René Pinon
Jean Louis René Pinon (5 February 1870 – 29 September 1958) was a French historian and political journalist, author of numerous books and columns on international relations between the beginning of the 20th century and the Second World War.
Contents
Biography
René Pinon was born in Montbard. Pinon earned a doctorate in law and a doctorate in literature. He was a professor at the Free School of Political Sciences, where he taught international relations and oriental issues alongside Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu.[1]
From 1900, he contributed to the Revue des deux Mondes, where he established himself as a specialist in Eastern affairs. He was in charge of the international column from 1922 to 1940. He was also a member of the editorial team at Radio Tour Eiffel, where he met Gaston Monnerville, from 1921 until the station was scuttled by the Germans in 1940. He also contributed to a number of other periodicals, including Questions diplomatiques et coloniales and Correspondance d'Orient, Études and the regional daily L'Ouest-Éclair.
During the First World War, he vigorously denounced the Armenian genocide, spoke out in favour of an autonomous Armenia and, in the aftermath of the war, edited the journal La Voix de l'Arménie (1918–1919).
Supported by Gabriel Hanotaux, he was appointed diplomatic adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a time.
The Institute of France awarded him the Prix Lambert in 1913. Pinon was awarded the Grand prix Gobert by the French Academy in 1929.
Pinon was a member of the Academy of Overseas Sciences. In 1938, he was one of the shortlisted candidates to succeed René Doumic at the French Academy, but was beaten by André Maurois by 19 votes to 13.
The debacle of 1940 and the Occupation of France put an end to his public activities, although he still occasionally wrote a few articles in the early post-war period.
Alongside his main activities, he was also interested in the history of the ancient medieval town of Gerberoy and in promoting its heritage. It was here that he met the painter Henri-Eugène Le Sidaner, who illustrated his book on Gerberoy (published in 1935). Alongside Le Sidaner and others, René Pinon co-founded the Society of the Friends of Gerberoy and became its president.
René Pinon died at the 7th arrondissement of Paris aged 88.
Thought
René Pinon was not active in politics in the electoral sense of the term, but his writings reveal a Christian Democrat sensibility, fervent patriotism and an uncompromising mistrust of totalitarian regimes whose expansionism he feared, but which he believed France and England would be able to oppose until the last moment. His publications focus on diplomatic, strategic and geopolitical aspects, and cover cultural, economic and social issues only as they relate to foreign policy.
A keen observer of the Near East, he was lucid (and sometimes prescient) in exposing the tensions and risks arising from oil, the interplay of the great powers and the Judeo-Palestinian question (notably in Fièvres d'Orient, 1938). Convinced that the Middle East should one day return to being the brilliant hotbed of culture and prosperity it once was, Pinon was uncompromising about the Ottoman Empire, which he blamed for the region's stagnation and underdevelopment. He saw the dismantling of the Empire (by the Treaty of Sèvres) as the removal of an obstacle to progress, but did not believe in the unity or immediate independence of the Arab world. For him, this world, with its very diverse local realities and whose only real unifying link was religion, could only be unified or coordinated from within by a theocracy, a factor of oppression and a threat to peace. He denounced as a mistake the promise of independence made by the British to Arab leaders during the Great War, a promise never kept and contradicted by the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Very optimistic about the intentions and resources of the two great European powers after the war, he was convinced that the control of France and Great Britain, legitimised by the League of Nations, was essential for maintaining peace in the region and restoring its former prosperity. He played down the significance of the demands for independence that were emerging in the countries concerned. In his view, in the face of religious fanaticism, the opposition between modern secular and democratic tendencies and the traditional Arab monarchies (authoritarian and theocratic), the delicate need to find a just response to Zionist demands, and the push from other imperialisms, the new Arab states could not achieve equilibrium without organised outside influence.
Like other moderate intellectuals of the inter-war period, Pinon believed both in France's constructive role in the East and in the strength of resistance of the Western democracies in the face of Hitlerist Germany and Stalinist Russia. The optimistic side of his vision, and his illusions about France as a global power, were obviously swept away by events from 1940 onwards. However, developments in the Near East after the Second World War and up to the present day have not belied the essence of his analyses: after the fading of France and Great Britain, external political influences have changed, but the most important issues that Pinon helped to highlight remain current and unresolved. His work, despite its limitations and the controversies to which it is sometimes subjected, remains not only a mine of information on pre-war diplomacy, but also a good tool for understanding the genesis of the contemporary Near East.
Works
- La Chine qui s'ouvre (1900; with Jean de Marcillac; awarded the Prix Maillé-Latour-Landry by the French academy in 1901)[2]
- L'Empire de la Méditerranée (1904; awarded the Montyon Prize by the French academy in 1904)[2]
- La Lutte pour le Pacifique - Origines et résultats de la guerre russo-japonaise (1906)
- L'Europe et l'Empire Ottoman (1909)
- L'Europe et la Jeune Turquie (1911)
- France et Allemagne 1870-1913 (1913)
- La suppression des Arméniens (1916)
- François-Joseph, essai d'histoire psychologique, 1830-1916 (1917)
- La reconstruction de l'Europe politique (1920)
- Le redressement de la politique française (1922)
- La bataille de la Ruhr (1923)
- L'avenir de l'entente franco-anglaise (1924)
- Histoire de la nation française, Tome IV : Histoire diplomatique 1515-1928 (1929; awarded the Grand prix Gobert by the French academy in 1929)[2]
- Au Maroc, fin des temps héroïques (1935)
- Gerberoy (1935)
- Fièvres d'Orient (1938)
- L'Eau vive, souvenirs de Terre Sainte (1939)
Notes
- ↑ Scot, Marie (2022). Sciences Po le roman vrai. Paris: SciencesPo les Presses.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "René Pinon," Académie française.
