Pierre Ceresole ( 1879-1945 ):
Brief Chronological Bibliography
From Vivre sa vérité, Baconnière,
Neuchâtel (Switzerland), 1950.
1879-1909: Childhood, years of studies
Pierre Ceresole was born in Lausanne on August 17,
1879. His father, Paul Ceresole, was a colonel of the Swiss army, a judge
in the Federal Court and president of the Swiss government in 1873. Pierre
had six brothers and three sisters, it was the last son. He lost his mother
Emma, been born Secrétan, when he was nine years old; a very deep
wound.
Classic studies in the Colleage of Lausanne, then
in the Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich ( ETHZ) where he obtains
his degree in Engineering and, in 1903, his PhD.
Post training in mathematics and physics in Göttingen,
then in Munich, working with Von Laue in Röntgen's laboratory
(Nobel prize in 1901).
In 1908 and 1909, Pierre Ceresole is lecturer in
the ETHZ.
1909-1912: The United States, Honolulu
1909: Pierre Ceresole decides to begin a journey
in the United States by earning the keep as worker. Very difficult period:
he is qualified for no manual labour.
1910: In the Hawaiian Islands. He gives prived lessons
of French. Lecturer of French literature at the French school
of the University.
First awarenesses of the social injustice. First
vague desires to get rid of the money: charged to give lessons of mathematics
to one of the members of the former royal family, he receives a sum which
represents a small fortune which he donates to an organisation active in
the country side.
1912-1914: In Japan
1912: Yokohama, Tokyo. Very fast, Ceresole feels
sympathy for the Japanese people.
1913: Engineer in the Kobé branch of the Swiss
compagny Sulzer.
1914: The war bursts. He decides to return in Switzerland
thinking to be able to work for his country.
1914-1918: Resistant
After he comes back in Switzerland, he writes a letter
to the ministers of the federal government:
" I send to you the shares which I received in
inheritance of my father, hoping that the current events will be enough
to explain the motive for my act ".
" I believe that the teachings of Christ (...)
are superior to the advices of the realistic politics and the commercial
common sense (...) ".
" Please make of this money the use which will
appear to you the most corresponding to the spirit in which these lines
are written ". (Annexed: 48 shares of Nestlé, etc.)
In January, 1915, he enters as engineer at Brown
Boveri, Baden.
This same year, he is turned upside down by the example
of John Baudraz, a schoolteacher who is condemned to several months of
prison and loses his situation to have refused to carry out its military
duties because of his Christian faith. The judgment, and the silence of
the official Church on this subject, made on Pierre Ceresole a profound
impression. Himself, for reasons of health, had been never called to the
military service, therfore, he thinks of refusing to pay the military tax
which he had faithfully fulfillled until then.
1917: he is condemned in a day by prison. He publishes
Religion
and patriotism where he explains the reasons of his refusal. On November
4, in the French Church of Zurich, he launches an appeal: " Swiss
clergymen (...) who accept (...) the service of the national idols (...)
you block the road; you put yourselves betwen us and the Spirit.. Go out
of our sun, or become yourselves transparent to its beams! "
Pierre Ceresole leaves Brown-Boveri in 1918 for a
private teaching institue at Pleiads, near Lausanne. He spends there two
school years, each interrupted by some days in prison.
1919-1925: The action for the Peace
1918: An trip in Germany without passport.
1919: Meeting in Holland of some members of the Movement
for the Reconciliation. At once, Pierre Ceresole feels at ease among
these people of thought and action.
1920: With some other German, Austrian and English
pacifists among which the Quaker Hubert Parris, Ceresole organizes to Esnes,
near Verdun (France),. He lasted five months. Pierre had the enjoyment to see
working on his sides his elder brother, Ernest, colonel in the Swiss army,
which remained up to its death one of the best supports of the non-military
national service.
1923: For a service of replacement in Switzerland.
1924: First peace camp in Switzerland: Ormonts.
1924-1925: Ceresole be established in Zurich and
becomes Secretary of the " Swiss Centre of Action for the Peace ".
1925: Soméo, a big service of help.
1926-1937: In Chaux-de-Fond and in India
1926: Ceresole is named a professor of mathematics
to the college of La Chaux-de-Fonds. From this year, he dedicates his spare
time and his holidays to numerous campaigns of the civil service in different
countries. Meetings with Charles Peguy and Auguste Forel.
1928: Construction camp in Lichtenstein.
1930: A service camp in the south of France.
1931: A construction camp in the Wales. Visit of
the Mahatma Gandhi in Switzerland. Ceresole is the interpreter during his
speech to Pully, near Lausanne.
1932: Condemnations of concensious objectors.
1934: Departure for India. He goes in Bihar,
destroyed by a terrible earthquake, and begins alteration works, with some
volunteers and a troop of farmers of the part of the country.
1934-1937: This service ends in the reconstruction
of seven villages - of which to shelter about 600 families - with dug and
built wells, quite new sanitary installations in the region. During these
years, Ceresole means spending the summer in Switzerland, to recover a
health and maintain the contact with those that support the effort.
During his stays in India, Ceresole meets Gandhi.
When he returns definitively, in 1937, Pierre Ceresole passes by the United
States to attend a world congress of the Quakers. He is then received in
the " Ssociety of the Friends".
1937-1945: Prisoner of the Eternal
1937: In anticipation of the threatening war, the
military authorities had ordered exercises of obscuring everywhere in Switzerland.
Pierre Ceresole refuses deliberately to obey the orders. Scandal. Judgment.
Prison. So a new stubborn effort of protest against the war begins for
him.
1939: " Not, it is not the war of the right and
the justice, it is, for those that do it, the war of the bitter idiocy
and the despair. " Disease and convalescence.
1940: Faithful to his ideal, he gives up, twice,
the inheritance of his brothers; he offers it in favour of works of mutual
aid, but not in favour of the international civil service which he considers
as a part of himself.
New refusals to darken. New stays in prison. In Easter,
an appeal to the Church: "You say to me: Christ is raisen. Never I shall
believe that you believe it, if I do not see in your life the strength
of mind attacking the problem which nothing else can resolve."
1941: Pierre Ceresole has between hands a circular
of the staff of the Swiss army: "articles and insistent comments on the
horrors of the war to show the inhuman, anti-Christian and anti-social
character of it, are censored". This text was accompanied with the note
"not intended for the publication". Ceresole reveals the text and protests
publicly. Prison in Neuchâtel.
On December 26, 1941, Pierre Ceresole marries Miss
Lise David, her relative, and enthusiastic friend of always, who shared
his ideal and its fights. Their small house of Daley, nested in the sides
of the hillside which dominates Lavaux, in front of a magnificent sight,
became, for the large pacifist family, a brilliant centre, never darkened
neither by the disease, nor by the times of prison which, on six occasions,
interrupted the course of their married life.
The fight continues by the writing and the action.
One month after his marriage, Pierre already spent some days in prison.
Twice, in 1942 then in 1944, Pierre Ceresole, after
long internal debates, tried to pass in Germany and was at once arrested.
Imprisoned to Shaffhouse. Imprisoned three months in Bois-Mermet, the prison
of Lausanne.
The lack of exercise and fortifying food deteriorates
so much an already precarious health that, same evening of his return to
home, Pierre Ceresole is struck by the disease which took him away some
months later, on October 23, 1945, in the evening of a magnificent day
which he had spent, surrounded with friends, on the terrace of his small
house.
The last matter which Pierre Ceresole wrote is a
prayer:
Lord, that your Spirit inspires
us and guides us; that your will is done.
Give us the force to carry
out our task without pride, without egoism, without laziness and without
cowardice.
Give us the force to resist
to the temptations, to forgive the others as we would want that widely
one forgives us.
Give us to answer the insults
only by doubling our efforts never to offend others.
Lord, we want to listen
to your call and to obey it, to understand) it always more sharply.
Give us the honesty to examine
with the same scruple and the same severity our own actions and thoughts
as those of the others.
Free us from the fanaticism
and from the pride which prevent us from welcoming the truth also by the
teaching and the experience of the others.
Give us the quiet confidence
which you will know yourself to reveal to others your truth and your justice,
as we believe that you revealed them partially to ourselves.
Learn us to collaborate
wholeheartedly, without self-interest, dirty selfish ambition, and without
narrow-minded vanity, in the common search for the truth.
Teach us the pity and the
real effort to relieve the miseries of others.
Give us the quiet, necessary
courage in any circumstances, and the nature to the one that dedicated
you his life.
That at the top of the existence
where the man and the woman meet, that is at first the fascinated respect
for the true values of the life: at first your truth and your love.
That no defeat, fall or
relapses never takes away us from you; that in the middle of all our miseries,
your love seizes us and bit by bit bring us nearer to you.