption to be false, and in some cases a lie, though it
was commonly accepted at the time.73 Still, their plight was real, Cassin
insisted, but it did not justify siding with Egypt, the real aggressor in this
conflict.
In the end, Cassin’s logic was simply bypassed by de Gaulle’s rai-
son d’état. One well-documented account of the diplomatic exchanges
72 René Cassin, ‘Pour éviter un nouveau Munich’, Ici-Paris Hebdo, 6–12 June 1967, p. 2.
73 Efrat Ben Ze’ev, Remembering Palestine 1948. Beyond National Narratives (Cambridge
University Press, 2010), chapter 1.
A Jewish life 329
leading up to the war put it this way. On 24 May, de Gaulle warned

Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban: ‘Don’t make war. You will be con-
sidered the aggressor by the world and by me. You will cause the Soviet
Union to penetrate more deeply into the Middle East, and Israel will suf-
fer the consequences. You will create a Palestinian nationalism, and you
will never get rid of it.’74 Eban duly reported the message, but the Israeli
government declined de Gaulle’s protection, and launched the war that
transformed the Middle East on 5 June 1967.
Two days before the war broke out, France imposed an arms embargo
on the Middle East. Shortly thereafter, France’s support for Israel’s
nuclear programme came to an end. Both meant little in material terms,
since Israel won the war decisively. The United States stepped into the
gap and became Israel’s chief defender and arms supplier, while the
Israeli nuclear programme carried on, without a hitch.
This reorientation of French foreign policy towards Israel and the
Arab world is the background against which to set an even more direct
confrontation between de Gaulle and Cassin. De Gaulle had warned
that he would hold accountable whichever state started the war. In his
press conference of 27 November 1967, he set this parting of the ways
between France and Israel in a long-term context. He noted that the
creation of ‘a Zionist home’ and later a Jewish state in Palestine then
had raised ‘some degree of apprehension’. Would there not be inevitably
‘incessant, interminable friction and conflict’? ‘There are even those who
feared that Jews, so long dispersed, but remaining what they had always
been, that is, a superior people, sure of themselves and domineering,
once installed in the site of their ancient grandeur, would change the
very moving desire they had nourished for nineteen centuries into an
ardent ambition towards conquest’. Despite this danger, the Jews had
found substantial sympathy among Christians, de Gaulle went on, ‘by
their constructive work and the courage of their soldiers’, and France was
prominent among those states which welcomed the creation of the Jewish
state and the arrival of many new immigrants from Arab lands. Urging
moderation on the state of Israel, France had been open to stronger ties
with Arab lands once the war in Algeria was over. The existence of the
state of Israel, de Gaulle insisted in this press conference, ‘was a fait
accompli’. That was not in question. What mattered was the transfor-
mation by Israel of the crisis of 1967 into an occasion for the expansion
of Israel itself. The closure of the Straits of Tiran, ‘unfortunately created
74 Edward Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger. A Secret History of American Diplomacy
in the Middle East (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1976), p. 31. There are many other
sources which support his account of the Eban–de Gaulle exchange.
by Egypt’, had provided ‘a pretext to those who wanted to fight’. Conse-

quently, de Gaulle observed, ‘Now, Israel is organizing on the territories
it holds an occupation which can only lead to oppression, repression,
expulsions, and against which there already is a resistance, which Israel
calls terrorism.’75
There were other turbulent issues at stake; on the same day and at
the same press conference, de Gaulle announced his veto of Britain’s
application to join the European Economic Community. He thereby
reoriented French foreign policy in fundamental ways, at variance with
Washington, and its Trojan Horse in London. Domestically, the rejection
of the British application was less controversial than his comments on
Israel and on the conflict in the Middle East, and his characterizations of
Jews and Jewish history. The fallout from this press conference was very
heavy.
Cassin, alongside other Jewish leaders, was incensed by de Gaulle’s
comments. He signed denunciations of the President’s language, and
shared the indignation the Chief Rabbi Jacob Kaplan expressed person-
ally to de Gaulle on 1 January 1968, during the formal exchange of New
Year’s greetings. De Gaulle assured the rabbi ‘that he had not the inten-
tion to insult Jews’; indeed, he thought ‘what he had said about the Jewish
people was a compliment’. Kaplan replied that ‘certain terms in his dec-
laration had been used by our enemies’. Nevertheless, the rabbi urged de
Gaulle to use his influence to promote a just peace in the Middle East.
‘As to my authority,’ de Gaulle said, ‘I have none. I asked Mr Eban not
to attack and he attacked.’76
Here the personal and the political were braided together. De Gaulle
took Israel’s decision to go to war as a rejection of his offer of protection;
but his case against Israel was more than that it had chosen war when its
survival was not, in his estimate, at stake. It was that Israel would keep
what it held, and consequently peace was impossible to achieve in the
Middle East.
He thought, from a geopolitical point of view, that it was in the interest
of France to reorient her stance away from an alliance with Washing-
ton, London and Tel Aviv. Had he pulled off a miracle of mediation
avoiding war in June 1967, his standing as a peacemaker would have
been enhanced substantially. He had already settled the war in Algeria,
at great risk. What stood in his way in the Near East, he believed, were
75 For the full text of the press conference, see Le Monde, 29 Nov. 1967.
76 Ariel Danan, ‘De Gaulle et Jacob Kaplan. Un document d’archives inédit’, Archives
Juives, 40 (2007), pp. 137–41, drawn from the archives of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign
Affairs.
A Jewish life 331
those in Israel who had used as a casus belli Nasser’s gambit of closing
the straits. He had personally urged Israel to stay its hand, and he had
been rejected. In a test of will between two forces, each ‘sure of itself
and domineering’, de Gaulle’s advice had been ignored. The bite in his
rhetoric came from this simple fact, but behind the words was a strategic
choice de Gaulle had made in the interests of France.
Cassin understood the matter differently. Who was as loyal to de Gaulle
as Cassin had been since the first meeting they had had in London in
June 1940? Who had accepted more laconically whatever decisions de
Gaulle had made to move him from one part of the political constellation
of Free France to another? This time de Gaulle had gone too far. De
Gaulle’s position was unjustified and immoral. It confused aggression
with legitimate defence, and added insult to injury by drawing from the
cesspool of anti-Semitic stereotypes to characterize what was a political
and diplomatic dispute. De Gaulle’s remarks and the language he used
to describe the ‘Jewishness’ of the position of Israel left lasting scars.
A few weeks later, Cassin took up the matter in person, on the occa-
sion of a lunch for the Constitutional Council at the Elysée Palace. The
episode was recounted by Bernard Ducamin who was in attendance and
described the General and Cassin in discussion in front of a window
having coffee. We have Cassin’s own account of the encounter.
On 31 January 1968, he told the Central Committee of the AIU that
he had ‘taken the opportunity of a recent lunch with the Constitutional
Council in the Elysée Palace to raise the issue of relations with Israel. The
general approached him at the end of the meal, and said, notably, with
respect to his press conference, “But I thought I was praising the Jewish
people”.’ Cassin would have none of it. ‘The word “domineering” is used
by propagandists hostile to Jews and in particular by the “Protocols of the
Elders of Zion.” It was not only a discriminatory word, but a murderous
word. The Russians used it in that manner in their propaganda.’77
We have no record of further exchanges between the two men, but we
do know that Cassin took up the matter discretely with the President’s
secretary general, Bernard Tricot, sending him his article in Le Monde,
dated 3 June 1967. He enquired of Tricot whether the General’s position
was that Israel had to agree to evacuate the occupied territories as a
precondition of peace negotiations, or whether the negotiations could
consider the matter in due course. At no point, then or in subsequent
years, did Cassin argue that Israel had the right to annex territories
acquired in the course of the 1967 war. He thought, however, that the
conflict had to be solved by direct negotiation between the parties.
77 AIU, AM Central Committee, Minutes, 28 Jan. 1968, pp. 10–11.

In the last decade of his life, between 1967 and 1976, both during
de Gaulle’s presidency and afterwards, Cassin followed the growing ten-
dency among French Jews to view their government’s foreign policy as
hostile not only to Israel but to Jews as such. De Gaulle’s choice of words
made that argument plausible. He had spoken not of ‘the state of Israel’
or ‘the Israelis’, but of ‘Jews’ as ‘a domineering people’. Where could
that possibly have left Jewish Republicans like René Cassin, other than
outside the Republican orbit, subjects of a double identity – Jews and
Frenchmen – of the very kind Vichy had concocted and de Gaulle and
Free France had struggled finally to erase? Why in the world had de
Gaulle, who had shown not the slightest sign of anti-Semitism in his
dealings with Cassin, come to this view?
De Gaulle’s presidency came to an end a year later. In 1970, he died,
and Cassin was one of the mourners who attended his interment at
Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. The ties of respect between the two men
were too deep to be broken by what was ultimately a matter of state.
But for Cassin, the principle at stake here was one of fairness and the
equal application of the rule of law to all parties to a dispute. Time
and again in the last decade of his life, Cassin protested against the lack
of even-handedness, the blatant bias in international condemnations of
Israel.78
In 1973, before the Yom Kippur war, Cassin privately prepared a
position paper for the use of the Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban.
The specific occasion to which Cassin responded was the international
condemnation of an Israeli commando raid on Beirut, in which several
leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization were killed. Claiming
that his remarks were provisional, based on a partial, and not an exhaus-
tive, study of the matter under international law, he hoped it would be
useful for Israel ‘to recall some principles all too often ignored since
1967’.79
The first point Cassin made was that ‘When certain parties to the
conflict openly violated the cease fire order, the Security Council showed
its weakness and its partiality, in reserving its condemnation for the only
party which had responded to attack – at times with rough reprisals –
without condemning those responsible for the initial attacks.’
Secondly, he recalled that ‘the violation of international law contin-
ued in another direction when the Security Council implicitly admitted
by terming them “Resisters” that Palestinians were “belligerents”, and
78 AIU, AM Présidence 013a, Cassin to Général Koenig, 19 Jan. 1970.

79 AIU, AM Présidence 015, ‘La situation respective des Etats Israël et du Liban au regard
du droit international’, 13 April 1973.
A Jewish life 333
therefore had a duty to respect the Hague Convention of 1907, but

proudly declared they would not respect the laws of war’. ‘Since then’,
Cassin argued, ‘the war has taken on a new aspect’. Not only has the
international community ‘left, without censure, the perpetrators of hos-
tile acts and even of terrorism against a third country’, but also ‘it has
accepted that terrorist organizations committing such acts’ were shelter-
ing in a third country, ‘Lebanon, not involved in this conflict’.
Here Cassin returned to a point he had made before the outbreak of
the 1967 war. The international community had lost sight of established
practice on the identification of an aggressor under international law.
‘Since the Litvinoff doctrine, formulated in Geneva in 1933–34, applied
to several treaties signed by the USSR and remains valid until the UN
adopts a new definition of “Aggression”, and of who is considered “an
aggressor”, a state may be considered an aggressor against a neighbouring
state when it continues to shelter bands of armed men and those com-
manding them.’ This was evidently the case with respect to Israel and
Lebanon in 1973. Consequently, ‘Israel had the right to accuse Lebanon
of aggression in these international incidents.’ How could the great pow-
ers view Israel as an aggressor in light of this doctrine? ‘If, however, there
is no state of war between two states, in light of the behaviour of Pales-
tinian bands, which the Security Council tolerates and accepts, there is
still a persistent violation of international law.’ Under these conditions,
‘it is just to set aside the law of reciprocity’. It was precisely this lack of
balance in the application of international law which outraged Cassin.
International security and a respect for the peaceful lives of neighbouring
states were both contractual matters. If broken by one party, it was not
possible for that party to claim a grievance, a point Cassin had made as
long ago as 1914 in his thesis on contracts.
Abba Eban thanked Cassin for his position paper on 3 May 1973.80
Not long thereafter war broke out in the Middle East. Cassin shared the
relief of the Central Committee of the Alliance that Israeli forces had
repelled the surprise attack of October 1973. He wrote to both the Israeli
ambassador to France and the President of the State of Israel to express
‘the anxiety we had all shared’ when Israel was ‘once more a victim of
evident aggression’ and ‘the complete admiration we have for the courage
of the Israeli nation, the discipline of the people, and the behaviour of
the army’.81
80 AIU, AM Présidence 015, Eban to Cassin, 3 May 1973.

81 AIU, AM Présidence 015a, Cassin to Katzir, 29 Oct. 1973. See also Cassin to Asher
Ben Natan, 10 Oct. 1973.
The following year, Cassin went to Israel, accompanied by Ghislaine

Mareschal, to inaugurate the new Lycée René Cassin in Jerusalem. Hav-
ing always considered the question of Jerusalem a separate matter, Cassin
was personally involved in the fundraising for this project, and agreed to
give his name to the school, despite the fact that it had been constructed
across the ‘Green line’, that is, in a part of the city in no-man’s land
between Jordanian and Israeli Jerusalem. Consequently, the French gov-
ernment did not send any officials to the ceremony.82 What a contrast
between this moment and the time in 1958 when Cassin had had full
French backing and praise for the creation of a French lycée under his
name in Tel Aviv. What a contrast between the celebration in 1960 of
the centenary of the Alliance in Paris and in Jerusalem, cities whose
governments were now worlds apart.
In his last years, despite infirmity and hospitalization, Cassin con-
tinued to speak out on issues of importance to French Jewry. In June
1972 he participated in an international conference in Uppsala in Swe-
den, a meeting he had helped to fund. He contributed to the writing
of what is known as the Uppsala Declaration, a text modelled on the
Universal Declaration. Its preamble of twenty articles stressed the need
for all countries to develop and enforce freedom of movement ‘through
international agencies and according to the law and to international
procedures’.83 In Uppsala, he drew attention to the ‘sad and persis-
tent problem of Soviet Jewry’, a problem which ‘merited the sympathetic
attention of the Soviet government, in light of its power and the prestige
of this great country . . . The only solution consistent with the restora-
tion of the indestructible core of human rights is freedom of choice,
which in this case means the freedom to stay or to leave.’84 This mes-
sage was published in the New York Times on 23 March 1973; it became
the rallying cry of a growing movement to force the Soviet Union to
liberalize its policy towards those of its citizens who wanted to emigrate
to Israel. The very last communiqué with his signature attached to it
was a protest, dated 24 December 1975, on the plight of Soviet Jews,
as yet unaffected by the final act of the Helsinki conference, establishing
Western surveillance of human rights as the price the Soviet Union paid
for guarantees of its western borders.85 Cassin could not have known that
Helsinki was a major event in the history of the human rights movement,
82 AIU, AM Présidence 016a, on arrangements for the inauguration of the school.

83 Karel Vasak and Sidney Liskofsky (eds.), The Right to Leave and to Return. Papers and
Recommendations of the International Colloquium Held in Uppsala, Sweden, 19–20 June
1972 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1976), p. xi.
84 Vasak and Liskofsky (eds.), The Right to Leave, pp. xxi–xxii.
85 AIU, AM Présidence 017a, communiqué on plight of Soviet Jews, 24 Dec. 1975.
A Jewish life 335
one with unanticipated consequences for both the Soviet Union and the
world.
Cassin was a committed Zionist. His loyalty to Israel was very deep,
and increasingly so as time went on. The question remains, though, as
to how to square Cassin’s commitment to human rights with his record
of solidarity for and advocacy on behalf of the state of Israel after the Six
Day War? The answer is mixed. On the one hand, his commitment to
the AIU was for Jewish emancipation, towards which the establishment
of the state of Israel was, in his view, a triumphant step. He recalled in
his later years the joy he felt in the United Nations in 1948 when he
heard that David Ben Gurion had announced the establishment of the
Jewish state. Cassin believed firmly that it was the right of Jews to create
a homeland in Palestine, especially after the Shoah, and to leave their
countries of birth, such as the Soviet Union, to go to Israel, if they chose
to do so. The right to emigrate is imbedded in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights.
The problem of Israel and human rights became more complex after
the occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Under
these circumstances, is there any basis for the claim that Cassin was guilty
of imbalance himself, in treating the rights of Israelis or Jews as somehow
worthy of greater respect than the rights of Palestinians or Muslims? The
answer is yes and no. He did believe that there had to be a settlement
of the Palestinian refugee problem as part of an overall settlement, but
he tended to use the term ‘population exchange’ in this context. On
23 October 1974, Cassin urged the president of the French Senate to
consider as parallel the position of immigrants from Arab countries to
Israel and the position of Palestinians in exile.86
Such a formulation is flawed, since it does not acknowledge that such a
‘population exchange’ would leave Palestinians with unfulfilled national
aspirations, while Jews could enjoy theirs. It was not a neutral step for
him to accept giving his name to a school built on land in East Jerusalem.
He did not speak out for the human rights of Palestinians under Israeli
occupation. But in the end, the way Cassin treated the Palestinian prob-
lem as a refugee question was characteristic of his entire approach to
politics. They were victims of war, and deserved to have their grievances
met in an honourable fashion. In the same way, Cassin had championed
Israel as a haven for Jewish victims of war and genocide. His position is
located in the period bracketed by the Second World War and the Six Day
War. Then there was force in the claim that Zionism was an ideology of
liberation and of the rescue of the victims of the Holocaust. Thereafter,
86 AIU, AM Présidence 016a, Cassin to Alain Poher, Président du Sénat, 23 Oct. 1974.
when Arab populations were subject to occupation, and land was taken
for Jewish settlement, the meaning of Zionism began to change, and the
political coloration of the Israeli state changed with it.
Cassin himself had said in 1948 that his commitment to the Jewish
people grew out of their suffering.87 If they were to become oppressors,
he would not be with them. The timing of his death meant that he did
not have to face the difficult dilemmas following the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon and the massacres of Sabra and Shatilah, but there is nothing in
his life or writings to indicate that he would have stood by and supported
blindly human rights violations whoever committed them and wherever
they occurred.
On the level of political analysis, though, it is evident that it was de
Gaulle rather than Cassin who had the more penetrating vision of the
contradictions at the heart of the Middle East conflict in 1967. However
crude his characterizations of Jews as ‘a domineering people’, he was right
about the cruelties imbedded in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza. No one in 1967 imagined that the stalemate would last for fifty
years. It was de Gaulle, not Cassin, who foresaw this tragic impasse, right
at the outset of the new balance of power arising from Israel’s victory in
the Six Day War.
Cassin and the French Jewish community

By the late 1940s there had been a double shift in Jewish opinion in
France. On the one hand, there was a tilt towards an active Zionist
stance as a reflection of a more assertive attitude on the part of French
Jews towards their co-religionists in peril. The Alliance adapted well to
this new mood. For Cassin, the Alliance had a proven record of benev-
olent service throughout the Arab world. They had earned the right to
speak out in defence of Jewish communities at risk. And speak out he
did, both publicly and privately through diplomatic channels at his dis-
posal. While in New York to work on the Human Rights Commission, he
got his colleague and friend Charles Malik, a Lebanese delegate, to pro-
vide assurances that the Lebanese government would protect the Jewish
population of the country.88
On the other hand, in the third quarter of the twentieth century, Jewish
life in France came to be defined more by social, political and philan-
thropic efforts than by participation in the rituals of synagogue life. This
distinction should not be drawn too sharply, since the arrival in France

88 AIU, AM Présidence 001e, Cassin to Weill, 27 May 1948.
A Jewish life 337
of North African Jews enriched the world of orthodoxy rooted in the

synagogue and schools. But what Maud Mandel has termed the ‘Ameri-
can model’ of associational life can be seen emerging in France after the
Second World War.89 Its arrival in part was the reflection of the growing
importance of American philanthropy, including Jewish philanthropy, in
the high-water years of the Marshall Plan. This support was absolutely
essential to the development of the AIU. The ‘Joint’ and the ‘Claims’
conferences were prepared to provide cash to restore and expand Jewish
institutions in France as elsewhere, but they demanded strict accounting
and reporting of where the funds went. Cassin was at the very heart of
this set of trans-national financial exchanges, and he did his best to see
to it that the Alliance received its due.
In this context, Cassin led the Alliance into the CRIF, the representa-
tive council of Jewish institutions in France, created in 1944 to coordi-
nate the rescue and revival of French Jewry at the end of the war.90 This
brought the Alliance together with religious organizations and leaders
who, like the first president of the CRIF, Léon Meiss, contributed much
to the organization. Secular Jews and observant Jews had perished in
the Shoah side by side; they remained together after the worst was over.
Cassin was one of the first people consulted by Nahum Goldmann about
the creation of a commission to honour the Just among the Nations,
Christians who had saved Jewish lives during the Shoah.91
Cassin spoke with political leaders as an equal and was treated as
such. He was recognized within Israel as a major public figure who had
brought honour to the Jewish people as a whole. When in 1958 David Ben
Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister, was trying to come to some consensus
as to how to define Jewish identity – essential for the promulgation of
a state constitution, something which has yet to be achieved – he asked
Cassin, as a distinguished Jewish jurist, for his opinion. Cassin’s view was
that there was more than one answer to the question, and that different
institutions should produce different forms of identity documents. The
rabbis could speak from their point of view; the secular community from
its perspective. Neither had the right to a monopoly on answering the
question of who is a Jew.92
This was Cassin to the core. His Jewish identity was of many parts.
He did not follow Jewish law, and successively married two Christian
women. He did not observe Jewish holidays, and knew little Hebrew
89 Maud Mandel, ‘Philanthropy or cultural imperialism? The impact of American Jewish

aid in post-Holocaust France’, Jewish Social Studies, 9, 1 (2002) pp. 53–94.
90 AIU, Central Committee, Minutes, 30 April 1945.
91 AIU, AM Présidence 012d, Goldmann and Anselm Reiss to Cassin, 3 July 1962.
92 382AP146, Ben Gurion to Cassin, 27 Oct. 1958; Cassin to Ben Gurion, 27 April 1959.
beyond the chants he had learned as a boy. And yet he had what Gershon
Scholem famously said Hannah Arendt lacked: ‘Ahavat Israel’, a love for
the people of Israel.93 They were his people; he knew that well before the
Nazis and Vichy had engraved it on the face of France. His brother Fédia
took on a leadership role in the Jewish community of Marseilles. He was
president of the Consistoire and the B’nai Brith.94 After the Shoah, his
brother René took on the mantle of a leader of his people on the national
and the international level, but he did so in his own language and in his
own way.
His overall concerns were secular, less Jewish than universal. Defend-
ing Jewish rights was one way to defend human rights; they either flour-
ished together or they failed together. And in this respect, he returned to
the emancipatory message of the French Revolution itself. And there’s
the rub. This was the period of decolonization. In its wake, violence and
instability endangered Jewish institutions and lives in the Maghreb. They
had to be defended, though that very defence undermined the universalist
beliefs and commitments of Cassin. French patriotism and a universalist
conscience were braided together in the Jewish life that René Cassin con-
structed for himself. It was a subject position he could occupy only at a
certain time and in a certain place. But it contained contradictions within
it which were all too evident at the time, as they are today. The rights of
Jewish minorities in Morocco in 1952 are no different in principle from
the rights of the Arab minority in Israel today (2012); both suffer from
violence for which they were and are not responsible. Both deserved and
deserve today the protection of human rights institutions, and both call
on their brothers and sisters elsewhere to ease their plight.
It would be absurd to fault Cassin for failing to respond to the unfolding
human rights tragedy in Palestine and Israel at the end of his life. It is
true that he treated Palestinians only as victims of war whose claim to aid
was justified. He accorded to the Jews who settled in Palestine rights to
form a state which he did not accord to Palestinians. And yet, few have
done better than he did in trying to keep sight of simple standards of
decency and respect for the law. He was incapable of giving in to despair.
After 1944, Cassin worked to develop contacts between Jews and the
Roman Catholic Church, which was not an easy task, given the behaviour
of most of the French bishops during the war. He benefited in particular
from warm relations with Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII,
when he was papal nuncio in Paris from 1945 to 1947. On 26 May
93 Hannah Arendt, Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York:
Schocken Books, 2007), chapter 1.
94 AIU, AM Présidence 005a, René Cassin to Marcel Schtaingart, 11 July 1952.
A Jewish life 339
1945, Cassin was seated beside Roncalli, in a meeting organized by

Rayonnement Français at the Conseil d’Etat.95 Later, Cassin acknowl-
edged the support provided by Roncalli during his work on the Universal
Declaration.96 Roncalli had been the Vatican observer to UNESCO, and
he was a stout partisan of that institution. As president of the AIU, Cassin
developed many links with friends in the French Catholic Church. His
intermediary was André Chouraqui, who in May 1952 wrote a report
on the Assembly of French bishops and archbishops. They favoured the
elimination of pejorative references to Jews in the liturgy.97 Three years
later, Cassin sent Chouraqui to Rome to open new channels of exchange
with the Vatican.98
In 1958 the election of John XXIII to the papacy opened the way to
Vatican II, in which the terms ‘perfidious’ and ‘infidel’ in the prayer for the
Jews in the service on Good Friday were suppressed. In his acceptance
speech for the Nobel Prize, Cassin saluted the Pope as his brother in
the defence of human rights and in the effort to make international law
superior to the sovereignty of states.99 Undoubtedly, in this extraordinary
moment of ecumenical detente, he was a bridge-builder rather than a
separatist, a man of convictions rather than of faith.
His ecumenical convictions clearly marked his private life. When the
International Conference of Jewish Jurists offered to plant a forest in
Israel in his name, Cassin urged them to give it the name of his wife
Simone. There it stands to this day, the Simone Cassin forest, a monu-
ment to his first, Christian, wife, set in the hills of Judea.100
As we noted in chapter 8, Simone died after a long illness in 1969.
In the last months of his life, on 5 November 1975, René Cassin remar-
ried. He had known his bride, Ghislaine Mareschal, since the Blitz in
London. She had served as his secretary since his retirement from the
Conseil d’Etat and she went with him as his companion to Israel in 1974.
Shortly afterwards, she donated a sum for scholarships for the Alliance
school in Mikve-Israel.101 Ghislaine was a mystic, rather than a practising
Catholic. The civil ceremony was followed by a religious ceremony in the
95 Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Journal de France, vol. 1, 1945–1948, trans. Jacques Mignon
(Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2006), p. 100.
96 Cassin, La pensée et l’action, p. 152.
97 AIU, AM Présidence 005a, Chouraqui to Cassin, 4 April 1952.
98 AIU, AM Présidence 007b, Cassin to Chouraqui, 8 June 1955.
99 http://nobelprize.org/nobel prizes/peace/laureates/1968/cassin-acceptance.html.
100 François-Joachim Beer, ‘René Cassin et le Judaisme’, in Cassin, La pensée et l’action,
p. 282.
101 AIU, AM Présidence 016a, voyage de Mme Mareschal en Israël, 23 sept. 1974; on
the announcement of their marriage, AIU, AM Présidence 017b, Ghislaine Cassin to
Weill, 6 Nov. 1975.
Salpêtrière hospital, where Cassin was convalescing from a stroke. The

event was entirely ecumenical. The couple’s marriage was blessed by both
a priest and a liberal rabbi. In his last weeks, his thoughts returned to the
dark days of 1914, when his life had almost been cut short. In his hospital
bed, he stretched out his arm and told his niece Josette Cassin, ‘this is
the arm of a soldier of the Great War’. The nurses on the ward appeared
to him as the nurses who cared for him over sixty years before.102 His
very last article was devoted to the comforting words of a priest, the curé
of Dompcevrin, whose benediction he had received, despite the fact that
he was a Jew. Remember, the priest said, that if you face the eternal judge
tomorrow, he is a judge full of love.103 Less than four months after his
wedding, on 20 February 1976, René Cassin died, his friends said, a
happy man.

103 André Chouraqui, L’amour fort comme la mort. Une autobiographie (Paris: R. Laffont,
1990), pp. 411–13. Thanks are due to Chantal Connochie-Bourgne for opening her
mother Ghislaine Bru’s archive to us. Cassin wrote down this story in his own hand,
and it was published in the regional newspaper Le Courrier de l’Ouest, 18 Dec. 1975.
Conclusion
The most striking feature of the life of René Cassin is its extraordinary
diversity. His life was not the playing out of a personal project he framed
from his early years, but rather it was like all our lives, filled with impro-
visations, with doors closing, and others opening in unanticipated and
unplanned ways. In effect, Cassin lived several lives, at times overlapping,
and at times sequential. These multiple facets of his life framed the major
state celebration on the centenary of his birth, when his remains were
transferred to the Panthéon in Paris on 4–5 October 1987.
Cassin had been buried in 1976 in the cemetery of Montparnasse
in Paris. His fondest wish, he said repeatedly, was to have his remains
transferred to the Panthéon. Through his widow’s efforts, and those of
the Union Fédérale and other admirers and old friends, the President of
the Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, decided in 1980 that his wish
would be fulfilled and that his remains would indeed be transferred to the
Panthéon.1 His successor François Mitterrand carried out this decision
seven years later.
The first stage of this state commemoration was military in character.
It took place in the Hôtel des Invalides, where the wounded veterans of
France’s wars have been cared for since Louis XIV. The square inside this
monument is the initial site of national funerals, which begin here and
process elsewhere. Here on the evening of 4 October, the Union Fédérale
gathered together veterans from all over France in order to celebrate the
life of one of its founders. Several thousand people took part in this
event.2
Cassin’s casket was placed in the middle of the square. Four people,
including his widow, came forward to honour his memory. There fol-
lowed one minute of silence, and only one address by the Minister of
1 Decree of 23 April 1981.

2 The best review of the entire ceremony, with the entire text of the three speeches which
were delivered on 4 and 5 October, is that given by the special issue of Cahiers de l’UF,
377, Nov. 1987.
341
Defence. His speech began by evoking Cassin, the soldier of the Great
War, his wounds, his service in the veterans’ movement. Then he turned
to Cassin in London with Free France. In conclusion, he read out the
text of the BBC broadcast Cassin had made in London on 8 September
1940 to celebrate the victory twenty-six years earlier at the Battle of the
Marne. This was a text so important to Cassin that he asked that it be
placed in his coffin after his death.
In this text, Cassin evoked the moment in 1914 in which he was
wounded, and the comrades who had died by his side.3 Then he imagined
the return of the Unknown Soldier to France in 1940 and said, this –
France defeated – was not the France for which we died. Cassin imagined
in his broadcast that the men and women of Free France – the true
France – heard this message from the Unknown Soldier, and promised
that they would return on the day of Liberation to tell him that they had
rescued the honour of France, and that he could return to his grave in
peace. This reading of Cassin’s broadcast was followed by a profound
silence. It was a simple but very moving moment. Some of those present
wept.4 Later on, Cassin’s coffin was transferred to the Museum of the
Order of the Liberation inside the Invalides, where it remained during
the night under the vigilance of veterans of Free France and the Union
Fédérale.
The second stage of this ceremony took place the next morning at the
Conseil d’Etat in the Palais Royal. In 1789, the gardens of this palace
were at the heart of revolutionary Paris. From the nineteenth century,
this was the home of the Conseil d’Etat, an institution Cassin had served
for sixteen years. Here was commemorated his central role in reshap-
ing the administration of liberated France and the re-establishment of
Republican legality. Cassin’s casket was brought into the Conseil d’Etat at
11 a.m. and rested on the first floor, adjacent to the room in which he had
worked for so many years. The audience was composed mainly of higher
civil servants, presidents of major institutions, diplomats and academics.
Madame Cassin was there, the only seated person in the entourage.
It was the role of the Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, to speak there
and to celebrate Cassin’s administrative career. He stressed the signifi-
cance of Cassin’s life-long campaign for human rights and justice. There
was nothing surprising in this talk, which clearly said what had to be
said.
The last stage took place in the Panthéon itself, at 6 p.m. that day.
The Panthéon is a church built in neo-classical style just before the
3 See p. 21.
4 Jacques Robert, ‘René Cassin au Panthéon’, Revue du Droit Public et de la Science Politique
en France et à l’Etranger, 6 (Nov.–Dec. 1987), pp. 1425–30.
Conclusion 343
French Revolution. The revolutionaries decided to turn the church into

a temple, a Valhalla, to honour the memory of its ‘great men’, which is
what is inscribed on its portico. Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, Jean Jaurès and
Jean Moulin among others are interred in it. Resting here is the highest
honour the nation can give to one of its sons.
The choreography of this event was carefully thought out. Two plat-
forms for guests and the public had been built facing the monument.
President Mitterrand was seated in the first row, facing the Panthéon.
Cassin’s casket was carried there on an armoured vehicle and then placed
in state in front of the steps leading into the building.
Then President Mitterrand went to a lectern and began a discourse
rich in allusions and meaning. ‘There are illustrious men’, he began,
‘who incarnate the pain or the glory of an epoch. There are others whose
grandeur is to come before their time, and to sow the seeds of the future.
René Cassin was one of these’, a man whose ideas were imbedded in
action and dedicated to one idea. Mitterrand stressed the linkage between
Cassin the internationalist and Cassin the intransigent patriot.
The President went on to insist on the continuity of Cassin’s thinking
from the Hague lectures of 1930 to the end of his life. ‘He refused to
place nationality above domicile’, since to do so would mean accepting
the absolute power of the state over the individual.
The only democratic regime, for Cassin, was that which insisted on the priority
of the defence of human rights both for those born in a state and those foreigners
who live in it . . . He suggested that state sovereignty could no longer serve as
the supreme law, but that the individual must be recognized as a subject in
international law.
Mitterrand recalled the Bernheim incident in the League of Nations

in 1933. This incident was important in Cassin’s growing sense of the
danger of anti-Semitism, and gave immediate meaning to the need to
establish the individual within an international system of law. The line
here points directly to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘the
first document of ethics ever adopted by humanity as a whole’, as Cassin
himself had said.
In his discourse, Mitterrand had the wisdom to avoid triumphalism,
either in terms of Cassin’s achievement or in terms of the place of human
rights within French society itself. Ironically, he pointed out that Cassin
had served in the European Court in Strasbourg long before France
herself had ratified the Convention on which it is based. He underlined
the ongoing limits faced by those who struggled for human rights.
The all too facile references to ‘human rights’ hardly cover up the reality of the
harsh lessons each generation has to learn in its turn. René Cassin repeatedly
said that ‘the slave trade was never so intense as during the Enlightenment’. We
all know that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 26 August
1789, of which we are justly proud, did not suppress or weaken this shameful
legal framework, which we call the ‘Black Code’.
Mitterrand’s conclusion followed the same line. Cassin, this soldier of

Human Rights,
merits, demands the homage of us all. Neither the jurists nor the diplomats, the
veterans, the Jews of France, those who admired General de Gaulle or followed
Jean Jaurès will be alone in sharing his honour . . . René Cassin has earned the
recognition of the whole of France, the France of yesterday and that of tomorrow.
The orchestra took up the heroic chorus of the prisoners from

Beethoven’s Fidelio, which was followed by one minute of silence. Then
came the Marseillaise. The portal of the Panthéon was illuminated, and
to the sounds of the Requiem of Gilles, President Mitterrand, Madame
Cassin and General Simon5 accompanied the casket into the Panthéon,
where it remains to this day.
We as biographers have had a task to do which is very different from that

of those who honoured René Cassin in such a magnificent setting. We
have had to confront Cassin’s life not in the semi-sacred tone we hear in
these ceremonies, but as that of a man struggling to use the intellectual
and moral tools of his generation to construct a new approach to the
balance between the individual and the state, a problem at the core of all
political thought and much political conflict. In this effort, we moved out
of the sacred realm into the profane space of contestation, of frustration,
of failure, which Cassin knew all too well. That is the only way to avoid
writing the history of human rights as a kind of sectarian history, the
history of a religion or a sect, with truth imbedded in its mission. It
is only by stepping outside of Cassin’s mental and political world that
we can do justice to his real contributions to it. Removing the halo is
the only way to see this extraordinary life in a clear light, a light that
discloses his shortcomings and his limitations alongside his gifts and
talents. Biographers who worship at the altar of their subjects betray
them; our aim was to do justice to him, not to follow the path of those
who pantheonized him. His profile is infinitely sharper once the halo
is removed from his portrait. His limitations were evident; so were his
achievements. Some were idiosyncratic; others were shared by most of
his generation.
The principal interest in dealing with the life of René Cassin is not
in the great honours he received, but rather in the fact that virtually
5 Grand chancelier de l’ordre de la Libération.

Conclusion 345
all the great events of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century in
Europe left their imprint on him. Looking at his life is to review the
entire history not only of France during the twentieth century. He took
part in most of the great upheavals of his time. He wanted to become a
Professor of Law, and effectively that is what he became after the Great
War. But the war of 1914–18 was not a parenthesis for him. He suffered
throughout his life from the traces of his wounds, and his public life
developed first and foremost in terms of his service of the victims of the
war at the heart of and at the head of the Union Fédérale. Then followed
his work for the international association of wounded veterans on both
sides, CIAMAC, and his participation in the League of Nations from
1924 to 1938. He was one of the earliest and most lucid commentators
to see clearly Hitler’s menace to Europe and tried to alert his colleagues
about this threat. He was in Geneva at the League of Nations when
the Munich tragedy unfolded, thereby hammering in the last nail in its
coffin. There he saw the end of the dream of peace he had shared and
knew that what had happened was only a pause before war returned to
Europe.
In 1940, he played out his life by choosing London, and joined Free
France. From the first day he arrived in London, he helped negotiate
the juridical framework within which Churchill recognized de Gaulle.
His role evolved at the heart of Free France, but he was always there.
He was there too in the Inter-Allied Commission in which projects
were formed for international reconstruction and for the punishment
of war crimes. He was there at the UN in the Human Rights Commis-
sion, and in 1948 in Paris, when the Universal Declaration was adopted
unanimously.
From 1943 in Paris and Algiers, he was a key figure in the re-
establishment of a Republican state in France. To some his role appeared
to be secondary, but in essence it was fundamental. He cleaned up the
entire set of laws, decrees and regulations after the damage done in the
Vichy period. This role opened the way to his being named vice-president
of the Conseil d’Etat in 1944, a position which he occupied until 1960.
Thus in 1958, when France passed from the Fourth to the Fifth Repub-
lic, Cassin was there. It was Cassin who presided over the passage of
power from the last President of the Fourth Republic, René Coty, to
the first of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle. When the European
Court of Human Rights rendered its first judgment, it was Cassin who
signed it as president of the court. He was there in 1944, when the time
came to rebuild the collective life of the Jews of France. And when an
international campaign to force the Soviet Union to respect the rights of
dissidents emerged in the last year of Cassin’s life, he was there too. The
last appeal he signed was on behalf of the campaign to fight for the rights
of Soviet Jews to emigrate.
There are those who argue that, in the language of the Universal Decla-
ration, Cassin did not identify the Shoah as a specific and separate crime
from the panoply of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.6 For him, the
rights of Jews were not specific rights; they were the rights of everyone;
the murder of the Jews of Europe was indeed a crime against humanity.
Human rights are the same as the rights of Jews. Here Cassin followed
to the letter the legacy of emancipation of the French Revolution. Fur-
thermore, it is impossible to ignore the fact that his sister Yvonne and
twenty-five other members of his family were deported and murdered.
This left a deep mark on his life. All his work within the Alliance Israélite
Universelle, over which he presided from 1943 to his death, as well as
in the Comité Juridique and in the Conseil d’Etat, provides evidence of
his constant vigilance over the fate of the victims of the Shoah and of
those Jews in danger after 1945, wherever they lived. His role in the AIU
opened the door for Cassin to enter into the world of Jewish international
politics, and to get to know the major Jewish figures of his time.
Why was Cassin there at so many crucial moments in the twentieth
century? Ironically enough, part of the explanation arises from his failure
to have a domestic political career, as he had hoped to do in 1928 and
1932. Had he succeeded, he probably would have held eminent positions
by chance, for instance as Minister of Foreign Affairs, but such posts are
very precarious, and few politicians last long in them, and certainly not
through three French Republics.
His political failure was a personal success. In politics, he would have
forfeited an advantage he himself was unaware of – the advantage of being
at key points of contact between the state and civil society. Cassin was
never a loner, an individual acting au-dessus de la mêlée. Always he sought
to work with a group, and he was a founder of many associations which
we now term ‘non-governmental organizations’, NGOs. These bodies
speak for collective interests and rights, and it is those rights of free asso-
ciation at the core of civil society which are imbedded in the 1948 Uni-
versal Declaration and make it different from the French Declaration of
1789.
NGOs are outside of the state, but their objective is to affect policy
inside the state. This was precisely the role he played as head of the
6 Marco Duranti, ‘The Holocaust, the legacy of 1789 and the birth of international human
rights law: revisiting the foundation myth’, Journal of Genocide Studies (May 2012),
pp. 200–33.
Conclusion 347
Conseil d’Etat, a paradoxical institution, a strange animal for those whose

political reference is Anglo-Saxon common law. On the one hand, the
Conseil d’Etat provides legal opinions to the government. On the other
hand, it defends individual rights against the same government’s abuses
of power. This Janus-faced function provided Cassin with a place both
within the highest levels of French politics and outside them.
The exceptional nature of Cassin’s many careers risks isolating his biog-
raphy from that of his generation. Above all, Cassin spoke the language of
and represented a generation formed well before the 1914–18 war, but
which passed through the two catastrophes of the twentieth century –
the two world wars. He was always conscious of this identity, which he
shared with men and women in many countries. The UF and CIAMAC
were based on this shared experience of war, and it is not surprising that
such groups were the major carriers of the memory of René Cassin. If, in
France, streets or schools bear the name of René Cassin, it is due mainly
to the lobbying efforts of local branches of the Union Fédérale on local
authorities, and the UF still today (2012) organizes an annual ceremony
at the Panthéon in his honour.
This generation is rapidly passing from the scene. The world of the
veterans of the two world wars has been transformed beyond recogni-
tion in the seventy years since 1945. We are now in a multi-polar world,
without the Soviet Union, without the empires of the major European
powers, with growing roles being played in particular by China, Brazil
and India. Even more, the character of war has changed radically. Wars
in Cassin’s generation were fought between existing states. After 1945,
there were wars fought to build or consolidate new states, for instance
Israel, Vietnam, Algeria, and so on. Thereafter came wars between differ-
ent sub-national groups, as in Nigeria, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Cambodia,
Yugoslavia, and so on. Recently we have been confronted by wars without
states; a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is not a state. It is hardly surprising
that this new constellation of violence has put the practice of human
rights in an entirely new setting, one which Cassin and his generation
never knew.
Logically enough, through the passage of time, Cassin has been forgot-
ten. And yet his biography shows the deep lines of continuity between the
earlier and later parts of the twentieth century and beyond. Recent con-
tributions to the historiography of human rights suffer from an unhappy
division between a pre-history which supposedly ended in 1970 and a
real history which began after Cassin had left the scene. For this reason,
Cassin’s work for human rights, and in particular his role in the drafting
and passage of the Universal Declaration, are consigned to pre-history,
of relatively little interest to today’s concerns. His work is either irrelevant

or viewed in a critical light.7
And yet that interpretation is impossible to sustain. After all, pre-
history is history, and recognizing the foundational work Cassin and
his generation did is the only way to understand later developments. In
Geneva, The Hague, Paris and New York, well before 1970, there were
major efforts and achievements in the construction of new approaches to
human rights. War crimes were prosecuted on an international level; the
Nuremberg trials did take place. The European Court of Human Rights
did begin its deliberations.
The heart and soul of this earlier twentieth-century history is the link-
age between the defence of peace and the defence of human rights. It is
too simple to say that the defence of peace arose out of the First World
War, and human rights arose out of the Shoah and other atrocities of the
Second World War. The key point is that the very same generation that
struggled for peace after 1918 fought for human rights after 1945. It was
the same struggle against what Cassin termed the Leviathan state. Both
imply the necessity of limiting state sovereignty, in terms of the state’s
power to make war on its neighbours, as well as in terms of its treatment
of its own citizens. The only way to make sense of the galaxy of NGOs
active today is to see that they are carrying on the work begun by Cassin
and his generation.
A second objection to Cassin’s position within the history of human
rights is that he betrayed the effort to realize them by accepting a non-
enforceable framework in the Universal Declaration. This was a critique
which Hersch Lauterpacht formulated sixty years ago.8 It ignores the
political climate of the time in which Cassin helped draft the Declaration.
He was always a pragmatist, and tried to get the most that was possible
at the time. There were objectives that he could not reach. He was in
favour of establishing the permanent office of an attorney general, to give
teeth to the United Nation’s commitment to human rights. In place of
this impossible goal, he tried to force nations to report annually on their
record of defending human rights. This too was out of his reach.
The question must be how anyone can have expected there to be
another outcome to human rights efforts in 1948, with Stalin and Tru-
man launching the Cold War, with millions dying in India at the end of
British rule, when millions of refugees fled from the Arab–Israeli war.
7 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2010).
8 Hersch Lauterpacht, ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, British Yearbook of
International Law, 25 (1948), pp. 354–81.
Conclusion 349
The resistance among the great powers to ceding sovereignty to a United

Nations commission was too powerful to overcome. These obstacles are
still evident today. The former French Foreign Minister and the founder
of Médecins Sans Frontières, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999,
said in 2008: ‘There is a permanent contradiction between human rights
and the foreign policy of the state, even in France.’9 Cassin was totally
aware of this problem. He lost another battle too. He had wanted mem-
bers of the Human Rights Commission to be independent representa-
tives. That was not to be, and today they are still appointed by states,
whatever their record of violation or respect for human rights. These
failures need to be recognized, but they are not the whole story.
Among the most powerful opponents of the Universal Declaration were
the imperial powers of the time, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands,
Portugal and Belgium. These states had absolutely no interest in helping
colonized people to turn the Universal Declaration into a weapon to be
used against their own supremacy. France opposed measures advanced
by Cassin himself: the point at issue was the right of individual petition,
which the Quai d’Orsay anticipated would produce an avalanche of claims
from colonized people. Cassin made every effort to make the right of
petition acceptable to French diplomats, but to no avail. Manifestly, the
Universal Declaration was framed in such a way as to enable the colonial
powers to sign it, but once signed, the fight for realizing the aspirations
stated in it had just begun.
Anachronism is one of the traps historians must sidestep at all times.
It is entirely anachronistic to think that the Universal Declaration could
have been written as a call for decolonization. No one then proposed that
it would be such a document. We must consider what was the horizon of
expectations at that time. In 1948 colonial rule was still legitimate as a
transitional state. The UN had translated the Mandates of the League of
Nations into the Trusteeship Council of the post-1945 period. Cassin’s
generation took both the reality of colonial rule and its eventual end for
granted. The Universal Declaration makes no mention of decolonization
as a human right, but its entire thrust was away from the arena of state
power and towards the associational life of civil society, within free states
and colonies alike.
When decolonization became an international question discussed at
the UN, it was complicated by the violence associated with its end. Time
and again, violent conflict led to atrocities which made the colonial pow-
ers appear to be black facing the white of the oppressed. The truth,
though, was otherwise. Non-violence was no longer on the agenda. Both
9 Interview with Bernard Kouchner, in Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui en France, 10 Dec. 2008.

sides in wars of decolonization committed crimes, and the end of the

period of decolonization was not at all the end of human rights abuses
within the newly independent states of the Third World. Cassin was com-
mitted to the democratic transfer of power in colonial settings, including
Algeria. His work on the Universal Declaration never consciously or
unconsciously served the purpose of extending colonial rule. It is impos-
sible therefore to accept the view of those who argue that its objectives
were the same as those of Jan Christiaan Smuts.10
It would be churlish to conclude a biography with a discussion of the

criticisms later historians have offered of his life and work. More useful
is to point to those institutions and practices which bear the marks of his
ideas, with all their limitations and their implications.
The first of these is the regionalization of human rights. Cassin’s role
in the European Court of Human Rights was essential in establishing
the court’s authority and compatibility with national courts and judicial
traditions. That achievement has been repeated in two other cases. There
are regional courts of human rights in Latin America and in Africa,
which, while not being identical to the Strasbourg court, have fortified
the view that the United Nations is but one site of contestation in a global
human rights environment. In addition, the UN itself has mandated an
International Criminal Court to act when flagrant violations of human
rights have been committed, for example in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and
Uganda. This Court has a long way to go before being accepted by
many countries, including the great powers, but we should not dismiss
its existence or the implications of its work.
What links the workings of these regional courts and the ICC to
Cassin’s theoretical work is that they share a view that the absolute
sovereignty of the state is no longer an acceptable idea. The limitation
of the sovereignty of the state – both internally and externally – implies
that the state is not the sole source of law. There are laws higher than
those written down by state legislators. Above the law of states is a nor-
mative structure which makes the rule of law possible. Cassin called this
the general principles of law, and their formulation is imbedded in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document is not interna-
tional. It is universal. That is why it operates as a standard against which
to measure the way states behave in treating their own citizens or those
living in adjacent states.
10 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the
United Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009).
Conclusion 351
The normative character of the Universal Declaration is reflected in

the fact that its wording has been incorporated in scores of constitutions
of new states. Even when such states do not practise human rights, they
need to pretend to do so, at least in principle, and thereby, vice pays
tribute to virtue.
Is it possible to argue then, that the existence of the Universal Dec-
laration is meaningless, a document full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing? The answer to this question must be no. For Cassin the Univer-
sal Declaration was a document for instructing the young. He believed
that education was the most powerful vector in advancing the cause of
human rights. He worked to develop the teaching of human rights in the
Institute he founded in Strasbourg as well as in universities and schools
in France and abroad. His vision was that of the long term.
Nevertheless, we must point out the incompleteness of the theoretical
premises on which the Universal Declaration rests. In many ways, its
foundational arguments are incomplete. They do not recognize in any
meaningful way the power of the state to command the loyalty and com-
mitment of individuals and groups. To belong to a nation state is a matter
of pride, a premise of political existence, and the seal of an individual’s
identity. Cassin believed that people without citizenship had rights in the
countries in which they lived. Having a passport was not the sole measure
of one’s access to rights. The Universal Declaration meant what it said:
these rights apply to everyone.
And yet his turn away from the nation state went too far. It is indeed
paradoxical that men who bled for their country, like Cassin, failed to
give adequate space to the love of nations and the mobilizing power of
national claims evident in France as in many other countries. The fact
that Cassin underestimated the positive facet of the life of a state or of
those who have aspirations to forming one may help us understand his
blindness to the case for a Palestinian state. The misperception of Cassin
was to see Palestinians in 1948 solely as victims of war and not as one
national group, like Israelis in 1948, demanding recognition of its right
to form a state. He went even further when he accepted the honour of
having his name given to an Israeli high school built on land seized after
the 1967 war. This asymmetry is hard to deny.
Cassin’s stand here raises a broader question. His solidarities were
those of a European of his generation. He expressed time and again his
admiration for the achievement of the founders of the state of Israel. He
could never dissociate himself publicly either from the state of Israel or
from the French Republic. He identified with the aspirations of both.
Furthermore, he had a high respect for the institutions of the state he
served, and it was extremely difficult for him to break publicly with his
own government. He did so on rare occasions, as in his dispute with de
Gaulle after his November 1967 press conference, but it was after he
had retired from the Conseil d’Etat. We need to recognize that, under
his leadership, the Conseil d’Etat never condemned French violations of
human rights during the Algerian war. This body, however, was a collec-
tive, and probably Cassin would have been unable to take the majority
of the Conseil d’Etat with him in proposing such a condemnation.
There is another element we need to consider to explain these sur-
prising lapses in his record in the defence of human rights: Cassin’s
personality. As we have seen, he was a kind and generous person. But he
was a man of compromise, a man unable to say ‘no’, as his wife Simone
told him. He had profound respect for the great institutions in which he
lived his life, and this is possibly one source of his vanity. He was not at
all impervious to institutional honours, of which he had many. To stand
out on matters of principle was not always his way of doing things. He
preferred working behind the scenes more than in front of them. The
older he got, the more amour propre he inevitably accrued. He was a man
of his generation, both a remarkable and a simple man, but neither a hero
nor a saint.
His vision was both clear and limited. One of the developments Cassin
could not have foreseen was the braiding together of humanitarian rights
and human rights in the generation since his death. In his time, human-
itarian law described the laws of war. That meant not only limits on the
use of violence by soldiers, but also the necessity of recognizing the rights
of bystanders and other victims of war – orphans, widows, the wounded,
the men and women with whom he had worked all his life. Human rights
were then the laws of peace, and had a particular pacifist thrust to them.
He and others alongside him provided a foundation for today’s human
rights movement, but his vision of pacifism has faded from the discourse
of those who have taken up the cause of human rights in recent years.
Partly, this is because of the substantial overlap between humanitarian
work and human rights work today.
In his time, Cassin began his career in the defence of the rights of
disabled veterans. Long before the Nazis came to power, he helped con-
figure a human rights movement as a way of containing the power of
the Leviathan state. By surveying the life of Cassin, we can appreciate
the error of seeing the human rights movement as having a foundational
moment only after the Second World War, or after 1970, or indeed after
1989. Through traversing his life, we have shown how important the First
World War was in framing a very long story about the balance between
Conclusion 353
human dignity and state sovereignty. That balance has yet to be achieved,
but we would do well to reflect on the way one French jurist spent his
life in search of it. He was a pioneer, and not a prophet. Pioneers, after
all, provide a place from which to move on.
An essay on sources
Sources and archives

The life and work of René Cassin are so rich that it is impossible to
construct a list of all the sources pertinent to his sixty years of public
work in France and in the world at large. We will limit this bibliographical
survey to a short guide to the primary sources we used by theme.
The starting point must be the Cassin papers in the National Archives
in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. This collection, 382AP, was formed in two
stages. During Cassin’s lifetime, 169 boxes were deposited. Ten years
later, Mme Ghislaine Cassin deposited sixty-one boxes in a supplemen-
tary donation, including numerous photographs. The backbone of this
biography was built out of this extraordinary collection.
On Cassin’s early years, he himself penned a text in 1972 entitled
‘A note on the Cassin family’. This may be found among other impor-
tant documents in 382AP198 and 167. Family letters are found in
382AP158, and other important sources on the family may be found in
382AP171, 189, 186 and 203. A fine collection of photographs is located
in 382AP229–35. For a history of the family in the Second World War,
the essential records are in AJ38, the archive of the Commissariat pour
les Questions Juives, in particular in files on Aryanization 4235, dossiers
3550–7, 4237, 3640–3, and those on the provisional administrators, 5457
and 5458. The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish people in
Jerusalem, BSM 8254, hold the papers of the spoliation office of the
Fonds Social Juif Unifié. Finally the efforts of Cassin to find out what
happened to members of his family during the war can be traced in
382AP173–5 and 178–9.
On Cassin in the Great War, his period at the front, his convales-
cence thereafter, and his work for the nascent veterans’ movement, see
382AP1, 10 and 11. The regimental records of the 311th Infantry Reg-
iment are located in the Service Historique de la Défense à Vincennes,
in file 26N747/1. These records are consultable on the internet on the
354
site ‘Mémoire des hommes’. On the veterans’ movement, the Union

Fédérale’s central office is the site of a remarkable collection of its annual
conferences and varied publications. Further documentation may be
found in the fonds Pichot in the National Archives, 43AS3, and on
reconstruction from 1944 onwards in 382AP117. The transcripts of the
executive of the National Commission for Disabled Veterans are held
at Fontainebleau under the reference: CAC, 20050206, cartons 6–28.
In addition, the library of the CAC has a full collection of the printed
transcripts of the Conseil, and the library of the Centre for Contempo-
rary Archives at Fontainebleau holds a collection of articles concerning
the Conseil Supérieur des Pupilles and the Bulletin officiel of the two
Commissions, followed by the records of the unified commission.
On Cassin’s life in the inter-war years, the starting point in the Cassin
papers is 382AP12–16 and 212–15. The ‘testament’ he wrote on the eve
of his operation in 1936 is found in 382AP1. Cassin’s personal files as
professor in the Law Faculty in Lille are in the Departmental Archives,
AD du Nord, 2T194; his file as professor in the Law Faculty in Paris is
in the National Archives, AJ16/5910.
On his international work before 1940, the most important sources
are in Geneva. In the archives of the ILO, in Series 7/4/1–9, there are
the files on international veterans’ meetings. There are other important
letters in the files of Albert Thomas and his staff. The archives of the
League of Nations, classified by year and subject, contain the transcripts
and records of the diverse commissions on which Cassin sat. In addition,
there is a separate record of his work for the Ciraolo project on natural
disasters, as well as the private papers of Paul Mantoux and Nikolas
Politis.
The Cassin papers are very rich for the Second World War. Cassin’s
diaries and notebooks are held in 382AP27; the papers on Free France, in
382AP27–35; other records, including those of his broadcasts and mul-
tiple activities in London, are in 382AP36–42 and 49–50. The essential
documents on 1941–4 are found in 382AP52–73, the last of which cover
Algiers, the Provisional Consultative Assembly (ACP), and the tran-
sition to Republican legality. The debates in the ACP are easily accessed
in a CD-rom of Le journal officiel de la France au combat avec le Général
de Gaulle. The Legislative Commission’s records are found in C 15269
94001/682–696 in Fontainebleau. On post-war planning, aside from the
files in the Cassin papers 382AP68–9, the Cassin-Gros papers in the
archives of the Foreign Ministry in La Courneuve are important. The
relevant documents are in carton 27, files 25–27. The de Gaulle papers
in the National Archives provide other important documents, notably
in 3/AG1/151, 252, 253, 272, 276, and telegrams sent and received in
3AG1/234, 239, 244.
In the National Archives at Fontainebleau, there are documents on
the ACP in C 15260 94001/507, and on the Conseil d’Etat in CAC,
20040382/65.
The archives of the Comité Juridique are conserved in the Conseil
d’Etat. They have been reclassified recently. There are forty-two boxes,
9938/1–42. The most interesting material was in boxes 1, 2, 10 and 42.
Boxes 10–42 preserve in chronological order the texts examined and the
opinions rendered by the Conseil d’Etat. Other documents may be found
in the Cassin papers in 382AP71–2. The registers of submissions to the
Conseil d’Etat are held in their archive, but the transcripts of General
Assemblies starting in 1946 are in Fontainebleau, in CAC, 19990026/1ff.
The reports of different sections of the Conseil have been published since
1947 in Etudes et documents du Conseil d’Etat.
The executive committee records of ENA may be found in
Fontainebleau at 19900256/1–4. Many facets of Cassin’s work in this
field may be found in the Cassin papers, 382AP99–102, and his cor-
respondence, in alphabetical order, is in boxes 105–111. Boxes 103–4
cover his period in the Consultative Constitutional Committee and the
preparation of the Constitution of 1958, which complement the three
volumes published on the preparatory work establishing the Constitu-
tion of the Fifth Republic, Documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’élaboration
de la Constitution du 4 octobre 1958 (La Documentation Française, 1987,
1988 et 1991).
The essential archives for the study of Cassin’s work as a Jewish leader
may be found in the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris and in the
archives of André Chouraqui, held by Mme Chouraqui in Jerusalem.
The archives of the AIU contain letters and other materials on all of
Cassin’s activities from 1945 until his death in 1976. The correspondence
is located in AM Présidence 001–30 and in the transcripts of Central
Committee meetings.
On his work for UNESCO and the UN, the National Archives in
Paris hold essential materials, in the Cassin papers, 382AP126–35. The
UNESCO archives are held on site in Paris. Materials on the Interna-
tional Institute of Intellectual Cooperation are found there, under the
heading IICI, and for the inter-Allied conferences of Ministers of Edu-
cation, under the heading CAME. The records of the preparatory com-
mission of UNESCO are located under COM.PREP.
On the UN, there are online collections of essential documents, includ-
ing those of the Human Rights Commission and the preparation of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in particular the series
E/CM4/SR1–22. Series A contains the documents of the General Assem-

bly. Additional material may be found in Geneva on the workings of the
Human Rights Commission under Cassin’s chairmanship and after. On
the attitude of the French Foreign Ministry to UN matters, see their
archives in La Courneuve, in particular the series NUOI, boxes 380–2.
On the European Court of Human Rights, there are important doc-
uments in 382AP137, 189, 192–3 and 205–8. Box 139 concerns the
International Institute for Human Rights in Strasbourg. In the Institute
itself, there are unclassified materials on the first years of its work. Its
library incorporates many of Cassin’s books, and the rest of his personal
library is stored in its basement. Finally, the library and archives of the
Nobel Institute in Oslo contain important documents as well as many of
Cassin’s obscure publications.
Bibliography
Since Cassin’s career spanned seventy years of the history of France,
Europe and the world, it is possible to provide only a general guide to
published works on various aspects of his life. Unless otherwise indicated,
the place of publication is Paris.
Cassin himself published a number of books on his life. The most
important is Les hommes partis de rien. Le réveil de la France abattue, 1940–
41 (Plon, 1975) and a collection of articles and an ‘autobiographical
fragment’ in La pensée et l’action (F. Lalou, 1972). There are interesting
documents, including his letters to his sister Félice, in Marceau Long
and François Monnier (eds.), René Cassin, 1887–1976. Une pensée ouverte
sur le monde moderne: hommage au prix Nobel de la paix 1968 (Honoré
Champion, 2001), which arose out of a conference organized by the
Association René-Cassin and the Collège de France, on 22 October
1998.
There are two biographies of Cassin. The first is by Marc Agi, who
had the benefit of long interviews with Cassin: René Cassin, prix Nobel de
la paix, 1887–1976, père de la ‘Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme’
(Perrin, 1998). Marc Agi’s doctoral dissertation was on the subject of
René Cassin’s ideas. The second was written by one of his collaborators
in the AIU, Gérard Israël, René Cassin: 1887–1976, la guerre hors-la-
loi. Avec de Gaulle. Les droits de l’homme (Desclée de Brouwer, 1990).
Finally, a book of memoirs by another colleague in the AIU, André
Chouraqui, L’amour fort comme la mort. Une autobiographie (R. Laffont,
1990), provides interesting insights into Cassin’s work in the last decades
of his life.
Aside from the publication of the conference of the Collège de France,

there are other publications of memoirs and studies about Cassin. Among
them are: 1887–1987, centenaire de la naissance de René Cassin, Actes
du colloque de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris, 11 octobre 1987;
‘Les droits de l’homme: tradition et devenir’ (Les Nouveaux Cahiers, 92,
1988); Comité d’Histoire de l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration, René
Cassin et l’Ecole nationale d’administration (La Documentation Française,
2004); Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, De
la France libre aux droits de l’homme. L’héritage de René Cassin (La Docu-
mentation Française, 2009); Marceau Long and François Monnier, Ami-
corum discipulorumque liber; vol. 1, Problèmes de protection internationale des
droits de l’homme; vol. 2 by Jean Graven, Le difficile progrès du règne de
la justice et de la paix internationales par le droit, des origines à la Société
des nations; vol. 3, Protection des droits de l’homme dans les rapports entre
personnes privées; vol. 4, Méthodologie des droits de l’homme (Pédone, 1969,
1970, 1971 and 1972).
The organizations and institutions in which Cassin worked have been
unevenly covered in recent historiography. French veterans in the Great
War and in the inter-war years are covered in Antoine Prost, Les anciens
combattants et la société française, 1914–1939 (3 vols., Presses de la FNSP,
1977), and on the wards of the state in Olivier Faron, Les enfants du deuil,
orphelins et pupilles de la nation de la première guerre mondiale (1914–1941)
(Editions de la Découverte and Syros, 2001). On Cassin’s time in the
Conseil d’Etat, there is less, but for a beginning consult: Le Conseil d’Etat,
livre jubilaire publié pour commémorer son cent cinquantième anniversaire, 4
nivose an VIII – 24 décembre 1949 (Recueil Sirey, 1952); ‘Deuxième cen-
tenaire du Conseil d’Etat’, Journée d’Etudes, 14 Nov. 1997; ‘Le Conseil
d’Etat et les crises’, La Revue Administrative (PUF, 2001).
We are more fortunate when we turn to international relations and
the League of Nations. We have Zara Steiner’s essential book, The Lights
that Failed. European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford University
Press, 2005), and Pierre Milza, Les relations internationales de 1918 à 1939
(A. Colin, 2008). Valuable insights may be found in the thesis of Maurice
Vaı̈sse, Sécurité d’abord. La politique française en matière de désarmement, 9
décembre 1930–17 avril 1934 (Pedone, 1981) and in the proceedings of
a conference organized by Vaı̈sse, Le pacifisme en Europe des années 1920
aux années 1950 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1993), alongside Norman Ingram,
The Politics of Dissent. Pacifism in France 1919–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991).
The historical literature on the defeat of 1940, on Free France,
the Resistance, and related themes is mountainous. The indispens-
able starting point is the works of Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, in
particular his two volumes on Les Français de l’an 40 (2 vols., Gallimard,

1990), La France libre. De l’appel du 18 juin à la Libération (Gallimard,
1996), and his biography, Georges Boris, trente ans d’influence. Blum, de
Gaulle, Mendès France (Gallimard, 2010). Important publications in this
field include Jean-Pierre Azéma, 1940, l’année noire (Seuil, 2010), Jean-
François Muracciole, Les Français libres. L’autre résistance (Tallandier,
2009) and Julian Jackson, La France sous l’occupation, 1940–1944 (Flam-
marion, 2010).
Two volumes published for the centenary and the 150th anniversary
of the Alliance Israélite Universelle are of great value: André Chouraqui,
L’Alliance Israélite Universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine, 1860–
1960. Cent ans d’histoire (PUF, 1965), and L’histoire de l’Alliance Israélite
Universelle. De 1860 à nos jours, ed. André Kaspi (A. Colin, 2010).
Michael Laskier published a useful book on the AIU in Morocco, The
‘Alliance Israélite Universelle’ and the Jewish Communities of Morocco, 1862–
1962 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983). This should be read together with
André Chouraqui, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord entre l’Orient et l’Occident
(Presses de la FNSP, 1965). On the history of French Judaism dur-
ing and after the war, there are these: André Kaspi, Les Juifs pen-
dant l’Occupation (Seuil, 1997), Muriel Pichon, Les Français juifs, 1914–
1950. Récit d’un désenchantement (Toulouse Presses du Mirail, 2009),
and Catherine Nicault, La France et le sionisme. Une rencontre manquée?
1897–1948 (Calmann-Lévy, 1992).
On the history of the UN and the Human Rights Commission, the
list of publications is huge. A useful place to start is Georges-Henri
Soutou, La France et la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme du 10
décembre 1948 (Editions du Diplomate, 2008), followed by Eric Pateyron,
Contribution française à la rédaction de la Déclaration universelle des droits
de l’homme. René Cassin et la Commission consultative des droits de l’homme
(La Documentation Française, 1998). On Henri Laugier, see Chantal
Morelle and Pierre Jakob, Henri Laugier. Un esprit sans frontières (Brussels:
Bruylant, 1997) and Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac and Jean-François
Picard (eds.), Henri Laugier en son siècle (CHRS Editions, 1995).
On Cassin’s work and colleagues in the UN and its Human Rights
Commission, we have the following: Habib C. Malik (ed.), Challenge
of Human Rights. Charles Malik and the Universal Declaration (Oxford:
Charles Malik Foundation, 2000); Clinton Timothy Curle, Humanité.
John Humphrey’s Alternative Account of Human Rights (University of
Toronto Press, 2007); Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor
Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York:
Random House, 2001). Humphrey’s diaries have been published by
A. J. Hobbins (ed.), On the Edge of Greatness. The Diaries of John
Humphrey, First Director of the United Nations Division of Human Rights

(Montreal: McGill University Libraries, 4 vols., 1994–8). Johannes
Morsink, Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Origins, Drafting, and
Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) fulfils the
promise of its title. Finally, even though he reaches a different conclusion
than we do, Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010) is essential reading.
On the European Convention on Human Rights, see Steven Greer,
The European Convention on Human Rights. Achievements, Problems and
Prospects (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Gérard Cohen-Jonathan
has organized several conferences published in Brussels by Bruylant on
international law; they are important contributions to an understanding
of Cassin’s work and legacies. See Gérard Cohen-Jonathan and Jean-
François Flauss, Droit international, droits de l’homme et juridictions inter-
nationales (2004); Gérard Cohen-Jonathan and Christophe Pettiti, La
réforme de la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme (2003) and Gérard
Cohen-Jonathan and Jacqueline Dutheil de la Rochère (eds.), Constitu-
tion européenne, démocratie et droits de l’homme (2003). On the emergence
of a global human rights movement after 1970, at the end of Cassin’s
life, see Moyn’s work, cited above.
Index
Abadie, Jules, 168, 173, 232 Joint Distribution Committee and, 320,
Abram, Paul, 14 337
Abram, Raoul, 8, 17, 24 Lebanese schools, 310
Abram, Suzy, 6, 8, 17, 304 Moroccan schools, 310, 312, 313, 314,
Abyssinia (Ethiopia), 70, 78, 79, 80, 89 315, 322
Académie de Législation de Toulouse, 14 Ittiahad-Maroc, 327
Académie des Sciences Morales et Palestinian schools, 310, 322
Politiques, 293 Persian schools, 310, 312, 315, 322
Cassin elected to, 204 provisional executive committee (1944),
Académie Française, 214 311
Action Française, 308 Syrian schools, 310, 325
Addis Ababa, 89 theft of library during war, 312
Africa, 97, 151 Tunisian schools, 314, 315
Aix-en-Provence, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, under Vichy, 303, 310, 311
24, 26, 28, 34, 93, 207 and Zionism, 316, 323
Institut d’Etudes Politiques, 207 Allied landing in North Africa (1942), 181
Albertville-Moutiers, constituency in Allied war aims, in Second World War,
Savoie, 74 110, 145, 146, 227
Aleppo, 138 Alpes Maritimes, 74
Algeria, 113, 180, 191, 275, 276, 277, Alsace, 3
282, 289, 293, 309, 327, 350 American Dilemma, 253
emigration of Jews from, to France and American Institute for International Law,
Israel, 327 226
state of emergency in (1955), 275 International Declaration of the Rights
Algiers, 16, 149, 168, 170, 172, 173, 178, of Man, drafted by, 226
181, 199, 231, 272, 274, 276, 294, American Law Institute, 240
311, 345 American Legion, 62
Alliance Française, 310 Amiaud, André, 15
Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), 207, Amputés de France, 215
213, 239, 259, 300, 315, 316, 318, Anglo-Jewish Association, 316
319, 322, 327, 331, 336, 337, 339 Anglo-Polish accords, 111
Cassin’s presidency of, 302, 309, 310, Antibes, 19, 22, 73, 74, 142, 205, 213, 305
311, 312, 320 anti-colonialism, 277
centenary of, 326, 346 Antilles, 179, 180
celebrated by France, 326, 334 anti-Semitism, 9, 12, 46, 97, 109, 118,
claims conference and, 319, 321 170, 189, 301, 302, 317, 343
committee for external affairs, 317 among French veterans, 96
Documentation Centre, 317, 320 in Free France, 118, 308
emancipation through education, as in Germany, 97
mission of, 319, 335, 346 in Italy, 97
and human rights, 318, 320, 321, 338 rejection of, by de Gaulle, 119, 308, 332
Israeli schools, 324, 339 Vichy laws, 303, 305
361
362 Index
Antoine, Aristide, 119, 121, 128 Bernheim, Franz, 77, 221

apartheid, xvii League’s decision on his case, 77, 343
appeasement, 94, 96, 112, 121 Berthoz, Hélène, 212, 213
ARAC (Association Républicaine des Beveridge, William, 143
Anciens Combattants), 52 and new welfare system, 143
arbitration, 63, 86 Report (1942), 144
Cassin and Rossmann report on, for Biarritz, 7, 305, 306, 307
CIAMAC, 63 Black Sea, 328
Cassin work at League of Nations on, 67 Blitz (London), 64, 109, 110, 128, 129,
Arendt, Hannah, 338 130, 131, 141, 142, 152, 214, 339
Argentia Naval Base, 145 Buckingham Palace hit, 141
Argonne, 20 Earl’s Court hit, 130
Armistice of 16 June 1940, illegitimacy of Natural History Museum hit, 130
Vichy legislation after, 181 Simone Cassin leaves London during,
Aron, Raymond, 105 142
Aryanization of property of Cassin family, Victoria & Albert Museum hit, 141
306 Bloch, Albert, 10
Assemblée Nationale, 293 Bloch, Marc, 280, 301, 302
Association Génerale des Mutilés de Bloch-Laı̂né, François, 281
Guerre (AGMG) 29 Blum, Léon, 92, 232, 233
Association pour la Fidelité à la Pensée de B’nai Brith, 338
René Cassin, 212 Boislambert, Claude Hettier de, 116, 120
Atlantic Charter (1941), 134, 135, 145 Boisson, Pierre, 121
Augusta, USS, 145 Bolshevik revolution, 52
Auschwitz, xx Bon Marché department store, 20
deportation of members of the Cassin Bordeaux, 103, 104, 105, 181
family to, 304 Hôtel Normandie, 104
Austria, 57, 88, 97 Borel, Emile, 229
Avignon, 34 Boris, Georges, 236
Borrell, Antoine, 75
Baghdad, 138 Bosphorus, 328
Baltic region, 214, 328 Bouffandeau, Tony, 198, 199
Barbusse, Henri, 52 Bourdeau de Fontenay, Henri, 281
Barel affair, 286 Bourgeois, Léon, 65
Bartin, Prof. Etienne Adolphe, 202 Boyd Orr, John, 260
Basel, 15 Braunschvig, Jules, 312, 313, 321
Basque country, 97 aliyah of, 326
Bayonne, 3, 6, 7, 8, 103, 104, 212, 304, as prisoner of war, 312
305, 306, 307 Brazzaville, 120, 124, 138
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), Declaration of, 125
131, 206, 208, 303, 309 Breton, André, 230
radio broadcasts of Cassin, 127, 309, Briand, Aristide, 51, 58, 73, 76, 82, 87
342 Kellogg-Briand Pact, 52, 71, 87, 221
Beirut, Israel raid on, in 1973, 332 Bridport (Dorset), 142
Belgium, 144, 258, 349 Brighton, 152
Belgrade, 34, 90 Britain, 79, 104, 109, 136, 144, 146, 327,
Ben Gurion, David, 335, 337 330, 349
Beneš, Eduard, xix, 51, 71, 92, 106, 127, Cassin’s pre-1940 contacts in, 126
128, 143, 228, 230, 237, 250 failure to impose embargo on Italy,
Bérard, Léon, 32, 40 89
Berchtesgaden, 16, 78 foreign policy of in 1930s, 79
Berlin, 62, 96 and Suez war, 327
Berlin Military Academy, 176 British Legion, 55, 58, 62, 102, 110
blockade of (1948), 237 British Museum, 131
RAF bombing of, 129 Brosset, Gen. Diégo, 128
Index 363
Brousmiche, Paul, 59, 62, 65, 78 Chauvoncourt, 21

Bru, Ghislaine (see also Mareschal, CDC (Caisse Nationale des Dépôts et
Ghislaine and Cassin, Ghislaine), Consignations), 190
205, 210, 211, 212, 213 Cecil of Chalwood, Lord Robert, 64, 71,
Brüg law (1958), 307 90, 91, 126, 260
Brussels, 55, 143 CFLN (Comité Français de la Libération
Brussels Conseil de guerre, 257 Nationale), see Free France
Buchenwald, 232 CGQJ (Commissariat Général aux
Bulgaria, 63 Questions Juives), 190, 196, 306
Bullitt, William, 152 CGT (Confédération Générale du
Bumsel, Henri, 8, 303 Travail), 65
Bunche, Ralph, 260 Chad, 117, 120
Butler, R. A. B., 231, 233 CHAE (Centre des Hautes Etudes
Administratives), 280
Cahen, Emile, 8, 303 Chamber of Commerce, Roman, 4
Cahiers de l’UF, 46, 89, 94, 206 Chamberlain, Neville, 92
Caillaux, Joseph, 48 Chambéry, 75
Cairo, 139, 152 Chang, P.-C., 237, 243, 248
Callarec, Jeanne, 215 Chapsal, Jacques, 281
Camberley, 118 Châtelet, Albert, 45
Cambridge, 141 Chatenet, Pierre, 281
Cameroons, 120, 277 chemical warfare, Cassin’s work for League
Canada, 122 of Nations on, 76
Canal, André, 269 Chéron, Henry, 32
Canal case, 269 Chais Olympia, 7
Capitant, Henri , 228 Chiang Kai-Shek, 102
Carnegie Endowment for International China, 97, 102, 117, 237, 243
Peace, 223 Chirac, Jacques, 342
Casablanca, 313, 314, 319 Chouraqui, André, 213, 313, 321
Cassin et Cie Meubles, 5 aliyah of, 326
Cassin family Churchill, Winston, 101, 111, 112, 113,
Abraham, 5 115, 120, 121, 122, 129, 134, 138,
Azaria (Henri), 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 17 139, 144, 145, 146, 148, 254, 345
Benjamin, 5 Iron-Curtain speech, 242
Fédia, 7, 8, 10, 11, 93, 100, 101, 212, Churchill–de Gaulle Accords (1940), 112,
303, 304, 305, 338 113, 114, 115
Félice, 7, 8, 9, 24, 212, 213, 263, 303 absence of assurances on restoration of
Ghislaine (Mme René Cassin), 339, French empire in, 114, 116
342, 344 British accepted financial responsibility
Josette, 6, 17, 100, 263, 340 for Free France, under, 114
Léontine, 5 Churchill promise to restore
Maurice, 5 independence of France under, 114
Max, 10, 212, 303, 307 de Gaulle accepted Allied command in,
René, birth and childhood, 7, 9 114
on origins of, 4 discussions of in Downing Street, 6
Roberto, 4 Aug., 113
Simone (Mme René Cassin), 25, 44, 73, French navy under, 114
104, 105, 109, 110, 129, 131, 141, masked Free French weakness, 115
142, 151, 210, 216, 241, 339, 352 military command of Free France
Yvon 303 established under, 114
Yvonne, 3, 7, 221, 303, 304, 307, 346 CIAMAC (International Conference of
Cassin Frères, 6 Associations of Wounded Soldiers
CCJO (Consultative Committee of Jewish and War Veterans), 58, 59, 60, 61,
Organizations), 246, 321 62, 63, 74, 90, 95, 97, 215, 221,
Catroux, Gen. Georges 137, 139, 140 345, 347
364 Index
Cimieux, 7 centre of documentation and

Ciraolo, Giovanni, 68, 69 coordination, creation of, 271
Ciraolo project, 69 in exile in Algiers, 178
Ciudad Real, 303 litigation section, 268, 269, 270, 274
civil law and civil code, 13, 14, 45, 46 naming of Cassin as, 178, 179
French and German, 13 permanent commission, 269
civil law, private international, 44 purging of, after 1944, 265, 266
comparative, 44 vice-presidency of Cassin (1944–60),
contract, 13 178
fiscal, 45 Consistoire central israélite de France, 322
insurance, 17 Consistoire de Marseille, 338
Swiss, 13 constituent national assembly, 185, 186,
civil servants 187
dismissed by Vichy, 193 Constitution, French
Ministry of, 282 of 1875, 124, 184, 185
Claims conference (Conference on Jewish of 1958, 295, 298, 299
Material Claims), 319, 321, 337 Constitutional Council, 331
Cassin’s association with, 337 Constitutional Court, 298, 299, 300
Clemenceau, Georges, 16, 64 Consultative Constitutional Committee,
CNRS (National Centre for Scientific 296, 297
Research), 228 Cordier, Daniel, 118, 200
Cohen, Albert, 9, 80 Corsica, 182
Cold War, xvii, 237, 253 Cot, Pierre, 75, 91, 117
collaboration, collaborator, 109, 214 Coty, René, 298, 345
collective security, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 97, Council of Europe, 254
196 Cover, Robert, v
Collège de France, 287 Cranborne, Viscount Robert, 144
Comité des Forges, 56 Crémieu, Louis, 14
Commissariat for Information (1939–40), Crémieux Decree, 310
102, 103, 132 abolition and restoration during the
Commission on post-war problems, see Second World War, 310
Free France Crémieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis, 150, 151,
Committee of Public Safety (1958), 293 168
Comtat Venaissin, 4 Creuse, Department of, 312
communism (communists), 52, 64, 82 CRIF (Representative Committee of
Chinese communists seize power in Jewish Institutions), 337
1949, 237 Croix de Feu, 25
Comintern, 222 Croix de Guerre, 23, 54, 145
exclusion from ENA, 287 awarded to Cassin, 23
French Communist party, 182, 186 Crossfield, Col. G.-R., 61, 110
Third International, 64 Cuba, 242
compagnons de l’Université nouvelle, Les, 229 Cuneo, 4
Congo, 120, 137 Czechoslovakia, xix, 51, 92, 97, 144, 328
Conseil d’Etat, xxi, 12, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, Judicial Council, 228
42, 112, 136, 168, 170, 171, 172, Sudeten crisis (1938), 92
174, 175, 195, 197, 198, 199, 201,
202, 208, 211, 212, 236, 247, 265, Dakar, expedition (1941), 120, 121, 131
266, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, Daladier, Edouard, 92
274, 275, 276, 279, 281, 284, 285, Dalton, Hugh, 90
287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 293, 295, Damascus, 137, 139, 325
296, 297, 299, 305, 311, 320, 339, Dandurant, Raoul, 60
342, 345, 346, 347, 352 Danzig, 63
administrative section, 268, 269 Dardanelles, expedition (1915), 120
and the Algerian war, 352 d’Argenlieu, Georges Thierry, 126, 136,
Cassin’s retirement, 300 137, 170
Index 365
Darlan, Adm. François, 144, 180, Joint Temporary Commission on

181 armaments, 87
Das, Kamleshwar, 235 Dompcevrin, curé of, 216, 340
d’Astier de la Vigerie, Emmanuel, 170 benediction of while wounded in 1914,
Dawes Plan, 58 340
de Becker, Raymond, 257 Douaumont, Fort, 95
de Courcel, Geoffroi Chodron, 116 Dover, 129
de Gaulle, Charles, 106, 109, 110, 111, Drancy, 149
112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, Dresch, Jean, 286
123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 132, 134, Dresch affair, 286
135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, Dreyfus affair, xx, 9, 10, 208
146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 169, 170, Dreyfus family, 3, 8
172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 182, Alfred, 301 (see also Dreyfus affair)
189, 200, 214, 215, 217, 229, 236, Cécile, 3, 5, 6, 8, 306
252, 265, 266, 267, 269, 278, 279, Gabrielle, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12
281, 293, 294, 295, 296, 298, 299, secretly buried, 212, 304
308, 309, 310, 319, 327, 328, 336, Samuel, 3
344, 345 Simone Léonce, 8
daughter, Anne, 215 Drummond, Sir Eric, 60
dispute with Cassin over Israel in 1967, Ducamin, Bernard, 331
329, 330, 352 Ducellier, Docteur, 10
in Elysée Palace, 331 Dunham, Katherine, 251
foreign policy towards Israel, 327, 328, Dunkirk, Battle of, 104, 129
329
funeral at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, Eban, Abba, 329, 330, 332, 333
215, 325 Eboué, Félix, 120, 137, 204
press conference of 27 Nov. 1967, 329, Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes (New
330 York), 228
use of anti-Semitic stereotypes in, Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, 279
331 Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale, 313,
de Jouvenel, Henri, 51 314
de Kérillis, Henri, 93 Ecole Normale Supérieure, 287
de Larminat, Edgar, 118, 137 Ecole Polytechnique, 289, 290
de Madariaga, Salvador, 228 ECOSOC (Conseil Economique et
de Menthon, François, 173, 178, 181, Social), see UN
182, 183, 188, 190 Eden, Anthony, 64, 94, 110, 113, 128,
de Montfort, Henri, 214 138, 144, 146, 147
de Monzie, Anatole, 48 Education, Ministry of, 210
death penalty in absentia, of Cassin Edward VIII, 129
(1941), 101 Egypt, 132, 138
Debré, Michel, 35, 279, 280, 281, 286, Eilat, 327
287, 296 elections, municipal (1945), 187
decolonization, 274, 276, 278, 338, 349, Empire, French, 115
350 ENA (National School of Administration),
as human right, 274 201, 207, 213, 276, 278, 279, 281,
Cassin’s attitude to, 278 282, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291,
Dejean, Maurice, 119, 135, 143, 144 292, 314
Denmark, 227 difficulty of placing graduates, 283, 284,
Delahoche, Jacques, 215 285
Delbos, Yvon, 229 exclusion of communists from, 287
Delcroix, Carlo, 78, 95 internships, 281, 285, 286, 288
Dentz, Henri, 139 students to be sent to Algeria, 288
Deschamps, André, 297, 298 Escarra, Jean, 117, 118, 119, 135, 308
disarmament, 67, 70, 73, 76, 77, 86, 87, Esmein, Adhémar, 46
88 Ettrick, HMS, 105, 110
366 Index
Etudes et Documents du Conseil d’Etat, permanent contradiction between

271 foreign policy of and human rights,
European Convention on Human Rights 349
(1950), xviii, 254, 255, 256, 257, ‘The nation of human rights’, 302
258, 261, 343 and Convention on Human Rights, 251,
Commission on Human Rights, 254 343
European Court of Human Rights, xviii, Franco, Marcel, 313
xx, 207, 222, 254, 255, 256, 259, Free France, xx, 109, 111, 112, 113, 116,
263, 300, 343, 345, 348, 350 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123,
de Becker case (1962), 257, 259 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131,
language laws in Belgium, case on 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141,
(1968), 258, 259 143, 144, 149, 150, 151, 168, 169,
Lawless case (1960), 255, 258 170, 171, 175, 179, 181, 184, 189,
European Economic Community, 330 196, 200, 204, 208, 213, 214, 228,
European Union, xx 229, 230, 231, 236, 278, 295, 303,
exiles, in London, 110, 142 308, 309, 310, 312, 319, 320, 331,
L’Exode (1940), 103, 149 342, 345
Carlton Gardens Headquarters, 129,
faculties of law (see also universities) 135
Aix-en-Provence, 8 Central Overseas Bank, 137
Grenoble, 281 CFLN (French Committee for National
Hanoi, 102 Liberation), 168, 172, 174, 177,
Lille, 24, 45, 52, 65, 75, 205, 224 180, 181, 182, 183, 194, 236
Paris, 14, 17, 25, 46, 74, 75, 85, 103, civil registration services, 127
117, 132, 168, 178, 203, 222, 223, Comité Juridique (Juridical
302, 345 Commission), 168, 170, 172, 173,
Dean of, 103 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180,
fascism, 77 182, 183, 184, 188, 189, 190, 191,
German, 77 193, 194, 195, 197, 199, 239, 266,
Italian, 77 267, 268, 272, 274, 275, 346
Fédération des Mutilés du Tarn, 54 disciplinary commission of, 127
Felletin, 312 documentation centre, 121
Fez, 313 Council for the Defence of the Empire,
FIDAC (Fédération Interalliée des Anciens 116, 120, 125, 126, 128, 136, 140,
Combattants), 53, 61, 63, 74, 95 141, 150
Fidelio, 344 French National Committee (Comité
Finance, Ministry of, 36, 273 National Français), 134, 140, 150,
Fleg, Edmond, 322 151, 311
Fondation Nationale des Sciences Commission for Justice and Public
Politiques, 279, 281 Instruction, 134, 150:
Foreign Affairs, Ministry, of France (Quai Documentation and Research
d’Orsay), 102, 232, 236, 247, 252, Division, 158
281, 290, 316, 349 Provisional Consultative Assembly
opposition to right to individual petition, (ACP), 173, 174, 175, 176, 177,
252 178, 181, 184, 185, 186, 187, 192,
France, 345, 351 196, 197, 215, 279
and Convention on Human Rights, 251, commission on legislation and
343 litigation, 178
defeat of in 1940, 64 educational commissariat,
foreign policy of in 1930s, 79 232
hesitation about ratifying UN ridicule of Cassin as ‘Bécassin’,
Covenants, 223 118
imperial power of, 349 St Stephen’s House, offices in, 111
international position, as affected by the French Equatorial Africa, 118, 120, 123,
Algerian war, 278, 330 124, 137, 204
Index 367
French West Africa, 277 International Court of Justice, 72, 148,

Frontiers, Battle of the (1914), 54 208, 223, 241
Hague Academy of International Law, 45,
Gallipoli, 121, 243 52, 64, 223
Gaza Strip, 335 Cassin’s lectures at (1925), 224
general principles of law, 195, 198, 199, Haifa, 324
350 Haiti, 250
Geneva, 16, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, Halifax, Edgar Wood, Lord, 121, 176
61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, Halph, Rachel, 5
76, 77, 80, 83, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, Hammerskjold, Dag, 254
122, 146, 209, 221, 222, 223, 227, Hauriou, André, 176, 177, 187
228, 245, 246, 248, 253, 319, 333, Havas Agency, 179
345, 348 Hébrard de Villeneuve, Henry, 41
Hôtel de Bergues, 64 Hegel, Friedrich, Cassin on, 227
Institut des Hautes Etudes Helsinki Accords (1975), 334
Internationales de Genève, 223 Henderson, Arthur, 64
Institut du Droit Internationale, 64 Herbette, Col. 106
Geneva Protocol (1924), 70, 71, 87, Herriot, Edouard, 65, 75, 76, 87, 127,
222 229, 254
genocide, xvii, 149 Hessel, Stéphane, 236
invention of the term by Raphael heures de la guerre, Les, 99, 100
Lemkin, 149 Heydrich, Reinhard, 148
George VI, 144 High Court of Justice, 136
Germany, 53, 78, 79, 87, 94, 121, 175, Hitler, Adolf, xix, 76, 78, 80, 87, 92, 93,
186 94, 95, 97, 98, 104, 106, 121, 131,
leaves League of Nations, 249 146, 226, 250, 253, 316, 345
Gestapo, 149 Hodgson, Col. William, 243
Giraud, Gen. Henri, 168, 169, 170, 180, Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 296
181, 310 Hudson, Manley, 260
Giraudoux, Jean, 85, 102 Huisman, Georges, 105
La Guerre de Troyes n’aura pas lieu, 85 human rights (see also Universal
Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 341 Declaration of Human Rights), 110,
Glendon, Mary Anne, 236 128, 146, 147, 149, 199, 208, 230,
Goebbels, Joseph, 77, 147, 303 276, 278, 297, 334, 339, 343, 348,
Goethe, Wolfgang, Cassin’s views on, 227 352
Goldmann, Nahum, 319, 321, 337 Cassin as ‘soldier of human rights’, 344
Gomès, Félicie, 3 Cassin’s position on rights of Israelis and
Gouin, Félix, 184 Palestinians, 335
Goy, Jean, 95, 96, 98 Cassin’s work on, after 1948, 254, 335,
Grands arrêts de la jurisprudence 342
administrative, 293 right to emigrate, 335
Greece, 51 Cassin’s work on, between 1945 and
German invasion of, 1941 142 1948, 242, 245, 246
Grégoire, Abbé, 318 covenants (1966), 260
Grégoire, Roger, 281 development of ideas on, during the
Grenoble, 34 Second World War, 135, 146, 147,
Grey, Lord Edward, 53 149, 199, 230, 310
Gros, Louis, 213, 236 and the Algerian War, 274, 276, 278
Guéret, 304 and Jewish rights, 338
Human Rights Commission, see UN
habeas corpus, principle of, 195, 276 humanitarian rights, 68, 352
The Hague, 45, 148, 222, 223, 227, Humphrey, John, 234, 235, 236, 237, 240,
348 245, 246, 251, 253, 254, 263
Convention of 1907, 333 Director of Human Rights Division of
Convention of 1948, 254 UN, 253
368 Index
Hungary, 72, 148 internment centres, in Algeria, 274, 276,

Hunter College (New York), 241 278
Hurst, Sir Cecil, 148 of black marketeers in Algeria, 194
Hymans, Paul, 222 Invalides, Hôtel des, 29, 341, 342
Cassin’s coffin lying in state in, 342
Ici-Paris, 206, 213, 303, 328 IRA (Irish Republican Army), 256
Ihering, Rudolf von, 14 Iran (Persia), 326
Ihering Society, 15, 16, 17, 213, 232 Iraq, 138
ILO (International Labour Organization), Ireland, 255, 256
51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 65, 88, Detention Commission, 256
221, 227, 245, 246, 264 Isfahan, 315
nations attending meeting of disabled Israel, 325, 329, 333, 334, 338, 339, 351
veterans, in 1922, at, 57 attitude of de Gaulle to, 328, 329, 330,
nations attending meeting of disabled 331, 352
veterans, in 1923, at, 58 defence of, by Cassin in 1967, 328
prosthetic devices, discussion of, at, 57 defence of, by Cassin in 1973, 332
India, 348 embargo of arms, by France, 329
Indochina, 102 establishment of, 324, 335
inflation, German, 58 exchange between Cassin and David
Ingwiller, 11 Ben Gurion, 337
Institut de Droit Comparé (Paris) 228 French foreign policy towards, 327
Institut de France, 211, 214 immigration to, 326, 327
Académie des Sciences Morales et leaders of and Cassin, 326
Politiques, 309 Ministry of Education, 316, 324
Institut d’Etudes Politiques, 279 occupation of Palestinian territories,
Institut Français of London, 111, 130, 335, 336
151, 214 right to form a state, 351
Institut International de Droit Publique, Simone Cassin Forest, 339
228 war of 1967, 329
Institute of International Law (Geneva), 52 Italy, 55, 79
Inter-Allied Commission on War Crimes, Air Force, 4
147, 148, 173, 235, 236, 255 Army, 89
Cassin as delegate to, 148, 345
rejection of defence of obedience to Jacquinot, Louis, 296
superior orders, 148 Jaffa, 323
Inter-Allied Conference of Ministers of Jakobson, Roman, 228
Education, 172, 228, 231, 311 Japan, 52, 80, 87
International Conference of Jewish Jurists, Jaurès, Jean, 16, 17, 344
339 Jeanneney, Jean-Marcel, 205, 279, 280,
International Court of Justice (The 281
Hague), 148, 208 Jeanneney, Jules, 279
International Criminal Court, xvii, 350 Jerusalem, 211, 319, 324, 326, 334, 335
in The Hague, xvii Jewish Agency, 319, 321
on Rwanda, 350 Jews, American, increased influence after
on the former Yugoslavia, 350 the Second World War, 319, 337
on Uganda, 350 Jews and Judaism, French, 3, 4, 6, 10, 317,
International Disarmament Conference 336, 338, 344, 345
(1932–34), 76, 77, 222, 328 growing sense of hostility of French state
International Expo, Paris (1937), 91 towards, after 1967, 332
International Institute for Human Rights, human rights and Jewish rights, 317
207, 263, 351 in Free France, 116, 119
International Institute of Intellectual and Zionism, 322, 336, 337
Cooperation, 66, 67, 85, 231, 232 Joint Distribution Committee, 320
international law, 147, 149 Jouhaux, Léon, 51, 65, 260
internment without trial, 194, 195, 276 Journal des Mutilés et Réformés, 46, 206
Index 369
Journal Officiel de la France Libre, 126, 177, 226, 227, 228, 234, 240, 246, 248,
198 249, 253, 255, 257, 260, 303, 311,
Journal Officiel (Vichy), 182 319, 328, 345, 349
Juin, Alphonse, 325 arbitration, Cassin’s work on, 67, 68, 72,
Julliot de la Morandière, Léon, 205, 298 86
Jura, 304 associations in support of, 86
jury of honour (1945), for the examination Bernheim (Petition of 1933), 77, 226,
of claims for the restoration of 343
eligibility to hold public office by chemical warfare, Cassin’s work on, for,
politicians and others who 76
collaborated with Vichy, 197, 198 covenant of, 60, 71
Justice, Education, and Health, Ministry failure of sanctions in Ethiopian war, 89
of, under CFLN, 168, 173 French delegation to, 65, 83, 87
Justice, Minister of (Garde des Sceaux), Mandates, 349
41, 188, 189, 194, 265, 266, 267, societies, 71
269, 272, 273 Lebanon, 139, 140, 237, 243, 326,
333
Kahn, Louis, 312, 322 Leclerc, de Hauteclocque (Philippe), 118,
Kant, Emmanuel, Cassin on, 227 120, 137
Kaplan, Jacob, 330 legality, Republican, restoration of
Kelsen, Hans, 223 (1944–45) 149, 151, 180, 200, 266,
King, Martin Luther, 262 342
Koo, Wellington, 64 Legentilhomme, Paul, 170
Koyré, Alexandre, 228 Légion des Combattants Français, 196
Legion of Honour, 21, 145, 204, 311
La France continue, 214 Lehman, Marcel, 27, 29
Labour, Ministry of, 28, 47 Lemkin, Raphael, 149
Labour party (British), 90, 232 Léonce, Simone, 3
Lange, Christian Loos, 64, 260 won lottery of the Congo, 3
Lapie, Paul-Olivier, 113, 117 Lesimple, Mlle, 175, 204, 270
Larminat, General Edgar de, 120 Leven, Maurice, 322
Laroque, Pierre, 281 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 311, 313, 314
Laugier, Henri, 228, 231, 232, 233, 234, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 228
235, 236, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245, Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 104
251, 253, 264 Lévy-Ullmann, Henri, 228
Lauren, Paul Gordon, xviii Lidice, 148
Laurentie, Henri, 204 Lie, Trygve, 144, 233, 260, 323
Lauterpacht, Hersch, 148, 235, 249, 348 Lille, 25, 31, 44, 273
opposition to Universal Declaration, 249 Lin, Mousheng, 235
Laval, Pierre, 83, 112, 129 Chunking Dialogues, written by, 235
Lawless, Gerard, 255, 256 Lionaes, Aase, 261, 262
Le Cannet, 304 Little Entente, 106
Le Gorgeu, Victor, 282 Litvinov, Maxime, doctrine of, on
Le Gorgeu report, 286, 289 agression, 333
L’Humanité, 16 Loire, River, 104
Le Monde, 213, 295, 327 Loiret, 27
Le Sillon, 11 London (see also Blitz), xix, 34, 64, 100,
Le Soir (Brussels), 257 101, 106, 110, 116, 119, 121, 124,
Le Verdon, 105 125, 126, 129, 132, 135, 136, 137,
League of Nations, xix, xx, 51, 52, 53, 141, 145, 149, 150, 152, 168, 170,
57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 172, 173, 174, 176, 181, 206, 210,
68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217, 227, 228,
80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 229, 232, 233, 235, 241, 255, 260,
91, 92, 94, 97, 102, 110, 112, 126, 276, 294, 297, 303, 310, 311, 330,
143, 146, 176, 217, 221, 222, 224, 342, 345
370 Index
London (see also Blitz) (cont.) Médecins sans Frontières, 349

Cassin’s arrival in, in 1940, 64, 110 Meiss, Honel (Rabbi) 5, 10, 11, 17
Savoy Hotel, 129 Meiss, Léon, 322, 337
London International Assembly, 164 Meknès, 313
Long, Marceau, 200, 201 Mélamède, Bernard, 312
Loucheur, Louis, 51 Mendès France, Pierre, 252, 295
Lubliana, 34 Mers-el-Kebir, 112, 120
Luftwaffe, 130 Meuse, 20
Lycée Jules Braunschvig (Jerusalem), 324 Michaud, Madame (friend of Simone),
Lycée René Cassin (Jerusalem), 211, 324, 130
334 Middle East, 151
diplomatic dispute over, 334, 335 Milice (Vichy para-military police), 196
Lycée René Cassin (Tel Aviv), 334 Mikve-Israel, 323, 324, 339
Lyon, Georges, 45 minorities, rights of, 80, 241
Lyons, 6, 17, 26, 105, 279, 312 Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Boris, 228, 236
Lyttleton, Sir Oliver, 139 Mitterrand, François, 201, 341, 343, 344
Mollet, Guy, 276, 296
Ma Cassinette, 305 Monnet, Jean, 52
MacBride, Sean, 256 Montag, Albert, 103, 104, 212, 304
McNair, Sir Arnold, 255 Montoire, 121
Madagascar, 180 Montreal, 227, 228, 229, 234
Madrid, 212 moral witnesses to war, 53
Maginot, Gen. André, 32, 43 Morocco, 111, 180, 277, 313, 322, 338
Maisky, Ivan, 146 Jews of, 320, 321, 325, 326, 327, 337
Malik, Charles, 237, 243, 244, 248, 336 Cassin as trustee for, 325
chair of ECOSOC, 248 France as defender of, 325, 326
Malleterre, Gen. Gabriel, 29 Morsink, Johannes, 246, 247
Manchuria, Japanese invasion of (1931), Moulin, Jean, 204
52, 63, 80, 87, 90 Moyn, Samuel, xviii
Mandel, Maud, 337 Munich, 15, 93, 96
Mantoux, Paul, 64, 223 Munich Accords (1938), 51, 65, 92,
Mareschal, Ghislaine (see also Bru and 101, 148
Cassin, Mme), 334 Munich crisis, 92, 143, 345
Maringer, Jean, 42 Murray, Sir Gilbert, 66, 228
Maritain, Jacques, 228, 246 Muselier, Admiral Emile, 135, 136, 137,
Marlow (Bucks), 130, 131, 142 150, 308
Marne, Battle of the (1914), 20, 206 Mussolini, Benito, 78, 79, 80, 89, 90, 96
Cassin’s BBC broadcast on (1940), 21, Myrdal, Alma, 253
127, 142, 207, 342 Myrdal, Gunnar, 253
Marrakech, 313
Marseilles, 5, 6, 9, 17, 24, 34, 100, 273, Nancy, 41, 55, 99
304, 312, 338 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 327, 328
Marshall plan, 337 National Education, Ministry of, 48, 49,
Masaryk, Jean, 144 178
Massigli, Charles, 13, 15 national indignity, crime of (see also
Massigli, René, 15, 73 collaboration), 196, 197, 199
Massilia, 105, 106 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Cassin’s decision not to embark on, 106 Organization), 237, 277
Massot, Jean, 198, 274 Nazis (Nazi Germany), xix, 63, 80, 88, 89,
Massu, Gen. Jacques, 278 94, 124, 221, 233, 238, 248, 302,
Maurice, Sir Frederick, 55 303, 317, 320, 328, 338, 346, 352
Mauritius, 202 Netherlands, 349
Maxwell-Fife, David, 254 Neufchâteau, 22
Mayer, Daniel, 294, 295, 299 New Caledonia, 123, 137, 138
Mayer, Gaston, 12 New College, Oxford, 110, 126, 228
Index 371
New School for Social Research, 228 right of Palestinians to form a state,
New York, 226, 227, 241, 242, 243, 270, 351
319, 326, 336, 348 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),
Biltmore Hotel, 320 332
Waldorf Astoria Hotel, 320 Panama, 242
Newfoundland, 145 Panthéon, 204, 212, 216
Niboyet, Jean-Paul, 15 Cassin’s reburial in (1987), 341, 342,
Nice, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 17, 21, 34, 343, 344, 347
73, 205 Parant, Philippe, 201
Jewish ‘university’ in, 4, 5 Paris, 8, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20, 26, 31, 34, 44,
Lycée Masséna, 11 46, 51, 62, 63, 64, 69, 91, 102,
Nicolson, Harold, 126 103, 145, 178, 199, 201, 210, 228,
Nobel Peace Prize, xx, 45, 106, 151, 204, 241, 248, 259, 279, 291, 300, 305,
213, 221, 237, 259, 261, 263, 264, 306, 312, 314, 316, 319, 323, 326,
349 341, 345, 348
Cassin’s oration (1968), 262, 339 Cassin’s education in, 14
Noguès, Gen. Charles, 111 Champs-Elysées, 210
North Africa, 121, 136 International Expo (1937), 91
Norton, William, 144 passage of Universal Declaration in, 248
Norway, 144, 227 Peace Conference (1919), 64, 222, 223
notaries, and the Cassin family property riots of 6 February 1934, 92
during and after the Second World Parodi, Alexandre, 235, 236, 247
War 363, 306 Parti Radical, see Radical party
Nouveau, Etienne, 215 Parti Radical-socialiste, see Radical
Nouveaux Cahiers, 226 Socialist party
Nuñes, Rachel Egle, 3, 303 Paul-Boncour, Joseph, 51, 60, 72, 73, 76,
Nuremberg trials (1945–6), 238, 242, 254, 87, 88, 94
348 Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on (1941),
134, 145, 146
obligations, Cassin’s thesis on (1914) Pell, Herbert, 148
Law of, 45 pensions, veterans’, 26, 29, 31, 35
ONM (National Commission for Disabled Cassin’s, 102
Veterans), 28, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, Charter (1919), 27, 29
39, 43, 46, 48, 49, 213, 215 Ministry of, 26, 28, 35, 43
ONP (National Commission for Wards of tribunals, 28
the Nation), 27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, Pétain, Gen. Philippe, 106, 115, 121, 122,
37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 48, 49, 129, 138, 170, 181, 182, 197
50, 96, 215 Pflimlin, Pierre, 296
Orléans, 26, 98 Philip, André, 173
Oslo, xxi, 213, 221, 259, 260 Picard, Maurice, 16
Oubangui-Chari, 120 Pichot, Henri, 27, 31, 33, 41, 43, 53, 54,
Oxford, 130, 228 55, 58, 60, 61, 80, 82, 89, 94, 95,
96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 215
pacifism, 61, 82, 86, 94 Mme Pichot, 103
of Cassin’s vision of human rights, 352 Piéron, Henri, 229
of veterans’ movement, 61 Pinay, Antoine, 292
peace ballot, 90 Pineau, Georges, 82, 100
Palais Royal, 342 Placentia Bay, 145
Palestine (Palestinians), 138, 332, 338, Plaisant, Marcel, 15, 16, 51, 232
351 Plantey, Alain, 201, 202, 209
nationalism of, 329 Pleven, René, 117, 119, 120, 128, 135,
refugees, 328, 348 138, 143
Sabra refugee camp, Beirut, 336 Plymouth, 64, 110
Shatila refugee camp, Beirut, 336 Poitiers, 202
right of Jews to immigrate to, 323, 335 Poland, 55, 62, 144, 214
372 Index
Politis, Nikolas, xix, 51, 64, 71, 72, 88, Ribbentrop, H. von, 94
222, 223, 224, 228 Riom trials, 161
Popular Front, 91, 104, 117, 118, 203 Ripert, Prof. Georges, 46, 103
Porché, Alfred, 266 anti-Semitism of, 46
Portsmouth, 129 Minister of Public Instruction and Youth
Portugal, 137, 148, 349 under Vichy, 103
Prague, 63, 127 view that Poles were ‘mad’ to resist, 103
Privas, 216 Rivero, Jean, 202
Provisional Administrators, 306, 307 Rivollet, Georges, 98
Provisional Government of the French Rochet, Waldeck, 210
Republic (GPRF), 182, 196 Rodez, 16
Public Instruction, Ministry of, 36, 40, 46, Rogé, Gaston, 55, 58, 99
48 Rolin, Henri, 222, 223, 228, 255
Rome, 78, 97
Questiaux, Nicole, 201, 209 Roman Catholic Church, 338
Queuille, Henri, 32 Rommel, Gen. Erwin, 132, 138
Quisling, Vidkun, 144 and Afrika Korps, 132
Roncalli, Angelo Giuseppe (John XXIII),
Rabat, 313 338, 339
Rachel Cottage, 8, 103, 105, 304, 305, Roosevelt, Eleanor, 237, 240, 243, 244,
306, 307 251, 260, 320
Landribet farm, 304 working partnership with Cassin, 242,
René Cassin’s love of, 8 244, 245
Racine, Pierre, 200, 202, 281, 286 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 134, 145,
Radical party, 173, 301 148, 250
Radical Socialist party, 75, 91, 178 Rosenfeld, Suzanne (Montag), 103
Ramadier, Paul, 15, 16, 17, 213, 247, 248 Ross, Alf, 257
Rappard, William, 223 Rossmann, Erich, 60, 62, 95
Ravensbrück, 214 Rougier, Louis, 121
Rayonnement Français, 339 Royal Air Force, 129, 131
rearmament, 92 Royal Institute of International Affairs,
rectorates, 214 Chatham House, 126
Recueil Sirey, 24 Ruhr, 58
Red Cross, International Committee of, Rumania, 72
57, 58, 60, 69, 70 Rundstedt, Gen. Gerd von, 176
Italian Red Cross, 68 RUP (Rassemblement Universel pour la
refugees, 225 Paix), 91
Russian and Armenian, 225
Renoir, Jean, 85 Sadowa, Battle of, 83
La grande illusion, 85 Safed, 324
Renouvin, Pierre, 281, 287 Saint-André, Gérard de, 116
reparations, German, 321 St James’s Conferences (1941–42)
Republican legal order 1st (June 1941), 134, 144
Cassin’s defence of, 118 2nd (Sept. 1941), 134, 145, 146, 150,
re-establishment of, xx 250
Requiem, Jean Gilles, 344 3rd (Jan. 1942), 147, 148, 149
Resistance (French), 169, 177, 179, 181, Saint-Jean d’Acre, accord (1941), 139, 140
182, 184, 204, 214 St Laurent du Var, 5
Cassin, as part of, 233 Saint-Mihiel, 21, 81
Comité Général d’Etudes, 184 St Paul Foundation, 14
in French empire, 123 Sakhiet Side Youssef (Tunisia), 277
Revolution of 1789, 318, 338 Salpêtrière Hospital (Paris), 340
Revolution of 1848, 250 Salzburg, 15
Reynaud, Paul, 296 Mozarteum, 15
Rhineland, demilitarization of, 97 Samama, Private, 301
Index 373
Samson, Moı̈se, 4, 5 state sovereignty, xx, 52, 70, 77, 85, 176,
Samson, Ralph, 5 224, 225, 226, 238, 239, 248, 250,
Sangnier, Marc, 11 343
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 318 Cassin’s lectures on, to Hague Academy
‘Reflections on the Jewish Question’, of International Law, 343
318 critique of theory of absolute state
Saurat, Denis, 111, 151 sovereignty, xx, 52, 77, 88, 147,
Sautot, Henri, 137 221, 223, 247, 348, 350
Sauvy, Alfred, 236 and Leviathan states, 85, 221, 226, 317,
Savatier, Prof. René, 202 348, 352
Savoie, 74, 75 rejection of, in European Court of
Scelle, Georges, 85, 86, 223, 228, Human Rights, 257
232 Strang, Sir William, 113, 144
Schiller, Friedrich, Cassin’s view on, Strasbourg, xviii, 207, 254, 256, 258, 259,
227 263, 279, 343, 350, 351
Schmitt, Carl, 257 Stresemann, Gustav, 58, 76
Schneider, William, 229 Suez Canal, 89, 132
Scholem, Gershom, 338 Suez Canal Company, 153
School of France Overseas, 278 Supreme Court (US), v
Schumann, Reinhard, 56 surgery, Cassin’s
Schwelb, Egon, 228, 235 (1914), 23
Secret, Abbé Bernard, 62, 78 (1936), 81, 84, 91, 95, 202
Sedan, Battle of, 83 Sweden, 334
Ségalat, André, 281 Switzerland, 20
Senegal, 120 Syria, 121, 138, 139, 140, 147, 150, 326
Sérisé, Jean, 283 Franco-British expedition in (1941),
Service des œuvres françaises à l’Etranger 139
(SOFE), 312 Australian troops in, 139
Seydoux, Roger, 281
Sharett, Moshe, 324, 325, 326 Tabouri, Ruben, 313
Shoah, xix, xx, 145, 212, 260, 303, 305, Tangiers, 312
317, 319, 323, 335, 337, 338, 346, Teitgen, Pierre-Henri, 282
348 Tel Aviv, 323, 324, 330
effect on Cassin’s thinking, 301, 303 Temkin, Sefton D., 316
final solution, 145 ‘Testament’, of 1936, 81
and human rights, 317 theft of Jewish property under Vichy, 190,
reconstruction after, 319 305, 306, 307, 312
Yad Vashem, memorial for the Just bad faith, in acquisition of Jewish
among the Nations, Jerusalem, 337 property under Vichy’s laws, 192
Sicé, Adolphe, 137 of Cassin and the Cassin family, 203
Siegfried, André, 281 restitution of Cassin property, 191,
Sikorski, Gen. Wladislaw, 144, 147 307
Simon, Gen. Jean, 344 Thomas, Albert, 51, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60,
Simon, Sir John, 88 61, 82
Simon, Manfred, 213 Tiananmen Square, xvii
Singapore, 155 Tiberius, 324
Skaggerak, 328 Tiran, Straits of, 327
Soustelle, Jacques, 170 blockade of (1967), 328
South Africa, xvii Tissier, Pierre, 112, 117, 118, 124, 135,
Southampton, 129 170, 172, 174, 193, 266
Spaak, Paul-Henri, 143, 144, 228 suspected anti-Semitism of, 170
Spain, 303 Tixier, Adrien, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60,
Spears, Gen. Edward, 113, 129, 138, 140 61, 62, 63, 230
SS (Schutzstaffel), 149 award of Military Medal and Croix de
Stalin, Josef, 348 Guerre to, 54
374 Index
Togo, 277 Food and Agricultural Organization,

Tokyo, 138 260
international war crimes trials, General Assembly, 208, 240, 244, 248,
242 250, 259, 325
Toulon, 34 HRC (Human Rights Commission), xx,
Toulouse, 15, 176, 187 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239,
Tours, 55, 103, 104 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 248,
treaties 249, 251, 253, 254, 259, 260, 277,
Anglo-Czech, 111 318, 325, 336, 345, 349
Locarno, 52, 58, 87, 221 bringing Soviet Union into, 234
Versailles, 56, 70, 88, 243 Cassin as French delegate to, 277,
rejected by US Senate, 70 320
Washington (1922), 224 declaration of human rights, 241, 244,
Tribunal de Commerce (Paris), 5 245
Tricot, Bernard, 331 charge to work for the protection of
Trieste, 34 minorities, 241
Truman, Harry S., 348 effort to create office of Attorney
Tunisia, 10, 180, 277, 325, 326 General, 249, 321, 348
Turkey, 120, 136 Eleanor Roosevelt as chair of, 237,
240, 241, 242, 251
U Thant, 327 right to individual petition, 252
UF (Union Fédérale des Mutilés et inaugural conference, at San Francisco,
Anciens Combattants), 25, 26, 27, 232
29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, Security Council, 208, 235, 332
41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55, Trusteeship Council (Division),
57, 58, 59, 61, 65, 72, 74, 75, 77, 349
78, 80, 81, 82, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, UNESCO (United Nations Educational,
95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, Scientific and Cultural
212, 215, 216, 276, 278, 302, 303, Organization), 68, 70, 211, 232,
311, 341, 342, 345, 347 233, 234, 238, 246, 315
of Ardèche-Drome, 216 Hotel Majestic as headquarters of,
of Deux-Sèvres, 99 233
UFAC (Union Française des Associations inaugural meeting, London, 232
de Combattants), 215, 216 Paris as home of, 233
UGIF (Union Générale des Israélites de UNRRA (United Nations Relief and
France), 312 Rehabilitation Agency), 235
UIS (Union Internationale de Secours), Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
69, 70 (USSR), xvii, 88, 122, 134, 146,
UNC (Union Nationale des Combattants), 148, 233, 249, 252, 253, 328, 329,
26, 52, 58, 95, 98, 99 333, 347
Unified Office of War Victims and struggle for right of Jews to emigrate
Veterans, 49 from, 334, 335, 346
UN (United Nations Organization), 64, United States (USA), 88, 122, 144, 145,
146, 149, 206, 208, 221, 222, 230, 146, 249, 252, 329
232, 233, 236, 239, 240, 243, 249, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
251, 254, 259, 262, 264, 270, 277, (1948), xx, 52, 71, 145, 147, 151,
318, 322, 323, 327, 328, 345, 348, 221, 227, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240,
349, 350 242, 245, 247, 248, 249, 251, 254,
Charter, 147, 243, 249 258, 259, 261, 334, 335, 339, 343,
Covenants on Human Rights (1966), 345, 346, 348, 349, 350, 351
260 Cassin’s speech introducing, to UN,
Declaration (1942), 146 250
ECOSOC (Economic and Social Cold War environment of its passage,
Council), 232, 234, 236, 240, 241, 237, 253, 348
247, 252 collective paternity of, 237
Index 375
drafting of by HRC, through Secretariat pacifism of, 61

of UN, 244, 245, 247, 248 Reichsbund Allemand, 55, 56
Haitian source of title, 250 Zentralverbund (Austrian), 55
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man Viala, Léon, 62, 75, 95, 215
(1793), xviii, 318 Vichy regime (1940–44), 46, 101, 103,
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man 113, 120, 121, 123, 124, 131, 132,
and of the Citizen (1789), 180, 318, 136, 137, 138, 142, 144, 175, 180,
344, 346 181, 182, 183, 188, 190, 195, 197,
universities (see also faculties of law) 198, 214, 302, 310, 311, 312, 317,
Aix-en-Provence, 11 322, 332, 338, 345
Algiers, 231 combat of Free France against the
Chinese, 102 legitimacy of, 122
Geneva, 51, 60 control of French imperial possessions,
Hanoi, 102 134
McGill, 234 coup d’état as origin of, 122, 123
Montpellier, 11 diplomatic ties to US, 143
Paris, Sorbonne, 12, 14 fall of, 149
Uppsala, conference and declaration French fleet under, 113
(1962), 334 sentence of death in absentia, for Cassin
and de Gaulle, 141
Valence, 34 Veterans’ Legion of, 101
Valentin-Smith, Victor, 156 Vienna, 16, 62, 63
Valentino, Charles, 27 Viterbo, Judith, 4, 5
Valéry, Paul, 232
Valin, Martial, 170 Wallon, Henri, 287
Vansittart, Robert, 144 Wavell, Gen. Archibald, 138
Vatican, 339 war 1914–18, xix, 8, 18, 19, 52, 215,
recognition of Vichy, 122 345, 348
relations of Cassin with, 339 1939–45, xix, 5, 9, 19, 52, 68, 70, 85,
and UNESCO, 339 134, 145, 212, 215, 221, 239, 248,
and Vatican II, 339 253, 348
Vaucher, Paul, 231, 232 German conquest of Greece, 132
Verdun, 20, 95, 206 German conquest of Yugoslavia,
veterans of the Great War, 123, 132, 132
205, 207, 216, 226, 264, Narvik campaign, 112
305, 345 North African campaign, 132
Cassin as soldier of the Great War, passage of Universal Declaration, as
342 end of, 239
Cassin’s last memories of the Great War, Algerian war of independence, 113, 256,
340 274, 276, 278, 282
in leading positions in the Second World as civil war, 278
War, 114 insurrection (1958), 278, 289, 293,
Veterans’ Affairs, Ministry of, 35 295
veterans’ movement (see also UF), 19, 29, Ethiopian (Abyssinia), 70, 78, 79, 97
33, 35, 36, 48, 65, 67, 73, 86, 101, failure of embargo in, 89
103, 109, 116, 206, 215, 239, 342 and European empires, 134
CIP (International Permanent Finnish-Soviet (1940), 226
Committee), 95, 96 Manchurian (1931), 70
disabled, 25, 26, 30, 33, 43, 221, 239, Palestinian–Israeli (1948), 237, 348
264, 352 Sino-Japanese (1937), 91, 102, 134
Franco-German committee, 95, 96 Six-Days (1967), 335, 336
international, 51, 56, 59, 64, 226 attitude of de Gaulle to, 215
Italian, 78, 89, 91 Spanish Civil War, 89, 91, 97
NSKOV (Nationalsozialistische Yom Kippur (1973), 333
Kriegsopferversorgung), 95, 96 War, Ministry of, 29
376 Index
war crimes (see also Inter-Allied welfare state, 35

Commission on), 146, 147, 149, West Bank, 335
303, 309, 348 Wilhelm II, 146
Japanese, 148 Wilkinson, Ellen, 233
trans-national crimes, 149 Wilson, Woodrow, 67
trans-national jurisdiction, 149 WJC (World Jewish Congress), 319
trials, 146 women’s suffrage, in France after
war generation (of two World Wars), xix, Liberation, 185, 186, 187
xxi workmen’s compensation, 27
Cassin as representative of, xix, xxi World Zionist Organization, 319
war service, Cassin’s in 1914 , 19, 20, 21,
22, 61 Yugoslavia, xvii, 34, 90
Croix de Guerre, awarded to, German invasion of (1941), 132,
23 142
invalided out of the army, 23 Yzombard, Pauline (Simone), 11, 12, 17,
Military Medal, awarded to, 23 20, 21, 22, 23, 209, 301
wounds, 21, 22, 23
war victims, 82, 132, 345 Zagreb, 34
Palestinian refugees, as, 335 Zay, Jean, 105
Warsaw, 62, 71 Zimmern, Alfred Eckhard, 110, 126,
Washington, 117, 330 228
Weill, Eugène, 313, 325 Zionism, 10, 301, 321, 326, 335, 336
Weimar Republic, 54, 61 Diaspora Zionism, of Cassin, 326, 335

(Jay Winter, Antoine Prost) René Cassin and Human

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more information - www.cambridge.

j ay w i n t e r is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University.

This series showcases new scholarship exploring the backgrounds of

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost

Originally published in French as René Cassin by Fayard, 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2013

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN 978-1-107-03256-9 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

List of plates page ix

Part I In the shadow of the Great War

Part II The jurist of Free France

Part III The struggle for human rights

Between pages 194 and 195

18 In the French Delegation to the League of Nations, 1925 (Archives

38 Dancing in Mauritius after a jurists’ congress, c. 1968 (Archives

Writing a biography poses particular problems for historians. First, it

biography. By surveying his multiple posts and responsibilities, his story

archivists who guided our research, and especially to Caroline Piketty,

League. Thereafter, Cassin established his reputation as a major cham-

1944; thereafter he headed the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest admin-

ACP Provisional Consultative Assembly

FAO Food and Agricultural Organization of UNO

In the shadow of the Great War

The maiden name of René Cassin’s paternal grandmother, Judith

Azaria took the name Henri, as befitted a free-thinking up-to-date

6 Interview with Suzy Abram, 27 July 2011.

8 Interview with Josette Cassin, 12 Aug. 2011.

12 Interview with Suzy Abram, 28 July 2011.

14 382AP167, ‘Biographie’, c. 1955, p. 3.

17 382AP167, ‘Note sur les liens rattachant à l’Alsace’.

21 Interview with Suzy Cassin, 28 July 2011.

including honours from the Académie de Législation de Toulouse28 and

In this circle he found older scholars and younger like-minded men,

32 Juristes, p. 3. 33 Juristes, p. 4. 34 Juristes, p. 5.

become.’37 There too he got to know Plaisant on a deeper level, find-

career. He flourished later, first in Lyons and then as Cassin’s colleague

5 Journal des marches et opérations du 311e régiment d’infanterie, Service historique de la

these precautions, you would have rapidly succumbed to peritonitis’, he

I managed to avoid unconsciousness, despite my loss of blood, until one of the

8 Letter of Dr Allouch, 30 July 1959; handwritten draft of a reply, undated, by Cassin,

was very fortunate to have arrived so quickly at his destination. The

service. A system constructed in 1831 for a relatively small professional

professors remaining in the faculty. He therefore ‘asked to teach in the

Victims’ rights: a prelude to social security in France

21 Biography Conseil d’Etat, I, p. 5. See also ‘Fragments autobiographiques’, p. 200. The

Feu’, a right-wing group, was a meaningless exception, totally outside the

22 Prost, Les anciens combattants. 23 Biographie du CE, I, p. 3.

as their re-education and their placement, by providing state financial

with the exception of the opposition of two representatives of the Min-

45 Pichot, Congrès de Clermont-Ferrand, 4–6 June 1922, p. 23.

are the outcome of opportunistic combinations. We do not refuse them;

President of the UF, 1922–23

50 Congrès de Nancy, p. 156.

54 Congrès de Marseille, 1–3 April 1923, pp. 13–14.

The national commissions for disabled veterans and

There was, in effect, a profoundly original set of ideas in the policy

Autonomous and centralized commissions

Financial autonomy was not only a means of daily management and

A third commission for veterans was created in 1926, despite Cassin’s

of public assistance, but they were considered rather as responsible citi-

servants and representatives of charities to enlarge the representation of