Bart de Ligt - Life and Work - Later Activities

Later Activities

In 1918, De Ligt married the Swiss activist Catharina Lydia van Rossem, with whom he had a son. He was imprisoned in 1921 for organizing a general strike to gain the release of Herman Groenendaal, a jailed conscientious objector who had gone on a hunger strike. Later that year, he founded the IAMB (International Anti-Militarism Bureau). As he was becoming more involved with the work of the League of Nations, in 1925 he moved to Geneva, where he remained for the rest of his life. However, De Ligt became sceptical about the League's efforts, viewing it as how the colonial powers maintained an unjust world order. De Ligt instead regarded the Brussels Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism, held in 1927 as more representative of the world's population. At a meeting of the War Resisters International in 1934, he presented his now-famous "Plan of a Campaign Against All Wars and Preparation for War". (The full text of which may be found in The Conquest of Violence.) De Ligt also took a firm stand against fascism and Nazism in the 1930s.

De Ligt's last work was a biography of Desiderius Erasmus, whom Van Den Dungen argues De Ligt strongly identified with: "He recognized in Erasmus a kindred spirit who.. had fought,..not only against war and violence, but also for the idea of free thought and for the liberation of humanity".

In 1938, after a brief illness, he collapsed from exhaustion and died at the railway station in Nantes.