Von Suttner was looking for a "better ideal", according to French journalist Antoine Jacob, whose new biography "Bertha la Paix" ("Bertha of Peace") will be published next week.
More than a century later, her 1906 Nobel Peace Prize recipient speech -- in which she said happiness is developed in times of peace -- has lost nothing of its acuity.
"Fortresses are being erected, submarines built, whole areas mined, airships tested for use in war; and all this with such zeal -- as if to attack one's neighbour were the most inevitable and important function of a state," von Suttner told her mostly male listeners.
- Provocative work -
She was born into an aristocratic family in the Austrian Empire in 1843.
Burdened by her mother's gambling debts, she became a governess and music teacher in the von Suttner household and married the family's son Arthur, who like her refused to conform to norms.
As journalist and novel writer, the polyglot published 60 short stories, a few essays and 19 novels, including the influential and provocative anti-war novel "Lay Down Your Arms" in 1889.
Thanks to her aristocratic origins, her energy and determination, and her talent for mobilising goodwill, von Suttner became one of the leaders of the international peace movement.
"Daughter of a general, she was raised in an environment where falling at the front with God's approval was an honour," her biographer Jacob told AFP.
"We have to realise how far she came."
With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, von Suttner's reflections on respect for international law, disarmament and multilateralism are "more relevant than ever", said Norwegian Nobel historian Asle Sveen.
"The international order advocated by Suttner and the peace movement is once again disintegrating," Sveen said.
"Her admonishing message 'Lay Down Your Arms' is more relevant than ever in the face of nuclear threat gestures," Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg told AFP.
Her cosmopolitan, liberal and anti-clerical worldview, however, earned her fierce enmity in nationalist circles, where she became derided as "Bertha of the Jews".
She died in June 1914 at the age of 71, just before World War I broke out.
- 'Decisive role' -
Von Suttner also played "a decisive role" in convincing her friend and patron, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, to award a prize for peace, according to Jacob.
But since the prestigious prize was first awarded in 1901, only 18 women have obtained the distinction, compared to 92 men.
The second woman to win it was American Jane Addams, 26 years after von Suttner.
Despite her prominence, which included being given a private audience by then US president Theodore Roosevelt, von Suttner did not have the right to vote -- and had to be accompanied by her husband when she travelled.
"Among all these men, she tried to play a role completely contrary to the dominant way of thinking and without anyone pushing her," Jacob told AFP.
Her legacy in Austria also had its ups and downs.
The Nazi regime, which annexed Austria in 1938, burned her books, and a Vienna square inaugurated in her honour was renamed in 1957 after poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
But in 1966 her image was printed on the 1,000-schilling banknote.
In 1986, a small Vienna street was named after her.
And today she appears on the two-euro coin of Austria, a neutral country which is host to several UN bodies.
Fifty years ago, 'total fiasco' marred Nobel Peace Prize
Oslo (AFP) Sept 28, 2023 -
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded 50 years ago to then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Vietnam's Le Duc Tho remains one of the most controversial Nobels ever.
One of the laureates declined the prize, the other didn't dare travel to Oslo to collect it and two of the five committee members quit in an uproar.
"A total fiasco," in the words of Norwegian Nobel historian Asle Sveen.
"It's the worst prize in the entire history of the Nobel Peace Prize," he told AFP.
The announcement sent shockwaves around the world on October 16, 1973: the Norwegian Nobel Committee had awarded the prize to Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam's chief peace negotiator, "for jointly having negotiated a ceasefire in Vietnam in 1973".
Earlier that year, on January 27, the pair had signed the Paris Peace Accords calling for an armistice in Vietnam.
"It wasn't a peace agreement but a truce that rapidly started to crack," Sveen said.
Perhaps above all, it was an opportunity for America to withdraw its troops from the quagmire in Vietnam, amid vehement anti-war sentiment at home.
The prize sparked instant controversy.
Two disgruntled members of the Nobel committee resigned, a first in the prize's history.
In the United States, the New York Times published an editorial about the "Nobel War Prize", while Harvard University professors wrote to the Norwegian parliament criticising a choice that was "more than a person with a normal sense of justice can take".
American satirical singer Tom Lehrer said that with the prize, "political satire became obsolete".
Kissinger, now 100, was a particular target of criticism, accused of causing the war to spill over into neighbouring Cambodia and ordering massive bombings of Hanoi to ramp up the pressure at the negotiating table.
He was also under fire for having backed Augusto Pinochet's coup in Chile against democratically elected President Salvador Allende.
- 'A bad decision' -
Less well-known, Le Duc Tho was also a hardliner who was already laying the groundwork for the invasion of South Vietnam two years later, in 1975.
He is to this day the only person to decline the Nobel Peace Prize.
"When the Paris agreement on Vietnam is respected, guns are silenced and peace is really restored in South Vietnam, I will consider the acceptance of this prize," he wrote in a telegram to the Peace Prize committee.
Meanwhile, fearing he would be met by angry protests, Kissinger insisted he had to attend a NATO meeting and was unable to pick up the prize in Oslo.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he tried to send his prize back to the committee, which refused it.
According to the current head of the Nobel Institute Olav Njolstad, the committee's archived deliberations, recently declassified after 50 years, suggest it hoped the prize would provide the impetus for a lasting peace.
Furthermore, that peace in Vietnam would ease East-West tensions in the rest of the world and help thaw the Cold War.
But, Njolstad admits, "I tend to think it was a bad decision. Usually it's not a good idea to give prizes to people who have been in charge of war."
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