The fight for peace in times of war: the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme in the face of the dilemma between Peace and Democracy (1914-1918)

This article analyzes the reaction to the Great War of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme (LDH), an organization that, created in 1898 in defense of the revision of the Dreyfus trial, became the most socially and politically influential civic platform during the French Third Republic. Defined by safeguarding civil rights, but also by promoting peace, the LDH faced a harrowing moral and political dilemma in 1914: it had to choose between calling for immediate peace or supporting war to preserve democracy in the face of aggression from the German autocracy. The article explores the debates that this dilemma generated among its members pacifists and democrats. These debates were of capital importance, as they caused an essential fracture in the organization and in part of French pacifism up to Vichy. Debates that, in short, revealed the substantial weight that two of its core ingredients had in the LDH: the juridical conception of peace and revolutionary memory.