Jacques-Louis-Edmond Chenevière (17 April 1886, Paris – 22 April 1976, Bellevue GE, Switzerland), commonly known as Jacques Chenevière, was a Swiss poet, librettist and novelist from a Patrician family in Geneva. For more than sixty years, he also served as a humanitarian official in top-positions of management and organisation at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The award-winning author, whose father Adolphe Chenevière (1855–1917) was a critically acclaimed man of letters as well, wrote in French and became most famous for his works of psychological fiction. The external contexts of the plots were mostly set in Paris, Geneva or Provence. His Œuvre comprises ten novels, two books of poems as well as several essays, lyrics and novellas. He was widely considered to be one of the most important representatives of literature from Romandy in the 20th century.
Shortly after the beginning of the First World War, Chenevière took up a leading role in the International Prisoners-of-War Agency (IPWA). In 1919 he was elected as a member of the ICRC and in 1923 became its director-general. During the Second World War he was appointed the director of the Central Information Agency on Prisoners-of-War as well as of the Central Bureau of the ICRC. In 1945, he rose to be its vice-president for the first time. Within the ICRC leadership he belonged to the legalistic group which prevented a public denounciation of the Nazi-terror regime. In recent years, the ICRC has recognised that its silence about the holocaust was «the greatest failure» in its history.
Chenevière remained a regular member of the ICRC for half a century, which made him the one with the second-longest term of office in the history of the organisation. Upon his retirement in 1969 he was made an honorary member. A decade earlier he had been appointed as the first ever honorary vice-president of the ICRC.
Life
Family background
Chenevière's paternal family originated from L’Arbresle near Lyon. Since many of his forefathers were Protestant pastors, it may be assumed that they like many other Huguenots fled to Geneva because of the French Wars of Religion. In 1631, the Chenevières obtained Genevan citizenship. Their descendants are thus officially amongst the ten oldest families of the city. Jacques Chenevière's great-grandfather was Jean-Jacques-Caton Chenevière (1783–1871), who became a professor of dogmatic theology and played a major role in Genevan politics of the 19th century.
Jacques Chenevière's grandfather Arthur Chenevière (1822–1908) worked at the Banque Bonna & Cie which became what is today the private bank Lombard Odier & Co, one of the biggest players in the Swiss financial sector. In 1868, he founded the Banque Chenevière & Cie and later also became a board member of BNP Paribas and other banks. At the same time, he was the controversial leader of the Parti indépendant («Independent Party»). During a feud about election results in 1864 some of his supporters even had a bloody shoot-out in the city centre with followers of a rival party. Between 1864 and 1871, he led the treasury of the canton of Geneva, before serving as a member of the Grand Council of Geneva until 1888 and as a member of the National Council from 1878 until 1884. Arthur Chenevière was married to Susanne-Firmine Munier, a daughter of the influential theologian David-François Munier (1798-1872). A street in Cologny, one of the wealthiest municipalities in Switzerland, is named after the couple. The plot of land, where the Villa Chenevière used to be, is nowadays the seat of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
While two sons of Arthur and Susanne-Firmine became bankers as well and their daughter married the founder of the Union Bank (later UBS), their brother Adolphe did not pursue his career as an advocate but instead became a novelist and essayist. The four siblings thus embodied the development of their Patrician class, which «turned to banking and philanthropic activities at the end of the 19th century, after losing control of the major public offices in Geneva.»Adolphe moved to Paris around 1880, where he worked as a literary critic at the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes, which is today the oldest still existing cultural magazine in Europe. Jacques’ mother Blanche (1865–1911), née Lugol, originated from an area close to Nîmes, where her family owned the wine-growing estate of Campuget. In his youth, Jacques Chenevière spent much of his holidays in Provence and Languedoc, which evidently inspired his literary works. The critic Charlotte König-von Dach argued that Jacques' mother gave him «the sparkling verve, the luster, and the mobility of poetic intuition as gifts from the Midi de la France, in contrast to the heavier calvinist-protestant blood of Geneva».Jacques Chenevière grew up as a de facto single-child, since his younger brother André Alfred died in 1888 shortly after birth.
Education and early career
Chenevière spent his childhood and youth in Paris during the cultural heyday of the Belle Époque. Thanks to his privileged family background he had access to gatherings of artists like the famous salon of the painter Madeleine Lemaire (1845–1928). At a young age already he thus had personal encounters with luminaries like novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), the composer Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947) and the stage actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). Meanwhile, he received his secondary school education at the elitist Lycées Carnot and Condorcet. He subsequently graduated from Sorbonne Université with a degree in humanities.
In 1906, Chenevière published his first poems in the Revue de Paris. Three years later, a Parisian publishing company published his first book of poems: Les beaux jours («The beautiful days»). The Académie Française honoured the debut with the Prix Archon-Despérouses, an award for young poets. Shortly afterwards, Chenevière was commissioned by the French composer Louis Aubert (1877–1968) to write the lyrics for the Opéra-comique La forêt bleue («The blue forest»), which premiered in Boston at the end of 1911.
When Chenevière's mother suddenly died in late 1911 from an embolism at the age of 46 years, he increasingly turned towards Geneva, which he only knew from the holidays he spent there. Hence, he started developing a life-long friendship with the Genevan composer and music educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), the founder of Dalcroze eurhythmics. Chenevière wrote the lyrics for the chorus of Jaques-Dalcroze's miming piece Eco e Narciso («Echo and Narcissus»), which premiered in 1912 at Jaques-Dalcroze's newly opened Hellerau Festival House near Dresden.
In 1913, Chenevière published his second book of poems: La chambre et le jardin («The chamber and the garden»). Many of the poems were also syndicated to the Revue de Paris, the Revue des Deux Mondes, for which his father worked, and to Swiss papers. In early 1914, Chenevière and his father moved from Paris to Geneva.
World War I
Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the ICRC under its president Gustave Ador established the International Prisoners-of-War Agency (IPWA) to trace POWs and to re-establish communications with their respective families. Chenevière was one of the first to register as a volunteer at the IPWA in September. He was joined by his father. The Austrian writer and pacifist Stefan Zweig described the situation during those early days at the agency as follows:«Hardly had the first blows been struck when cries of anguish from all lands began to be heard in Switzerland. Thousands who were without news of fathers, husbands, and sons in the battlefields, stretched despairing arms into the void. By hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands, letters and telegrams poured into the little House of the Red Cross in Geneva, the only international rallying point that still remained. Isolated, like stormy petrels, came the first inquiries for missing relatives; then these inquiries themselves became a storm. The letters arrived in sackfuls. Nothing had been prepared for dealing with such an inundation of misery. The Red Cross had no space, no organization, no system, and above all no helpers.»However, by the end of 1914 there were already some 1,200 volunteers working at the IPWA which was then housed inside the Musée Rath. Amongst them was the French novelist and pacifist Romain Rolland, who was given his initial tasks by Chenevière. When Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1915, he donated half of the prize money to the Agency.
Most of the staff were women though. Some of them came from the Patrician class of Geneva and joined the IPWA because of male relatives in high ICRC positions, which was all-male for more than half century. This group included female pioneers like the legal scholar and historian Marguerite Cramer, the art historian Marguerite van Berchem, and the Dalcroze eurhythmics educator Suzanne Ferrière. The connection between the Chenevières came through family tradition and bonds as well: Adolphe's younger brother Edmond (1862–1932) was married to a daughter of the Milanese banker Charles Brot, who played a role when the ICRC was founded. The wife of Adolphe's older brother Alfred-Maurice (1848–1926) was related to the families of ICRC co-founder Gustave Moynier (1826–1910) and of his successor Ador.
Under those conditions, Chenevière quickly rose to become the co-director of the IPWA department which was responsible for the Triple Entente of the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Upon the suggestion of his co-director Cramer they established a system, which could cope with the flood of incoming information through index cards and catalogues.
At the same time, Chenevière established himself further in the cultural life of Geneva. Most notably, he joined the child psychologist Édouard Claparède (1873–1940) and his brother-in-law Auguste de Morsier (1864–1923), a prominent proponent of women's suffrage, to collect funds for Jaques-Dalcroze who was thus able to found his own institute in October 1915. The academy still exists today in the Eaux-Vives quarter of Geneva in the building which was purchased at the time from those donations. Chenevière also supported Georges Pitoëff, a student of Jaques-Dalcroze, when he founded his theatre group.
Moreover, Chenevière continued to work on his own literary career: in 1917, his first novel was published under the title L’île déserte («The lonely island») by Éditions Bernard Grasset, one of the most important literary publishing companies in France. The plot about a Parisian man and a woman who get stranded on a polynesian atoll and gradually overcome their mutual resentments, was a scandalous affront for large swaths of the Calvinist-puritan upper-class. It is a striking example of Chenevière's «biting satire of the Genevan society which was imprisoned in its corset of moralism».
At the end of 1917, just a few months after Chenevière's father Adolphe had died at the age of 63 years, the ICRC received its first Nobel Peace Prize (ICRC founder Henry Dunant had been ousted because of his personal bankruptcy by co-founder Moynier and hence received the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 as an individual). It was the only prize awarded during the war years. Chenevière as the co-director of the Entente-department at the IPWA had contributed accordingly to the honour.
Shortly before the end of the war, Jaques-Dalcroze premiered in his institute the eurhythmic show Les premiers souvenirs («The first memories») for which Chenevière had written the lyrics.
Between the World Wars