1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Passy, Frédéric

PASSY, FRÉDÉRIC (1822-1912), French economist and pacifist, was born in 1822 and was a nephew of the economist Hippolyte Passy, finance minister to Louis Philippe and to Louis Napoleon's Republican Government. Under his uncle's influence Frédéric devoted himself to economic studies, and to that end gave up the appointment as auditor of the Conseil de Droit, which he had held during 1846-49. In 1860 he began to teach political economy both in Paris and in the provinces. His first work on the subject, Mélanges économiques, appeared in 1857. True to his republican principles, he refused to be reconciled to the Second Empire, and remained, therefore, ineligible for any Government post. He was an ardent free-trader and an admirer of Cobden. In 1867 he founded the Ligue Internationale de la Paix, afterwards known as the Société Française pour l'Arbitrage entre Nations, and for the rest of his life he devoted himself to the promotion of international peace. From 1881 to 1899 he was deputy for the Seine department. In 1901 he received the Nobel Prize, sharing it with M. Dunant. His published works include De la Propriété Intellectuelle (1859); Leçons d'économie politique (1860-61); La Démocratie et l'Instruction (1864); L'Histoire du Travail (1873); Malthus et sa Doctrine (1868); La Solidarité du Travail et du Capital (1875) and Le Petit Poucet du 19ième Siècle: George Stephenson (1881). He died in Paris June 12 1912.