page_title: Pour le Mérite
section_title: Recipients of the Civil class
hierarchical_section_title: Pour le Mérite / Notable recipients / Recipients of the Civil class
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Öffentliche Sitzung der Mitglieder des Ordens Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste 2014 im Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin
context_page_description: The Pour le Mérite is an order of merit established in 1740 by King Frederick II of Prussia. The Pour le Mérite was awarded as both a military and civil honour and ranked, along with the Order of the Black Eagle, the Order of the Red Eagle and the House Order of Hohenzollern, among the highest orders of merit in the Kingdom of Prussia. After 1871, when the various German kingdoms, grand duchies, duchies, principalities and Hanseatic city states had come together under Prussian leadership to form the federally structured German Empire, the Prussian honours gradually assumed, at least in public perception, the status of honours of Imperial Germany, even though many honours of the various German states continued to be awarded.
  The Pour le Mérite was an honour conferred both for military and civil services. It was awarded strictly as a recognition of extraordinary personal achievement, rather than as a general marker of social status or a courtesy-honour, although certain restrictions of social class and military rank were applied. The order was secular, and membership endured for the remaining lifetime of the recipient, unless renounced or revoked.
context_section_description: Among famous recipients of the civil class of the Pour le Mérite in the first group of awards in 1842 were Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Jakob Grimm, Felix Mendelssohn, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Foreign recipients in the "class of 1842" included François-René de Chateaubriand, Louis Daguerre, Michael Faraday, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Franz Liszt.
  Later recipients included Thomas Babington Macaulay (1853), John C. Frémont (1860), Theodor Mommsen (1868), Charles Darwin (1868), Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander (1874), Thomas Carlyle (1874) (who never accepted any other honor), Max Müller (1874), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1875), William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1884), Heinrich von Treitschke (1887), Johannes Brahms (1887), Giuseppe Verdi (1887), William Henry Flower and Hubert von Herkomer (1899), Camille Saint-Saëns (1901), Luigi Cremona (1903), John Singer Sargent (1908), Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1910), Otto Lessing (sculptor) (1911), Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1911), Sir William Ramsay (1911), Max Planck (1915), and Rudolph Sohm (1916).
  New members of the revised order in 1923 included Albert Einstein (1923), Gerhart Hauptmann (1923), Richard Strauss (1924), Wilhelm Furtwängler (1929), antiwar sculptor Käthe Kollwitz (1929) – the first female recipient of the honor – and Ernst Barlach (1933).
  Among those inducted in 1952 were Otto Heinrich Warburg, Otto Hahn, Paul Hindemith, Reinhold Schneider and Emil Nolde.
  Later recipients include Arthur Compton (1954), Hermann Hesse (1954), Albert Schweitzer (1954), Thomas Mann (1955), Oskar Kokoschka (1955), Carl Orff (1956), Erwin Schrödinger (1956), Thornton Wilder (1956), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1956), Werner Heisenberg (1957), Gerhard Ritter (1957), Lise Meitner (1957), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1957), Percy Ernst Schramm (1958), Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1961), Karl Jaspers (1964), Otto Klemperer (1967), Carl Zuckmayer (1967), Henry Moore (1972), Raymond Aron (1973), George F. Kennan (1976), Friedrich Hayek (1977), Karl Popper (1980), Emil Schumacher (1982), Eugène Ionesco (1983), Hans Bethe (1984), Gordon A. Craig (1990), Carlos Kleiber (1990), Witold Lutosławski (1993), Fritz Stern (1994), Rudolf Mößbauer (1996), Umberto Eco (1998), Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1999), Bronisław Geremek (2002), Wim Wenders (2005), James J. Sheehan (2006) and Svante Pääbo (2008).
  More recent recipients were Gidon Kremer (2016), Emmanuelle Charpentier (2017), Heinz Holliger (2018) and Sir Christopher Clark (2019).
caption: James J. Sheehan wearing his Pour le Merite in 2014
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