Gonzague de Reynold (15 June 1880 – 9 April 1970) was a Swiss writer, historian, and right-wing political activist. Over the course of his six-decade career, he wrote more than thirty books outlining his traditionalist Catholic and Swiss nationalist worldview.

Gonzague de Reynold
Gonzague de Reynold, pendant la Première Guerre mondiale
Born	15 July 1880  Fribourg
Died	9 April 1970  (aged 89)
Occupation	Historian, writer
Signature

De Reynold won the Schiller Prize in 1955, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.[1] With René de Weck and Léon Savary, he formed the troika of Fribourg writers of the early twentieth century.

Life

A member of the minor Fribourgeois nobility, de Reynold was born at his family's sixteenth-century chateau in Cressier. He studied at Collège Saint-Michel, the Sorbonne, and the Institut Catholique de Paris before returning to Switzerland to teach philosophy and French literature at the University of Bern and the University of Fribourg.[2] His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics.[3]

Consistently "sceptical of liberal democracy and scathing about modernity in all its forms", de Reynold devoted his life to the promotion of Swiss nationalist and right-wing, traditionalist Catholic causes.[4][5] In letters, he described longtime Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar as a friend[6] and paid a personal visit to Benito Mussolini in 1933.[7]

Although mostly active in Swiss affairs, in de Reynold's view his Fribourgeois, Swiss, Catholic, and European identities were inextricably linked, and he devoted two decades of his career to international affairs in service of this belief. He served as the Swiss delegate to and rapporteur of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, a body of the League of Nations and precursor to UNESCO, from its inception in 1922 to its demise in 1939.[7] Along with other prominent Catholics at the League, including Oskar Halecki and Secretaries-General Eric Drummond and Joseph Avenol, de Reynold used his position to promote the interests and values of the Holy See and the Catholic Church, in opposition to the more prevalent secular tendencies within the international organisation.[4]

Bibliography

References

Further reading

• Mattioli, Aram (1997). Gonzague de Reynold: ideologue d'une Suisse autoritaire. Fribourg.
• Renoliet, Jean-Jacques (1999). L'UNESCO Oubliée: la Société des Nations et la coopération intellectuelle 1919–1946. Paris.
• Shine, Cormac (2018). "Papal Diplomacy by Proxy? Catholic Internationalism at the League of Nations' International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation". The Journal of Ecclesiastical History. 69 (4): 785–805. doi:10.1017/S0022046917002731.
• Trinchan, Philippe (1992). "Gonzague de Reynold et l'Union catholique d'études internationales". Annales fribourgeoises: Revue fribourgeoise d'histoire, d'art et d'archéologie.

External links

• Gonzague de Reynold, Radio Télévision Suisse archival video of de Reynold giving a tour of his ancestral home in 1957.
• Works by or about Gonzague de Reynold at Internet Archive
• Publications by and about Gonzague de Reynold in the catalogue Helveticat of the Swiss National Library
• "Literary estate of Gonzague de Reynold". HelveticArchives. Swiss National Library.