The 'merchant of death' obituary said to inspire the Peace Prize may never have existed
A popular tale says that in 1888 a French paper mistook Ludvig Nobel's death for Alfred's and damned him as a merchant of death, shaming him into endowing a peace prize. Investigators have failed to find either the obituary or the newspaper usually named.
Alfred Nobel, a chemical engineer who made his fortune from dynamite and the military propellant ballistite, died in 1896 without explaining why peace sat beside chemistry, physics, medicine and literature in his will. His explosives were used violently in his own lifetime, and he helped turn the Swedish ironworks Bofors into an arms maker, so some scholars see the prize as a kind of atonement. The Norwegian Nobel Committee credits a different influence: his friendship with the activist Bertha von Suttner, who later won the prize herself.
A second puzzle is geography. Every other Nobel is handled in Sweden, yet the will gave the peace award to a five-member committee chosen by Norway's parliament, at a time when Norway was ruled in union with Sweden. The committee's own guess is that Nobel saw Norway as less militaristic, and its parliament was then closely involved in efforts to settle disputes through arbitration. The ceremony has moved around Oslo, from parliament to the Nobel Institute to the university and, since 1990, to City Hall, always on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel's death, before the King.
Nominating is easier than it sounds. Thousands of people qualify, including national legislators, senior professors in fields like law and history, and past laureates, so being called a nominee means little. In 1939 a Swedish parliamentarian even nominated Adolf Hitler as satire, mocking the sincere nomination of Neville Chamberlain. Deliberations stay sealed for at least 50 years. The first prizes in 1901 were worth 150,782 kronor each; the 2026 award was 12 million.
The winners' list has quirks. The Red Cross committee in Geneva has collected it on three occasions, and 19 women had won by 2023, more than in any other Nobel category. Lê Đức Thọ remains the only person to turn it down voluntarily. Critics, Christopher Hitchens among them, have long accused the prize of rewarding aspirations instead of achievements.
Source: Nobel Peace Prize
