La Paix d’un homme raisonnable

This pamphlet was first published in the 14 August 1917 issue of the Daily News & Leader, a newspaper published in London and Manchester. A Reasonable Man’s Peace quickly circulated in pacifist circles and reached Wells’s English translator and publisher, Cécil Georges-Bazile, who translated the text and published it through the small publishing house he ran on the rue de Taitbout. It would not appear in book form in English until 1920, published in London by the Pelican Press.

When the war ended, Wells was convinced that humanity had never before faced such an opportunity to take its destiny into its own hands and turn utopia into reality: “the international situation at this moment is without doubt the most wonderful the world has ever known. There is not a single country in the world where the great majority of sensible people do not passionately desire peace, a lasting peace; and yet the war goes on.”

A prolific spokesman for the pre-war younger generations, Wells, nearing fifty when the armistice was signed, had by then lost some of his influence. Even though his preaching in favor of a world state seemed to have been heard, with the Treaty of Versailles and the coming creation of the League of Nations, his verdict was bitter, and his deeply utopian thinking was to be shattered against the “new world” that, upended by the conflict, was opening up to the peoples of the earth. For Wells, education always remained the fundamental problem of any society in crisis: peace depends on knowledge, the only force capable of holding back chaos.

A rare publication and the true first edition of the text in book form, preceding its English publication.