Alfred Nobel and the 'Merchant of Death' Obituary: Myth or Fact?

Jun 7, 2025

10 min read

Updated: Oct 21

Black-and-white photo of dynamite sticks stacked beside a canister, with a portrait of a bearded Alfred Nobel in a dark suit on the right

Picture opening the morning paper and reading your own obituary. Now picture it calling you a man who got rich by finding new ways to kill people. That's the story everyone tells about Alfred Nobel, and it's a cracker. A French newspaper confuses him with his dead brother, brands him the "merchant of death" and the horrified inventor of dynamite spends his last years buying back his reputation with the world's most famous prizes.

It's a brilliant tale. The trouble is that nobody has ever actually found the obituary. The real story of Nobel is messier, sadder and a lot more interesting: a dead younger brother, a secret mistress in Vienna, an arms factory, a heart condition treated with his own explosive and a will so explosive in its own right that it took four years and a pistol-packing assistant to make it stick.

Quick Answers

Who was Alfred Nobel? A Swedish chemist, inventor and industrialist (1833 to 1896) who invented dynamite and left most of his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes.
Was there really a "merchant of death" obituary? A French paper does seem to have confused Alfred with his brother Ludvig when Ludvig died in 1888, but historians have never found the famous "merchant of death" version.
Who died in the 1864 Nobel explosion? Five people, including Alfred's 20-year-old brother Emil, at the family's works at Heleneborg in Stockholm.
Why is there a Nobel Peace Prize? His long friendship with the pacifist Bertha von Suttner is the most likely reason, more so than any obituary.
Did Nobel stop making weapons? No. In 1894, barely two years before he died, he bought the Swedish arms maker Bofors.
How much did he leave? More than 31 million Swedish kronor, one of the biggest private fortunes of the age.

A bankrupt father and a boy who spoke five languages

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm in October 1833, the same year his father Immanuel's building business went bust. Immanuel fled his creditors to St Petersburg and the family followed when Alfred was nine. Russia made him. He was taught chemistry by Nikolai Zinin and ended up fluent in Swedish, Russian, German, English and French, according to the Nobel Foundation, which describes the young Alfred as clever, dreamy and introverted.

At 17 his father packed him off on a two-year study tour. In Paris he worked in the laboratory of Professor Théophile-Jules Pelouze, and it was there he first came across nitroglycerin, a liquid so powerful and so unstable that most chemists thought it was useless. Alfred thought it was the future. In 1861 he borrowed 100,000 francs in Paris to try to make money from it, and in 1863 he patented a detonator that made it possible to set the stuff off on purpose rather than by accident.

Heleneborg, 1864: the blast that killed his brother

Accidents were the problem. On 3 September 1864 the Nobel works at Heleneborg on the edge of Stockholm blew up. Five people were killed, among them Alfred's younger brother Emil, who was 20. Stockholm's authorities banned nitroglycerin manufacture inside the city and Alfred was forced to carry on his experiments on a barge moored out on Lake Mälaren.

What he didn't do was stop. Within a year he'd built a nitroglycerin factory near Hamburg. His breakthrough came when he mixed the liquid with kieselguhr, a porous earth made from fossilised algae, which soaked it up into a paste that could be shaped into sticks and handled without blowing anyone's hands off. He patented it in 1867 and called it dynamite, from the Greek word for power.

Vintage German-language advertisement for Nobel's Dynamite with an ornate decorative border and Alfred Nobel's printed signature

Dynamite changed the physical shape of the world. It blasted out quarries, mines and harbours. One of its first big jobs was the St Gotthard rail tunnel through the Swiss Alps. Nobel followed it up with blasting gelatin in 1875. The Nobel Foundation repeats the lovely story that he got the idea after dabbing collodion on a cut finger, then woke in the night and made the first batch at four in the morning. Like a lot of Nobel stories, it's charming and probably too neat to take entirely at face value.

From quarry to battlefield

Nobel liked to describe himself as a scientist and a humanist, and most of his fortune did come from mining and construction. But he never kept his distance from the arms business. In 1887 he patented ballistite, a smokeless powder for guns. France turned it down. Italy bought it. A furious French press campaign accused him of industrial espionage and in 1891 he left Paris for good and moved to a villa in San Remo.

Then came a fight with Britain. The British government adopted cordite, a smokeless propellant developed by Frederick Abel and James Dewar that looked an awful lot like ballistite. Nobel sued, claiming infringement of his patent. He lost, and the case ended in the House of Lords in 1895 with Abel walking away the winner.

And in 1894, by which point he was supposedly a man desperate to be remembered for peace, Nobel bought AB Bofors-Gullspång in western Sweden. Bofors went on to become one of the most famous gun makers of the 20th century. He moved into Björkborn manor next door and set up a laboratory there, run by a young assistant called Ragnar Sohlman. Remember that name.

Three technical cross-section diagrams of explosive fuses with labelled parts and Swedish captions, showing how each fuse is assembled and fired

Did the "merchant of death" obituary really happen?

Here's where the legend comes in. In April 1888 Alfred's older brother Ludvig, who ran the family's hugely successful oil business in Baku, died in Cannes. At least one French paper appears to have assumed the dead Nobel was the famous one, the inventor of dynamite, and reported Alfred's death instead.

So far, so plausible. The problem is the bit everybody quotes. The supposed headline, "Le marchand de la mort est mort", and the line about a man who grew rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, have never been traced to an actual newspaper. Historians have looked. Some now treat the whole thing as a myth, while others think a garbled death notice might have happened but has been dressed up beyond recognition.

There's another clue that something's off. "Merchants of death" became a stock insult for arms dealers in the 1930s, when it was the title of a bestselling 1934 exposé of the armaments industry, the same era that gave the world shadowy figures like Basil Zaharoff. The phrase fits the 1930s far better than the 1880s. Nobel's earliest popular biographies, written decades after his death, are where the dramatic scene of Alfred reading his own obituary really takes off.

Even the Library of Congress is careful to present it as a reported motive rather than a fact. And crucially, Nobel himself never explained why he set up the prizes. Everything about his motives is reconstruction.

The woman who actually gave us the Peace Prize

If you want a better explanation for the Peace Prize, look at Bertha von Suttner. In 1876 a 42-year-old Nobel placed an advert in a Viennese paper looking for a secretary and housekeeper for his Paris home. The woman who answered was a penniless Austrian countess called Bertha Kinsky, who'd just been sent away from a job as a governess after falling for the family's youngest son, Arthur von Suttner.

She worked for Nobel for about eight days before slipping back to Vienna to marry Arthur in secret. But the two of them wrote to each other for the rest of Nobel's life. She became one of the leading voices of the European peace movement and her 1889 anti-war novel Lay Down Your Arms was a huge hit. She pelted Nobel with peace literature. He was sceptical and teased her that his factories might end war sooner than her congresses would, on the grounds that once armies could wipe each other out in seconds, nobody would dare fight.

That argument has aged badly. But Suttner clearly got through to him. Nobel said that if she could convince him, he'd do something great for the cause, and the Peace Prize, written into his will in 1895, looks very much like him keeping his word. Her own push for European unity as the only way to stop the next war turned up in some odd places later on, including this bizarre 1920s plan to redraw Europe. She won the Peace Prize herself in 1905, the first woman to do so, and died in June 1914, days before the war she'd spent her life warning about.

The other prizes have their own backstories too. HISTORY points out that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave Nobel an award back in 1868 for inventions of practical use to mankind, which may have planted the seed for the science prizes, and his lifelong love of literature explains the rest.

Sofie Hess: the secret Viennese mistress

While he was writing high-minded letters to Bertha von Suttner, Nobel was writing very different ones to Sofie Hess. She was a young woman who worked in a Viennese flower shop, and in letters running from 1877 to 1896 he paid for her flat, her spa trips and her bills. He wrote her around 221 letters and she sent about 41 back.

Those letters show a man nothing like the saintly benefactor on the medal. The English edition, translated by Erika Rummel, paints him as a hypochondriac, a workaholic and a jealous, controlling lover. They also contain flashes of chauvinism and antisemitism. Sofie eventually had a child with a Hungarian cavalry officer, and after Nobel's death she handed the letters over in exchange for money and a promise of silence. They stayed out of public view for most of the 20th century.

Treated with his own explosive

Here's a detail that sounds made up but isn't. In his last years Nobel suffered from angina, the crushing chest pain of heart disease. The treatment was nitroglycerin. Doctors suggested it as early as 1890 and he refused. By October 1896 he was writing to Ragnar Sohlman that he'd been prescribed it under the name Trinitrin, and he described it as the irony of fate.

He was more interested in medicine than most people realise. He gave 50,000 kronor in 1890 to fund medical research in his mother's memory, helped bankroll Ivan Pavlov's work in Russia and paid a Swedish physiologist to try blood transfusions at his lab in Sevran outside Paris. That last project went nowhere because blood groups hadn't been discovered yet.

He was also terrified of being buried alive, a common Victorian panic you can read more about in our story of Barbara Jane Mackle, who survived it for real. Tucked into the end of his will is an instruction that his veins should be cut after death once doctors had confirmed he was gone, and only then should he be cremated.

He died at about two in the morning on 10 December 1896 at his villa in San Remo, after a stroke left him partly paralysed. He was 63 and largely alone.

The will that blew up in Sweden

Nobel had signed his final will on 27 November 1895 at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris. It set out instructions for turning an estate worth more than 31 million kronor into five annual prizes: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. The will insisted the winners' nationality shouldn't count, which went down terribly in a country that expected Swedish money to reward Swedes.

When it was read, all hell broke loose. Relatives tried to have it declared invalid, and for a while they had King Oscar II on their side. Conservatives called it unpatriotic, the left called it a capitalist fantasy and the bodies Nobel had named to hand out the prizes weren't sure they wanted the job. One newspaper summed it up as magnificent intentions, magnificent blunder.

It was saved by Ragnar Sohlman, the young assistant from Bofors, who'd been named an executor alongside the engineer Rudolf Lilljequist. Most of Nobel's wealth sat in securities in France, and Sohlman feared the family would tie it up in the French courts. So he moved it himself, splitting it into small packages and, by his own account, sitting with a pistol on his lap to guard it on the way. A Swedish court then decided Nobel's legal home was Sweden, partly because he'd moved his horses there, which under French rules counted for something.

After four years of wrangling, the Nobel Foundation's statutes were approved on 29 June 1900 and the first prizes were handed out on 10 December 1901, five years to the day after he died.

The play his family burned

There's one more Nobel nobody puts on the poster. He wrote poetry in English all his life and, right at the end, a tragedy called Nemesis about the Cenci, the 16th-century Roman family whose story is a catalogue of incest, murder and torture. It was printed just before he died. His relatives were so appalled they burned most of the copies, and only a handful survived. A Stockholm theatre finally gave it a premiere in 2005, timed for the anniversary of his death.

So what really changed Alfred Nobel?

Probably not one bad newspaper day. Nobel was a lonely, restless, contradictory man who read Shelley, wrote verse and corresponded with pacifists while selling explosives to armies and buying a gun factory. A line often credited to Victor Hugo called him the richest vagabond in Europe, though nobody seems able to say exactly where Hugo said it. Either way, it suits him.

What's clear is that he thought hard about how he'd be remembered, and that the people around him, Bertha von Suttner above all, pushed him towards peace long before any obituary could have. The prizes didn't stop the arms trade. Within a few decades the descendants of his explosives were turning up in wartime sabotage devices disguised as dead rats. Not everyone has even wanted his money either: Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the literature prize in 1964 and Le Duc Tho refused the 1973 Peace Prize he'd been awarded alongside Henry Kissinger.

But the merchant of death headline lives on because it tells us what we want to hear, that one shock can turn a man around. The real Nobel is harder to sum up, and he left the world his name without ever telling it why.