Lafontaine, Henri Marie (1854–1943)

Belgian international lawyer and president of the International Peace Bureau (1907–1943). Lafontaine was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1913 for his efforts to establish and further the principles of international cooperation and understanding among the peoples of the world.

Lafontaine took an early interest in the International Peace Bureau and was influential in bringing about The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. He was a Belgian delegate at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and at the League of Nations Assembly of 1920. He founded the Centre Intellectuel Mondial which later merged with the League of Nations Institute for Intellectual Cooperation. He was the founder of the review La Vie Internationale/International Life, as well as the author of several legal handbooks and documentary histories of international arbitration including La Femme et le Barreau (1901), Histoire Sommaire et Chronologique des Arbitrages Internationeaux (1794–1900) (1902), Bibliographie de la Paix et de l'Arbitrage International (1904), and The Great Solution: Magnissima Charta (1916).

Born in Brussels, Belgium, Lafontaine was educated at the university there, achieving a law doctorate in 1877. He was admitted to the bar and gained a reputation as an authority on international law. In 1893 he became professor of international law at the Universite Nouvelle de Bruxelles and in 1895 was elected to the Belgian Senate as a member of the Socialist Party. From 1919 to 1932 he was vice chairman of the Senate. La Fontaine was devoted to the principle of bringing freedom to the whole world and was a lifelong supporter of the idea of a world bibliography and a universal index to information in order to facilitate understanding between nations. He proposed a world school and university and a world parliament and international court of justice. This would be a ‘magnissima charta’ from which would grow a ‘United States of the World’.