Émile Benveniste was one of the signatories of the Stockholm appeal on 19 March 1950, against nuclear weapons. The short text of the appeal reads:
We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples. We demand strict international control to enforce this measure.
We believe that any government which first uses atomic weapons against any other country whatsoever will be committing a crime against humanity and should be dealt with as a war criminal.
We call on all men and women of good will throughout the world to sign this appeal.
Launched a few months before the start of the Korean War, this was about six months after the Soviet Union became a nuclear power.
The appeal was organised by Benveniste’s Collège colleague Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Chair of Nuclear Physics, who had won the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with his wife Irène Curie, daughter of Marie. Joliot-Curie was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), and had been an active resistant. He lost his position on the French Atomic Energy Commission because of his political views, shortly after the Stockholm appeal. He retained his Collège de France chair, and would go on to be one of the eleven signatories of the Russell-Einstein manifesto in 1955. Michel Pinault’s biography Frédéric Joliot-Curie discusses his activism especially in its fifth part.
The appeal was supported by the World Peace Council, created by Cominform in 1949. Joliot-Curie was president of the Council. Although many of the signatories were there because of individual choice, it was also ‘signed’ by every adult Soviet citizen. Because of its connections, the World Peace Council was dismissed by the United States as “a propaganda trick in the spurious ‘peace offensive’ of the Soviet Union”.
In the newspaper reports which include Benveniste’s name, they also note several of his Collège colleagues, including Marcel Bataillon, Jules Bloch, Alfred Ernout, Louis Massignon, Fernand Mossé, André Piganiol, and Henri Wallon. Wallon at least was a PCF member. Many other French writers, musicians, composers and actors also signed, including Louis Aragon, Sylvia Bataille, Marc Chagall, Maurice Chevalier, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Simone Signoret. While not everyone who signed the Stockholm appeal was on the left, it was often an indication of their politics. The young Jacques Chirac signed it, for example, when he was a member of the PCF. The activist Catholic priest Jean Boulier said he signed it “to reverse a situation which is intolerable for a Christian” (Pourquoi j’ai signé l’Appel de Stockholm, 1; see J’étais un prêtre rouge, pp. 170-71). He was later defrocked for his political views, supposedly too close to Communism.
The two places I’ve found Benveniste’s signature reported are Les lettres françaises which was supported by the PCF, and L’Humanité, which was a PCF paper. Benveniste’s political views were not something which he was explicit about. His 1925 signature of the Surrealist manifesto and of a petition in L’Humanité in opposition to the Rif war in Morocco are two things used by his biographers and commentators to indicate his affiliations. There are very few other indications of his political views, and he was not very forthcoming in the few interviews he gave late in his life. Given what happened to Joliot-Curie and Boulier in the Cold War this reticence is unsurprising. Benveniste’s signature of the Stockholm appeal is another little bit of evidence, and not one I have seen mentioned before.
References
“15 professeurs au Collège de France de réputation Mondiale ont signé à ce jour l’appel de Stockholm”, l’Humanité, 7 June 1950, 1.
“Contre l’arme atomique se fait l’unanimité des intellectuels français”, Les Lettres françaises, 8 June 1950, 1-2.
Frédéric Joliot, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1935, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1935/joliot-fred/biographical/
J.D. Bernal, “The Threat of Nuclear War and the Stockholm Appeal”, excerpt from World Without War, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958, https://www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/project/jd-bernal/threat-nuclear-war-and-stockholm-appeal
Jean Boulier, Pourquoi j’ai signé l’Appel de Stockholm, typescript, 1950, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 16-LB60-75.
Jean Boulier, J’étais un prêtre rouge: souvenirs et témoinages, Paris: Éditions de l’Athanor, 1977.
Michel Pinault, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000.
This is the 80th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm throughout 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
.jpg){kind=link}