With Donald Trump furiously, ineptly, and fraudulently campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, it may interest liberals—the classical variety, libertarians—to know that the first Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 1901, was shared by one of their own. This was a man who espoused the same political-economic philosophy as his fellow Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat and Englishman Richard Cobden. Its pillars were freedom, unrestricted trade, and peace.

That man was Frédéric Passy (1822-1912). Passy shared the prize with Henry Dunant, founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross and originator of the Geneva Convention. That was no small honor. Passy was cited “for his lifelong work for international peace conferences, diplomacy and arbitration.”

According to the Nobel Foundation’s website:

 In both age and prominence, he was the dean of the international peace movement. Both as an economist and as a politician, he maintained that free trade between independent nations promoted peace. Passy founded the first French Peace Society, which held a congress in Paris during the 1878 World Exhibition. As an independent leftist republican in the French Chamber of Deputies, he opposed France’s colonial policy because it did not accord with the ideals of free trade.

Passy was also one of the founders of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an organization for cooperation between the elected representatives of different countries. Despite his age, Passy kept up his work for peace after 1901.

Don’t let the word leftist in the first paragraph throw you. Since the French Revolution, members of the national legislature who opposed the monarchical ancien regime sat on the left side of the chamber; defenders sat on the right. Thus the “left’ included socialists like Proudhon and individualist free-market radicals like Bastiat. It was a historical quirk.

Passy’s more in-depth biography at the Nobel site states:

An admirer of Richard Cobden, he became an ardent free trader, believing that free trade would draw nations together as partners in a common enterprise, result in disarmament, and lead to the abandonment of war. Passy lectured on economic subjects in virtually every city and university of any consequence in France and continued a stream of publications on economic subjects.

If Trump wants the prize badly enough, maybe he should embrace free trade. The free-trade movement routinely linked peace, liberty (including property), and unrestricted global commerce as an integrated program. “If goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will,” a liberal once said. The connection should require no explanation. Cobden, who with John Bright brought an end to Britain’s hunger-imposing grain tariffs, eloquently pointed out that trade and violence were opposites.

The Nobel biographical essay notes that, like Cobden, Passy worked to substitute arbitration for war and old-fashioned balance-of-power diplomacy. In those days, that was a standard liberal principle. As a member of France’s Chamber of Deputies from 1881-89, he staunchly opposed colonization.

Passy was also a friend of the Belgian libertarian economist Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), author of “The Production of Security” (1849), apparently the first explicitly anarchocapitalist essay, which applied competitive market principles to rights protection. In 1904 Passy wrote a prefatory letter to the English edition of Molinari’s book The Society of the Future (sometimes translated as The Society of To-morrow, first published in French in 1899). Passy praised Molinari as

the doyen of our economists—I should say of our liberal economists—of the men with whom, though, alas! few in number, I have been happy to stand side by side during more than half a century. Their principles were proclaimed and defended in England through the mouths of Adam Smith, Fox, Cobden, Gladstone, and Bright. In France they were championed by Quesnay, Turgot, Say, Michel Chevalier, Laboulaye, and Bastiat. And my belief grows yearly stronger that, but for these principles, the societies of the present would be without wealth, peace, material greatness, or moral dignity.

The Nobel website essay concludes:

Passy’s thought and action had unity. International peace was the goal, arbitration of disputes in international politics and free trade in goods the means, the national units making up the Interparliamentary Union the initiating agents, the people the sovereign constituency. Through his prodigious labors over a period of half a century in the peace movement, Passy became known as the apostle of peace.

Freedom’s advocates should rejoice at Monsieur Passy’s deserved recognition as a leading peace-mongering free-trader.