Charles Hainchelin

Charles Hainchelin (2 August 1901 – 26 August 1944) was a French historian, teacher, communist activist and resistance fighter.

Biography The son of a teacher and trade unionist who died in the Battle of Verdun in 1916, Charles Hainchelin was adopted by an orphanage and entered the teacher training school, which he left in 1920 to take his first post in Reims. Despite very fragile health and tuberculosis from which he struggled to recover, he managed to obtain a degree in history, which allowed him to obtain a teaching position at the upper primary school of Nancy in 1926.

Hainchelin was a member Communist Party since 1921 and as a convinced Marxist intellectual he collaborated with numerous journals linked to the party or the syndicalist movement throughout the 1920s and 30s, most notably La Vie Ouvrière, Clarté, L'École emancipée, l'Université syndicaliste, Commune (under the pseudonym Chassagne), Regards etc. At the time of the occupation of the Ruhr, Hainchelin, who spoke German fluently, crossed the border to transport leaflets and brochures. He spent fourteen years in Lorraine, devoting himself, in addition to his teaching, to the study of Marxism and history.

From 1932, he was very active in the magazine La Lutte, edited by Louis Aragon, Jean Baby and his friend Georges Sadoul. The magazine essentially centered on a Marxist approach to free thought. Being interested in the subject of the Marxist approach to religion, in 1934 he published his first book, Les origines de la religion (The Origins of Religion), under the pseudonym Lucien Henry. He signed with the same pseudonym an anthology of Marx and Engels “On Religion” which he had himself translated to French in the collection “The great texts of Marxism”.

After his death, Georges Sadoul published Hainchelin's work on the francs-tireurs and produced several new editions of his work on the origins of religion.

Publications Les origines de la religion, Éditions sociales internationales, 1935 (sous le pseudonyme de Lucien Henry), réédité sous son nom (Charles Hainchelin), éditions sociales, Paris, 1956 (préface de Georges Sadoul)

Sur la religion / Karl Marx, Friedrich Engel; textes choisis, traduits et présentés par Lucien Henry, Éditions sociales internationales, 1936

Le Japon contre le monde, Éditions sociales internationales, 1938 (sous le pseudonyme d'Henri Chassagne)

Coblence 1789-1792: Des Français au service de l'étranger, Éditions sociales internationales, 1939 (sous le pseudonyme d'Henri Chassagne)

Les Francs-Tireurs dans l'histoire de France, Éditions France d'abord, 1945

Awards Resistance Medal

Croix de Guerre 1939–1945

Mort pour la France