Ferdinand Buisson was a French Nobel Peace Prize winner (1927), academic, pacifist and socialist politician. He was born in 1841 in Paris and died in 1932 in Thieuloy-Saint-Antoine, France. He has completed his secondary education at the Lycee Condorcet and then studied philosophy.
From 1866 to 1870, he went into exile in Switzerland as he refused to oath to the Empire. He served as a Professor at the University of Neuchatel. In 1867, he participated in three conferences of the League of Peace and Freedom. He returned to France, when the third republic was established and became the head of an orphanage in Paris in 1870.
In 1879, Ferdinand Buisson was appointed as the Director of Primary Education, and brought significant improvements in rules and regulation of teaching. In 1890, he was appointed as the professor of education at Sorbonne and in 1896, he was called the chair of Education at the Sorbonne.
Mr. Buisson supervised the writing and design of the rules of secularism in France, and in 1905 he served as the chairman of the parliamentary committee for writing the text of the law of separation of church and state. He led the League of Education from 1902 to 1906 and created a secular education. Also, he took part in the establishment of the French League for Human Rights and directed it from 1913 to 1926.
Buisson spent efforts for reconciliation between France and Germany. He traveled to Berlin and invited German pacifist to Paris in order to normalize the relationship between the two nations. In 1927, he was awarded the Noble Peace Prize along with a German professor, Ludwig Quidde.