Mathilde Paravicini


Mathilde Paravicini was a Swiss philanthropist and a pioneer of the children’s trains.

Early life

Mathilde Paravicini was the youngest of five daughters of the Basel merchant family Emanuel Leonhard and Elise Paravicini-Heusler. The Paravicini family were religious refugees who escaped to Basel before the Valtellina massacre of 1620, where they became part of the city’s patriciate. The humanitarian tradition of Basel’s patricians dates back to the 16th century.
After her father lost his fortune in the 1880s—which included the ironworks in Lucelle—the family had to adapt to more modest circumstances. The five daughters learned humility and helpfulness, and their father, unusually for the time, ensured that each of them received a practical vocational education.

Career

After school, Paravicini spent a year in Neuchâtel to improve her French and then moved to Paris, where she completed a multi-year apprenticeship as a dressmaker. Back in Basel, she opened a tailoring workshop offering sewing courses, which she ran from 1898 to 1948, alongside her growing humanitarian work.

First World War

During the First World War, she gained international recognition for her charitable activities related to the transport of around half a million wounded soldiers and evacuees from occupied France. Neutral Switzerland served as a transit country where returning soldiers and civilians from Germany, France, the United States, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were provided with food, clothing, and medical care at the border stations of Schaffhausen, Basel, and Geneva before quickly continuing their journey. Paravicini worked on prisoner-of-war exchanges, in the Basel relief office for war hostages, and on the organizing committee for evacuation trains, assisting refugee women, children, and the elderly in Schaffhausen and Basel.
In 1916 she co-founded and became the first president of the Association for Women's Suffrage in Basel and Surroundings. The vice president was Georgine Gerhard, founder of the Basel section of the Swiss Relief Organization for Emigrant Children.
In the summer of 1917 she organized children’s trains for children of Swiss expatriates in Germany, personally accompanying the journeys. The association Swiss Relief, Holiday Action for Swiss Children Abroad sought host families and funding. Children suffering from tuberculosis were accommodated in mountain sanatoriums.
After the war, she continued the program with the foundation Pro Juventute, arranging annual holidays for thousands of expatriate Swiss children. During the famine in Vienna, about twenty aid organizations were founded in Switzerland; in 1920 they were coordinated by the newly established umbrella organization Union internationale de secours aux enfants under the patronage of the ICRC. The Swiss Central Committee for Destitute Foreign Children developed the criteria for these children’s trains.

Great Depression

During the Great Depression, the workers’ relief organization led by Regina Kägi-Fuchsmann collaborated with the SHEK, founded in 1933 by Nettie Sutro-Katzenstein. From 1934 to 1939, Paravicini was responsible for organizing the children’s trains from Paris. In 1939 she helped establish the Swiss Women's Auxiliary Service.

Second World War

During the Second World War, Paravicini coordinated, in cooperation with the Swiss Working Group for War-Damaged Children and later the Children’s relief of the Swiss Red Cross, the transport of about 65,000 war-affected French children between 1940 and 1945. She was the only Swiss citizen granted permission to cross the Demarcation Line into occupied Paris to collect children from northern France and Bordeaux.
In Basel, she assisted Georgine Gerhard in the activities of the local SHEK section, supported by her extended family. Her nephew, Chief Physician Anton Christ, treated the children free of charge at the SHEK home “Waldeck” in Langenbruck.
When the children’s trains were halted in late 1942, she continued her humanitarian work in the railway station center of the Friends of Young Women, serving as its president from 1921 until her death. During the war, the FJM “Stübli” on the first floor of Basel station became a key hub of refugee assistance.

Later life and death

After the war, she organized children’s trains across Europe for the Swiss Donation, tirelessly accompanying and caring for children in the rough third-class carriages. Paravicini died in 1954 at the age of 79.

Honours

  • On 2 September 1919, she and her sister Helene were awarded the rank of Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour in Basel for their role in the repatriation of evacuated French citizens.
  • On 2 February 1922, the “French Monument” by sculptor Paul Landowski was inaugurated on Promenadenstieg in Schaffhausen to commemorate the evacuation and care of French civilians during the First World War.
  • In 1942, she became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel’s Faculty of Medicine.
  • In 1946, the French government promoted her to Officier of the Legion of Honour.
  • On 27 June 1948, the Monument of Gratitude “The Mother Figure” by French sculptor Georges Salendres was unveiled to the sound of the Marseillaise as France’s tribute to the women of the Swiss Red Cross who cared for many French children.
  • In 1964, the city of Basel named a street in the Gellert district after her, the first time a woman received such an honor.
  • From 2 April to 31 May 2014, the University of Basel hosted the exhibition Forgotten Basel Woman – Mathilde Paravicini.