An emblematic European figure
In many respects , her childhood was European 2 , and she was raised between the Protestant and Jewish minorities , which strongly supported the republican model . Louise Weiss was born in Arras in 1893 , into a Dreyfusard , upper-bourgeois family , and her Alsatian and Protestant roots came from her father , Paul Weiss . He was a graduate of the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines , Paris , and he left his position in the Ministry of Public Works for the private sector , where he felt more useful . Louise Weiss ’ mother Jeanne Javal was from a wealthy Jewish bourgeois family with relatives in Alsace , Germany and Austria . At a very young age , when her father took her on visits , or almost pilgrimages , to Alsace , she came to understand the resentment that existed between France and Germany .
At the age of 21 , and without daring to tell her father , she passed the agrégation teacher training examination in arts subjects , an extremely rare accomplishment for a woman at that time .
During World War I , she served as a nurse in a military hospital in western France and saw her brothers and her parents painfully separated on either side of the River Rhine . It was also during the First World War conflict that she wrote her first articles under a pseudonym and , at a salon in Paris , met Milan Štefánik , a Slovak astronomer serving in the French army as a pilot . This first ill-fated love story had a major impact on her campaigning , prompting her to espouse the cause of Milan Štefánik and Edvard Beneš , the leader of Czech emigrants in Paris : she instantly embraced their aspirations for a future independent Czechoslovakia that would be free from
2 . L . Weiss , Mémoires d ’ une Européenne , volume 1 , Une petite fille du siècle 1893- 1919 , A . Michel , Paris , 1978 . Also of note are the biographies written by Célia Bertin ( Louise Weiss , A . Michel , Paris , 1999 ) and by Evelyne Wrinkler ( Louise Weiss , une journaliste-voyageuse au cœur de la construction européenne , L ’ Harmattan , Paris , 2017 ).
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