Hélène Brion

Hélène Brion (27 January 1882 – 31 August 1962) was a French teacher, feminist, socialist and communist. She was one of the leaders of the French teachers' union. During World War I (1914–18) she was arrested for distributing pacifist propaganda, given a suspended sentence and dismissed from her job as a teacher. She visited Russia soon after the Russian Revolution, and wrote a book on her experiences. It was never published. She devoted much of her effort in later years to preparing a feminist encyclopedia, which was never completed or published.

Early years

Hélène Brion was born in Clermont-Ferrand, Auvergne on 27 January 1882.

Her family were teachers.

She was orphaned when very young, and spent her childhood in the Ardennes with her grandmother. She studied at the Ecole Primaire Supérieure Sophie Germain in Paris to become a teacher.

Unions had been authorized in 1884, but state employees could not belong to them. They could however join friendly societies.

Brion was working as a teacher in 1905 when she enrolled in the new federation of school teachers and in the Socialist Party (SFIO).

Brion never married, but around 1905–07 she had two children by a Russian immigrant.

She taught at a nursery school (école maternelle) in Pantin, on the outskirts of Paris.

Brion was active in various feminist organizations for most of her life, fighting for equal legal rights for women and for the vote.

These would include Le Suffrage des Femmes, L’Union fraternelle des Femmes, La Fédération féminine universitaire, La Ligue pour le droit des femmes, L’Union française pour le suffrage des femmes and La Ligue nationale du vote.

In 1907 the International Socialist Conference of Stuttgart forbade socialist women from collaborating with "bourgeois" feminists. Brion, Marthe Bigot and Madeleine Pelletier resisted this decision. While belonging to the extreme left, they tried to maintain radical feminism.

Union leader and pacifist

After the Congress of Chambéry in 1912 Hélène Brion joined the Confederal Committee of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT: General Confederation of Labor).

She became assistant secretary of the teachers' union in January 1914.

With the outbreak of World War I in July 1914 the teachers' union office was reduced to Brion as acting secretary general and Fernand Loriot as treasurer.

Loriot was appointed treasurer of the Federation of Teachers' Unions in 1915, and was appointed by Brion to the central committee. He devoted much effort to fighting the nationalist unions that supported the war, along with Alphonse Merrheim, Albert Bourderon and Raymond Péricat.

At the start of the war Brion accepted the union sacrée, where the unions would not work against the war.

She opened a soup kitchen in Pantin.

Many teachers were mobilized and others supported the war effort, but later a strong pacifist movement developed among them.

Marie Mayoux called a pacifist meeting at the union office in June 1915.

On 15 August 1915 a pacifist resolution was presented at the CGT's national congress at the initiative of Albert Bourderon and Alphonse Merrheim, signed by several militants of the federation of teachers' unions including Louis Bouët, Fernand Loriot, Marie Guillot, Marie Mayoux, Marthe Bigot and Hélène Brion. The resolution said "this war is not our war" and laid responsibility on the leaders of the belligerent states. The resolution denounced the union sacrée and called for the restoration of liberty.

A major international conference of pacifists was held in 1915 in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, and another in Kienthal, Switzerland.

The French activists were prevented from attending, but kept in contact by letters.

They circulated banned publications and attended meetings, sometimes in private apartments to avoid informers.

Louis Malvy, Minister of the Interior, received the reports of spies and all the letters addressed to Brion.

In 1917, Louise Bodin and Colette Reynaud founded the journal La Voix des femmes, to which the major feminists contributed including Nelly Roussel and Hélène Brion.

The first issue of La Voix des Femmes appeared on 31 August 1917.

Contributors included men such as Boris Souvarine and Georges Pioch as well as women such as Colette Reynaud.

A police report in 1917 described "the activist Hélène Brion, public school teacher in Pantin, general secretary of the National Federation of public school teachers (Fédération Nationale des instituteurs et institutrices publics), a member of the Committee for the resumption of international relations (Comité pour la reprise des relations internationales) and a member of union defense committee (Comité de défense syndicaliste). Her correspondents included Léon Bronstein-Trotsky, a Russian journalist.

Describing a meeting of trade unionists and anarchists the reporter said about 40 women were present, about half of them from the Russian-Polish colony. There were a few from Louise Saumoneau's socialist women and Hélène Brion's teachers, and the rest of the women were militant socialists or French trade unionists.