Louise weiss biography

Louise Weiss along with other suffragettes in The bold text on the newspaper translates: "The Frenchwoman must vote".

Louise weiss ogma

Louise Weiss was one of the foremost European journalists and experts on international affairs of the twentieth century. She is considered an architect of European unity and she is best known for her campaigns on behalf of the peaceful resolution of international conflicts both during the interwar years and during the Cold War.

She also worked on behalf of Jewish refugee rights in the late s and was a leading feminist activist who focused on obtaining the right for French women to vote. In , at the age of 86, she was elected to the first European parliament, and as the eldest member of that body, she delivered its inaugural address. She received numerous honors and awards, and the main building of the European Parliament in Strasbourg bears her name.

Her cosmopolitan perspective and persistent readiness to challenge the status quo led many to consider her on a par with other architects of European union, such as Jean Monnet — and Robert Schuman — Weiss was born in Arras Pas-de-Calais on January 25, , the eldest of six children in an upper-middle-class family of mixed Protestant-Jewish background whose descendants hailed from Alsace.

Her father, Paul Louis Weiss , a prominent mining engineer, came from a family of Protestant notables with a long history of public service. My European imprint was thus inevitable. Both of her parents were deeply influenced by the Dreyfus Affair Her father even attended the Rennes trial August 7, September 9, , when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish, faced a second court-martial for allegedly having sold military secrets to the Germans in Beginning in late , however, evidence began to surface that showed that Dreyfus had been framed by high-ranking army officers at the time of his original conviction in December In her memoirs, Weiss recalled that in , a few years after Dreyfus's pardon in September , since the second court martial upheld the original conviction, her mother was not altogether displeased when Louise, at the age of ten, punched a classmate who had called her a Jew and a freethinking dreyfusard.

Although she always received encouragement in her studies from her mother, her father disapproved, preferring that she become a housewife rather than pursue a career.