Arturo de Marcoartu ( Bilbao, 1829 – San Sebastián, 1904), [1]: 250 XII Lord of the House of Marcoartu, was a noble Spanish pacifist, engineer and senator. [1]: 49 He was the first Spanish nominee for a Nobel Prize (the Nobel Peace Prize), and the only Spaniard in the late 19th-century peace movement. [1]: 50
His most notable work, and the beginning of his actions in the peace movement, was a 1876 book named Internationalism. [1]: 49 In 1878, he travelled to half-a-dozen Central European capitals to argue for organised peace. [1]: 49
De Marcoartu was a follower of Richard Cobden's free trade beliefs, attending meetings of the Cobden Club in London. [2] In 1889, de Marcoartu sponsored an essay competition on the "burdens of production" caused by the high taxation of militarism, with a winning prize of £150. [3] Accepting Spanish, French, and English entries, the judges for the French submissions were Léon Say, Frédéric Passy, and Jules Simon. [3] As the head of the Spanish Engineering Corps, he was involved in transferring Latin American concessions to the United States. [4]