La Poste France Romain Rolland

LA POSTE FRANCE on 23 February 1985 issued a First Day Cover commemorative stamp of writer and lifelong pacifist Romain Rolland. The stamp carried a face value of 1F 70c + 40c. An Intaglio printing method was used to render a purplish red and dark purple stamp. It was designed and engraved by Jacques Jubert. A total of 2,500,000 copies were printed.

Romain Rolland (1866 - 1944) was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings".

Romain Rolland was a lifelong pacifist. He was one of the few major French writers to retain his pacifist internationalist values; he moved to Switzerland. He protested against the first World War in "Au-dessus de la mêlée" [fr] (1915), "Above the Battle" (Chicago, 1916). In 1924, his book on "Gandhi" contributed to the Indian nonviolent leader's reputation and the two men met in 1931. 

He counted Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Joseph Stalin, Hermann Hesse amongst his friends. He corresponded with Sigmund Freud; they shared a mutual admiration for each other's work and remained friends until Freud's death. He assisted Richard Strauss in the French translation of his opera "Salome".  He intervened on behalf of Russian writers to request leniency from Stalin. Hermann Hesse dedicated his "Siddhartha" to Rolland.

Source: Wikipedia