Louis Lecoin

I awoke to find my two neighbours dead by my side. The day before, sleeping in the same straw, we had spoken a little — to reassure ourselves and each other.

Louis Lecoin (30 September 1888 – 23 June 1971) was a French antimilitarist, pacifist, and anarchist.

Quotes

If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.

• One morning, I awoke to find my two neighbours dead by my side. The day before, sleeping in the same straw, we had spoken a little — to reassure ourselves and each other.
  • De Prison En Prison (1947)

• If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.
  • As quoted in Seeds of Peace : A Catalogue of Quotations (1986) edited by Jeanne Larson and Madge Micheels-Cyrus

Quotes about Lecoin

• Louis Lecoin, who has been described as France's most “militant pacifist,” died today in a hospital at suburban Pavilions‐Sous‐Bois after surgery. He was 83 years old.
  Mr. Lecoin, who throughout his life indifferently earned a living as a printer, gardener, proofreader or construction worker, joined the anarchists in 1905 at the age of 17 and was sentenced to eight years in prison at 24. One of the leading campaigners here for Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920's and for Republican Spain in the thirties, he went to jail again in 1939 for the publication of a pamphlet with the evocative title, “Immediate Peace!”
  • "Louis Lecoin Dead; French Pacifist, 83", The New York Times (24 June 1971)

External links

• Brief profile at The Anarchist Encyclopedia
• Online profile at bloodyminded.org