Albert Roper: Architect of the 1919
Paris Convention
Albert
Roper was born in 1891 in a Breton family. In 1914, he had just undertaken law
studies when he served in World War I, initially enlisted in the infantry and
later, in 1916, transferred to the Flying Corps. Shot down by the DCA in May
1918, seriously wounded, left for death, he recovered the use of his legs for
one dazzling international career.
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Dr. Albert Roper |
At
the end of WW I, Albert Roper became Air Expert at the Cabinet of the
Under-Secretary of State for Aeronautics; upon Roper’s advice, French President
Clemenceau proposed in January 1919 to create an Aeronautical Commission under
the auspices of the Paris Peace Conference to study the establishment of an organization
charged to regulate all the problems raised by the imminent development of
civil aviation.
It
is there that the legal dimension and aeronautical experience of Albert Roper,
as secretary of this Commission, appeared. He conceived the twelve fundamental
principles (using the groundwork laid at the 1910 Diplomatic Conference) that
constituted the basis of the Convention relating to the Regulation of Aerial
Navigation signed in Paris on 13 October 1919. This Convention included the
provision for the creation of the International Commission on Air Navigation
(ICAN), of which Roper became the Secretary General, before occupying the same
position for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) created
shortly after the Second World War. It is to say that Albert Roper crossed, as
an actor, one of the richest periods of the aeronautical history.
Following the signature of the
Convention of 13 October 1919 by the allied and associated Powers taking part
in the Peace Conference of Versailles, the governments of the twenty-seven
committed countries still had to ratify the aforementioned Convention.
Accordingly, Albert Roper was at the origin of a series of meetings which were
named at the beginning Conférences anglo-franco-belges and took later
the too broad title of Conférences aéronautiques internationales. The first eleven of these Conferences
were held between 1920 and 1922 in Paris, London and Brussels until the
Convention came into force on 11 July 1922.
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Commercial cover sent to Albert Ropert |
In his biography: Un homme et des ailes, Albert Roper refers several times to
ICAN as his Commission! As the
first and only Secretary General of ICAN, he was among the first to defend the
principles of world cooperation in civil aviation and the general interests of
aviation at international conferences.
At the
time of the marriage of Albert Roper’s parents, the scribe of the Town Hall of
Dinan, France, had spelled ROPER, instead of ROPERT, the name of
his father. As this marriage booklet was thereafter used for the establishment
of Albert’s birth certificate, his name was written without final T on all his
official papers; however, Albert Roper always signed with T, so that at the
college and the regiment, everyone knew him under the name of ROPERT. It was
only at the end of the 1914-18 war that he decided to give up any procedure to
correct his official papers and birth certificate. Since then, he signed ROPER
without T, surprising everyone.
However,
the envelope shown here, sent from Argentina in 1947, spelled Roper’s name with
an ending letter T. This is extremely interesting when one knows
the origin of the error in the name.
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