114 J.-A. PEMBERTON
speech delivered by Briand in the French Senate on January 15, 1929 in
defence of the Pact of Paris. To much applause and after having observed
that the adversaries of the Pact of Paris in the United States Senate were
afraid ‘to see America absorbed by the moral power of Geneva’ and that
a critic of it in the French Senate was afraid that the LON would be
‘absorbed by the moral power of America,’ Briand declared the follow-
ing: a moment will come when people will perceive that however distant
the nations be from one another, ‘there is not a peace of Europe and a
peace of America, but a peace of the entire world.’ On each side of the
wall and immediately below this quotation and the name of its author,
were reliefs outlining the world’s continents and other land masses.
Shaded in were those areas occupied by countries which were not mem-
bers of the LON. Inscribed on tablets placed along the length of the
base of the wall, was the text of the Covenant of the League of Nations:
in English on one side and in French on the other. In the very middle
of the wall and also immediately below the Briand quotation, were the
letters SDN: the acronym derived from the French name for the LON:
the Société des Nations. Below these letters, was a representation of the
LON’s new headquarters in the parc de l’Ariana in Geneva.^106
Located directly in front of the letters SDN and the representation
of the Palais des Nations, was the Monument de la Paix. This monu-
ment took the form of a bronze and green column in the tradition,
as Rivoirard notes, of a structure which came to symbolise the pax
Romana: the column of Trajan. Fifty metres in height and around five
metres in diameter, the column was embroidered with olive leaves and
bore in letters of gold the name of the IPC/RUP rendered in six differ-
ent languages.^107 The column was crowned with a huge ‘Star of Peace’.
(^106) Aristide Briand’s speech in the French Senate of January 15, 1929, is reproduced in
the following: Christophe Bellon, ‘Aristide Briand et la “mise universelle de la guerre hors
la loi”,’ Parlement[s], Revue d’histoire politique 2, no. 2 (2004): 143–49, 145, https://
http://www.cairn.info/revue-parlement[s]1-2-psge-138.htm. The quotation that appeared on
the front wall of the Pavillion de la Paix was as follows: ‘Il n’y a pas une paix de l’Europe, et
une paix de l’Amérique, mais une paix du monde entier’ (ibid). See also Challet-Bailhache,
ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855– 1937 , 91.
(^107) Rivoirard, ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ 308. See also Challet-Bailhache, ed.,
Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855– 1937 , 91. For the architectural and
stylistic details concerning the Monument de la Paix, see Société pour le Développement
du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, Paris 1937, 28. See also Challet-
Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855– 1937 , 91.