Louise Weiss

“[H]ow could I accept the ordinariness of a family life? What a defeat!” – Louise Weiss

When you hear the name ‘Louise Weiss’, you may think of the European Parliament building in Strasbourg named after her, or that she was elected to the first European Parliament and gave its inaugural speech. What, sadly, may not come to mind is the woman Louise Weiss herself and her outstanding achievements during her life. When studying the creation and history of the European Union¹⁾ and the ideas that underlie it, one is quite likely to study the so-called ‘fathers of Europe’.²⁾ The many women who contributed to the remarkable achievement that is the EU are often overlooked. One of these women is Louise Weiss. This brief profile aims to give an overview of her life.

Copyright: European Union, 2023 – Source: European Parliament

The background, upbringing, and education of Louise Weiss

Louise Weiss was born on January 25, 1893, in Arras, France and was the eldest of six children. Her father, Paul Louis Weiss, had a protestant background and worked as a mining engineer, whereas her mother, Jeanne Félicie Javal, came from a Jewish family in Alsace with ties to Germany and Bohemia. Jeanne Félicie Javal’s family consisted of bankers and merchants who had established commercial networks throughout Europe and the United States. During Louise Weiss’s youth, the family often visited relatives in Alsace, Germany, and central Europe. Therefore, Louise Weiss was brought up in a way that gave her an understanding of what it meant to be European and how complex relations between countries, especially between France and Germany, could be.

Louise Weiss performed outstandingly at school and was sent by her mother to the Lycée Molière high school in Paris, where she won several awards. Despite her father’s opposition,³⁾ with her mother’s support, she studied literature for a year at the University of Oxford before finishing her studies back in Paris at the Collège Sévigné. At the age of 21 and as one of only 10% of French women to do so, she completed the agrégation and was allowed to teach in French high schools.

Weiss’s shifting interests during World War I and endeavours in journalism

However, in 1914, Louise Weiss had just turned 21 when the First World War broke out and took centre stage in her thoughts. Instead of continuing her teaching career, she set up a military hospital in northern France to help wounded soldiers. After witnessing the horrors of the First World War while nursing soldiers who had been wounded in the trenches on the battlefield, she began a career in journalism focusing on international affairs and the pursuit of peace. During that time, women were not allowed to take part in the politics of France. This circumstance contributed to Weiss’s decision to become a journalist and use her new career to make ‘war on war’ by promoting a European reconstruction under the precepts of dialogue and peace.

Louise Weiss started writing under the pseudonym of Louis Lefranc for the newspaper Le Radical, for which she inter alia wrote an exposé on the treatment of French soldiers imprisoned in Germany. In 1919, she became a correspondent for Le Petit Parisien and, in that capacity, travelled to major cities in Europe to interview prominent figures, for example, Leon Trotsky in 1921. During this time, Weiss still found time to do humanitarian work. For one of her humanitarian projects, she went to Switzerland to help nurse French prisoners of war and she helped evacuate 100 French governesses from the Soviet Union.

In 1918, Weiss co-created the magazine L’Europe nouvelle, which, under her direction, became one of the most influential magazines on international affairs and politics in France. During these years, beginning in 1918/1919, Louise Weiss started to advocate the creation of a European Organization to secure peace and stability by promoting economic and political cooperation. In 1919, Weiss attended the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles, where she witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and attended early assemblies of the League of Nations in Geneva. She covered these events for L’Europe nouvelle.

In the late 1920s, the appearance of the economic crisis – the so-called ‘Great Depression’ – led to the emergence of a new nationalism, radicalism, and violent attitudes among the states of Europe. As she watched her dreams of a united and peaceful Europe vanish, Weiss founded La Nouvelle École de la Paix in 1930, a higher-education institution dedicated to the study of peace and conflict prevention. Louise Weiss never stopped promoting peace, but when Adolf Hitler started to gain influence in Germany, her pacifist approach to peace began to waver. She observed the developments in Germany closely and, through her writing, tried to raise awareness of the Nazi persecution of Jews and political opponents. Having advocated heavily for the League of Nations, Weiss now started to lose faith in it, as the League was not prepared to use force to defend its purpose and ensure peace in Europe.

Weiss’s fight for women’s rights and endeavours during WWII

Observing the stocking progress of creating a united Europe and Adolf Hitler coming to power in 1933, Louise Weiss shifted her focus to a different project, which had been an interest of hers for many years: women’s emancipation and, particularly, women’s right to vote. In 1934, Weiss resigned from her magazine L’Europe Nouvelle⁴⁾and, building on the influence she had gained as a journalist, founded La Femme Nouvelle, an organisation dedicated to fighting for women’s suffrage in France. Unlike other feminist organisations of the time, La Femme Nouvelle focused solely on obtaining the right to vote for women. They tried to achieve this goal by using a more direct-action but peaceful approach than the other organisations, for example, interrupting major sporting events or having Weiss herself run in elections. The fight for women’s right to vote was even closer to Weiss’s heart, as she believed that women voting and holding political positions would result in a peaceful resolution of the now-imminent war. Weiss and her organisation had some success and gained some publicity, but, ultimately, women did not gain the right to vote at this time.⁵⁾ Due to a lack of results, La Femme Nouvelle ceased publication and activities in 1937. This was followed by the closure of the Nouvelle École de la Paix in 1939 due to the worsening political climate.

Thinking that another war was inescapable, Weiss turned back to international affairs and humanitarian work. She used her political influence to convince the French government to establish and finance a refugee committee to help Jews and political prisoners fleeing from the Nazi Regime. Through this committee, Weiss helped one thousand Jewish children from Austria and Germany to gain French visas after the ‘Progromnacht’⁶⁾ in 1938. She also helped hundreds of refugees who had been refused entry into the US to stay in France. She also helped to organize a women’s civil passive defence against air raids.

By June 1940, France was under occupation, and Weiss volunteered to go to the US to secure medical supplies from the American Red Cross. However, she could only secure a small number of supplies due to the Americans’ fear that the supplies would be taken by the Germans. Weiss returned to France in December 1940 and, by tricking a French bureaucrat, got a certificate of non-affiliation with the Jewish race that allowed her to live in Paris until 1943 despite being on a Gestapo list. However, even though she had the certificate of non-affiliation, the Gestapo seized her library and personal archives, so Weiss went into hiding in mid-1943 and joined the resistance as an editor of the then-underground newspaper La Nouvelle République.⁷⁾

Weiss’s return to journalism and election into the European Parliament

After WWII, Louise Weiss returned to journalism and covered, among other things, the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. She then started to travel the world, writing articles about the role Europe could play in fostering democratic principles and values around the world. She visited places like Syria, China, Japan, India and the Kashmir region, and Tanzania, and she continued to emphasise the rights of women. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, Louise Weiss ventured into different forms of publishing, writing novels and plays, and started to make documentaries and short films. She also started to publish her memoirs, titled ‘Mémoires d’une Européene’, in six volumes between 1968 and 1976 and co-founded a Peace Studies Institute in France to study the causes of armed conflicts and peace policies.

After witnessing two world wars and the inhumanity that went with them, as well as seeing the League of Nations fail and witnessing the Cold War, Louise Weiss still, at her core, believed in peace. However, her views on the world became more pessimistic, her political views more conservative, and, on the political spectrum, she moved to the right. This can be seen in her documentaries, which often show force and violence as the determinants of human behaviour. In addition, her views on Europe changed. She now understood the European Union in part as a unified, military-equipped counterpoint to the US and the Soviet Union. In 1971, Weiss founded the Louise Weiss Foundation, which awarded an annual prize based on a person or institution’s contribution to the field of the ‘science of peace’. One could argue that this shows that Weiss did not comprehend peace as a state that can only be achieved in one way but, rather, as a state that can be achieved in different ways, and that the method she preferred after the end of WWII was not the most ideal method, but the one that she, in that stage of her life, thought to be the most likely to succeed. Throughout all her work and writings, she was always aware that her life and views were shaped by the time in which she lived – the 20th century.

Furthermore, although she continued advocating for the rights of women, her more conservative views can also be found in her 1973 book ‘Lettre à un embryon’, which contains a letter to an embryo, and the embryo’s replies, and the overall message entails anti-abortion standpoints.⁸⁾

In 1979, after being a political activist her whole life, Louise Weiss became a politician when she was elected to the first directly elected European Parliament. On July 17, 1979, as the Parliament’s oldest member, she gave its inaugural speech. In her speech, after briefly summarising the history of Europe, Weiss warned: ‘[…] [R]everence for our ancestors must not paralyse our action nor turn our eyes from the future. Let us beware of becoming the classical image of our own selves.’ She later highlighted three problems that the European Union would face in the future: first, the problem of a missing European identity; second, the problem of a low birth rate; and third, the problem of legality.

Louise Weiss remained an active politician and a member of the European Parliament until her death at the age of 90 in 1983. During her lifetime and posthumously, she received many prizes, awards and honours, just one of which was that the building of the European Parliament bears her name.

Louise Weiss should be remembered for her relentless search for peace, her inexhaustible fight for women’s rights, her endless humanitarian work, and for being truly European.

Further Readings:

• Louise Weiss, Mémoires d’une Européenne, t. I, Une petite fille du siècle 1893-1919, Paris, Albin Michel, 1978 (and the following five volumes).
• Maria Manuela Tavares Ribeiro, Louise Weiss – The Travels of a European Woman, in Cultura, Vol. 22, 2006, pp. 115-126.
• Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier, La journaliste Louise Weiss (1893-1983): une femme d’influence, pacifiste et féministe par opportunism ou par conviction?, in Femmes, culture et pouvoir, May 2009, Sherbrooke, Canada, pp. 287-306.
• Matteo Tomasoni, From L’Europe nouvelle to violet Europeanism: Louise Weiss and the beginning of European feminist activism, in Investigations Históricas. Epoca Moderna Y Contemporánea, Extraordinario, March 2024.
• Louise Weiss, Inaugural Speech at the European Parliament, 17 July 1979, Strasbourg.

Further Sources:

• Louise Weis: a committed European – Digital Exhibition, https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/louise-weiss-a-committed-european/credits (last accessed 16 April 2024)
• Speeches that have made Europe: Louise Weiss (1979): Full speech (Youtube), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9PXBOC_dzo (last accessed 28 April 2024).