Auguste Beernaert

Auguste Beernaert

Auguste Marie François Beernaert (born July 26, 1829 in Ostend , † October 6, 1912 in Lucerne ) was a Belgian lawyer and statesman. As a member of the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague and his commitment to solving international disputes, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1909 together with the French Paul Henri d'Estournelles de Constant .

biography

Early years

Auguste Beernaert was born in 1829 to Euphrosine Royon, the daughter of a former mayor and a member of one of the city's most distinguished families. His father was a finance officer and later inspector general in Brussels. His younger sister was Euphrosine Beernaert , who later became a well-known landscape painter. After his school education he studied law at the Catholic University of Leuven and received his doctorate there in 1850 . Financed by a travel grant , he then attended the universities of Berlin , Paris , Heidelberg , Leipzig and Strasbourg for two years and returned to his homeland in 1853. There he became a successful lawyer.

Statue of Louis Mascré

politics

It was not until 1873 that Beernaert began his political career with an appointment to the Belgian government. In 1884 - as a member of the Catholic Party , which held an absolute majority in parliament from now until 1918 - he became head of government and finance minister of his country and concentrated his work primarily on improving the sea routes, including the establishment of the Belgian Association for Unification of the Law of the Sea and the International Maritime Committee . Another focus was on expanding the Belgian capital, Brussels . He played an important role in the Belgian language and denominational dispute as a mediator between Catholic Flemings and the more secular Walloons . He was also an advisor to the Belgian King Leopold II on his early colonial policy in the Belgian Congo . In 1894 he gave up his government work, partly as a criticism of the development in the Congo, which was turning into a policy of exploitation, partly because of a rejected draft for proportional representation in the Belgian parliament. He retired to his law firm, but remained in Parliament as a member of the Catholic party.

During his reign, Beernaert tried to secure peace through international law. Above all, he advocated a diplomatic rapprochement with the neighboring Belgian state, the Netherlands . He was chairman of the International Law Association and honorary member of the Institut de Droit international . He was one of the leading figures who prepared the first International Peace Conference in The Hague in 1899 and was also President of the First Commission. He also fulfilled this function in 1907 at the Second Hague Peace Conference, where he particularly advocated the inviolability of enemy property in naval warfare . In addition to these functions, he temporarily held the presidency of the Interparliamentary Union, was a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and, in 1912, Honorary President of the Catholic League for Peace and the International League of Catholic Pacifists . At the Geneva Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a few days before his death, he advocated a ban on air warfare .

literature

• Laurence van Ypersele: L'image du Roi dans la caricature politique en Belgique de 1884 à 1914

Web links

Commons : Auguste Beernaert  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1909 award ceremony for Auguste Beernaert (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eliane Gubin: Beernaert, Euphrosine . In: Dictionnaire des femmes belges: XIXe et XXe siècles . Racine, Bruxelles 2006, ISBN 2-87386-434-6 , pp. 43–45 ( limited preview in Google Book search).