A Jewish boyhood in Bayonne and Nice
René Samuel Cassin was born on 5 October 1887 in Bayonne, in the French Basque country, into an old Jewish family of Portuguese (Sephardi) descent. His father, Henri Cassin, was a merchant in the wine trade; his mother was Gabrielle Dreyfus. He grew up in Nice, where he shone at the Lycée Masséna, and went on to the law faculty at Aix-en-Provence.
His academic record was dazzling. He took degrees in both humanities and law, won first place in the national competitive examination for law faculties, and in 1914 received his doctorate in juridical, economic and political sciences in Paris, with a thesis on inheritance under the Swiss civil code. He had already begun practising as a lawyer at the Paris Court of Appeal. He was, in short, a brilliant young jurist at the start of a conventional career, and then the First World War began.
Wounded at Saint-Mihiel
Cassin was mobilised in 1914 as a corporal. Leading a small volunteer assault unit, he was gravely wounded by German machine-gun fire near Saint-Mihiel in the Meuse, on 12 October 1914, according to the French Ministry of the Armed Forces and the Order of Liberation. Hit in the arm, side and stomach, he waited days for proper surgery; the Nobel Foundation’s biography says he survived only because his mother, serving as a nurse at the hospital where he was taken, persuaded the doctors to operate. He received the Croix de Guerre with palm and the Médaille militaire, but was left permanently disabled and invalided out of the army.
The wound shaped his life. He returned to teaching law, first at Aix and Marseille, then at Lille from 1920 and, from 1929, at the University of Paris, where he held a chair until 1960. Above all he threw himself into the cause of his fellow veterans. He helped found one of the first associations of war victims and in 1918 the federation that became the Union fédérale, the great movement of disabled ex-servicemen, which he led for many years; he drafted and secured laws on pensions, employment for the war-wounded and support for war orphans, and helped organise an international conference of veterans’ associations from former enemy countries.
A pacifist at Geneva
From 1924 to 1938 Cassin was a member of the French delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva, where he worked on disarmament and on mechanisms for settling international disputes. He believed that peace depended on law, on rules and institutions strong enough to restrain states.
He was also among the first in French public life to warn of Nazism. In 1930, after a journey to the Middle East during which he met many German Jews in Palestine, he began campaigning against the Nazi movement. He denounced the Munich Agreement of 1938 and refused to return to Geneva afterwards.
The lawyer of Free France
When France collapsed in June 1940 and Marshal Pétain sought an armistice, Cassin refused to accept defeat. On 24 June he and his wife, Simone, boarded a British troopship, the Ettrick, at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and on 29 June he presented himself to General Charles de Gaulle in London, one of the very first prominent civilians to do so. De Gaulle needed a lawyer above all, and Cassin became the legal architect of Free France.
He negotiated and drafted the agreement of 7 August 1940 between Churchill and de Gaulle that gave the Free French forces a legal status as a distinctly French army allied to Britain. He wrote the statutes of the Order of Liberation, served as permanent secretary of the Council of Defence of the Empire, became national commissioner for justice and public education, and in 1943 took charge of the legal committee that acted as the provisional government’s council of state. His argument throughout was that the Vichy regime was illegitimate and that the French Republic lived on in exile.
The Vichy regime stripped him of his French nationality and sentenced him to death in absentia. In April 1941 he spoke on London radio directly to the Jews of France, reminding them of the equality the Republic had granted them since the Revolution and urging them to join the fight. The Holocaust struck his own family: according to the human-rights organisation that bears his name, he lost some two dozen relatives, including his sister, to Nazi deportation.
Writing a declaration for the world
After the liberation Cassin became vice-president of the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, in effect its working head, from 1944 to 1960. At the same time he represented France at the United Nations. In 1946 he became a member and vice-chairman of the new UN Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, and joined the small group charged with drafting an international bill of rights.
Working from a long preliminary list of rights compiled by the Canadian lawyer John Humphrey of the UN Secretariat, Cassin produced a revised, reorganised draft that gave the document much of its eventual shape. He is credited with its logical architecture, general principles first, then personal, civil and political rights, then social, economic and cultural rights, and finally the duties and conditions needed to realise them, and he later compared the structure to the portico of a temple. He fought for the word “universal” rather than “international” in the title, insisting that the rights belonged to every human being and not merely to citizens of states, and he argued for economic, social and cultural rights to stand alongside civil and political ones.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948. Cassin remained a central figure on the Commission for years, serving as its chairman from 1955 to 1957.
Judge and institution-builder
Cassin spent the rest of his career turning principles into institutions. He presided over the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in the 1950s, and in 1959 was elected to the new European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, becoming its president from 1965 to 1968. The street on which the Court now stands is named Allée René Cassin. In France he chaired the advisory committee that prepared the constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958, and sat on the Constitutional Council from 1960 to 1971.
In 1968, the United Nations’ International Year for Human Rights, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and received it on 10 December, the twentieth anniversary of the Declaration. In his Nobel lecture the next day he called the Declaration “the first document of an ethical sort that organized humanity has ever adopted”. He used the prize money to found, in 1969, the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which still trains lawyers and activists from around the world.
A Jew of the Republic
Cassin was a secular, deeply patriotic Frenchman and a committed Jew, and he saw no contradiction between the two. At de Gaulle’s request he became president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Paris-based network of schools for Jewish communities across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, in 1943, and led it until his death. Through the Alliance he worked with the American Jewish Committee and the Anglo-Jewish Association to create the Consultative Council of Jewish Organisations, which promoted human rights from a Jewish perspective at the United Nations.
He supported the Jewish homeland in Palestine and later the State of Israel, received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a high school in Jerusalem bears his name. For Cassin, the universalism of human rights and the particular experience of the Jewish people pointed in the same direction: a people that had been stripped of every protection knew better than any what it meant for rights to belong to the human being as such.
Last years and the Panthéon
Cassin carried the pain of his war wound throughout his long life but remained astonishingly active into his eighties, as a judge, teacher, president of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and tireless speaker for human rights. He was made a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and a Companion of the Liberation.
He died in Paris on 20 February 1976, at the age of eighty-eight, and was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery. On 5 October 1987, the centenary of his birth, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon, the resting place of France’s most honoured citizens.
Legacy
The Universal Declaration that Cassin helped write is the most translated document in the world and the foundation of the modern international human-rights system. Its articles echo in dozens of national constitutions and in the treaties that followed it, the two international covenants of 1966, conventions against torture and discrimination, and regional systems such as the European Convention on Human Rights, whose court he presided over.
Today the law campus of the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, streets and schools across France, and a British human-rights charity carry his name. Cassin’s life traced a remarkable arc: a wounded soldier who devoted himself to his comrades, a lawyer who gave a government-in-exile its legal backbone, and a Jew from Bayonne who helped give the world its first common language of human dignity.
Sources & further reading
René Cassin, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · René Cassin, Ordre de la Libération · René Cassin, Chemins de mémoire (French Ministry of the Armed Forces) · René Cassin, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.