Henri La Fontaine

"The peoples are not awake...[There are dangers] which will render a world organization impossible. I foresee the renewal of...the secret bargaining behind closed doors. Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds. International institutions ought to be, as the national ones in democratic countries, established by the peoples and for the peoples." - Henri La Fontaine

Henri La Fontaine (1854-1943) - Belgian, international lawyer, professor of international law, senator for 36 years, Socialist, renowned bibliographer, devoted internationalist, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913.

Contribution to the Peace Mouvement

La Fontaine entered the organized peace mouvement when Hodgson Pratt, the British pacifist, came to Belgium in the early 1880's to establish a branch of the International Arbitration and Peace Association. He went on to become the Secretary-General of the Société belge de l'arbitrage et de la paix in 1889, and participated actively in nearly all peace congresses held in the following 25 years. In 1907, he became President of the International Peace Bureau, and was influentual in the Bureau's efforts to bring about The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. He was a member of the Belgian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and to the League of Nations Assembly (1920-1921).

In other efforts to foster world peace, he founded the Centre intellectuel mondial, which later merged into the League of Nations Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, and proposed such organizations as a world school and university, a world parliament, and an international court of justice.

Founding of the Union of International Associations

In 1895, Henri La Fontaine and Paul Otlet established the Institut international de bibliographie, which later became the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID), otherwise known as the "House of Documentation". They also established the Repertoire Bibliographique Universel (RBU), an ambitious attempt at developing a master bibliography of the world's accumulated knowledge. With their informational retrieval scheme, they proposed to file, index, and provide information for retrieval on anything of note published anywhere in the world. They were able to make great progress in bringing their plan into reality. By the late 1930's, the RBU had grown to 15 million entries.

From the work of the Institute came the idea for the Union of International Associations (UIA). The UIA is the world's oldest, largest and most comprehensive source of information on global civil society, and to this day, still carries out the sophisticated and visionary concepts of its founders. In developing beyond its initial bibliographical and organizational focus, the UIA continues to seek ways to recognize, honour and represent the full spectrum of human initiatives and preoccupations manifested in an organized manner across national boundaries - both in isolation and within the complex networks of relationships between them.