Romain Rolland and the rejection of pacifism

AbstractThough well known as an opponent of the 19141918 war, Romain Rolland resisted the appellation of pacifist. This was largely on account on his high valuation of faith and his recognition of the inevitability of conflict among men of differing faiths. In 1914, he accepted that nationalism had been among the faiths that his pre-war works had encouraged, and his wartime writing attempted not to stop the war but to humanize its conduct. Between the wars, he sought to preserve peace, but sensed the inadequacy of pacifist individualism as a means of doing so, and failed to find a pacifist mass movement with any hope of success; Gandhism could not work in Europe, which lacked the sacrificial religious fervour of India. Convinced that the Soviet Union was essentially peace-loving, he sought to contain Hitler by means of military alliances and supported the declaration of war in 1939.