Jeanne Halbwachs

Jeanne Halbwachs Alexandre (; February 14, 1890 – November 14, 1980) was a French pacifist, feminist and socialist. Remembered as one of the main figures of integral pacifism in the 1930s, she was a leader of the French branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). She was also an educator and literary critic.

Early life and education Jeanne Halbwachs was born in Paris on February 14, 1890. Coming from a background of Alsatian intellectuals, her father was Gustave Halbwachs, normalien and professor of German, who had chosen France after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Her mother was a philosophy student. Jeanne's brother was the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs.

As a student at the Lycée Fénelon in Paris, the Dreyfus affair marked her, and she welcomed the Russian revolution of 1905. In 1909, while a student of Alain at Collège Sévigné, she was strongly influenced by his thinking. Halbwachs, Marie-Hélène Latrilhe and Jeanne Daste forced their entry into the very masculine group, (Internationalist Revolutionary Socialist Students, ESRI).

Career Placed first in the Agrégation examination results in 1913, Halbwachs taught at the Cours Fénelon from 1914 to 1915,

In 1914, Halbwachs joined the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) and the Ligue Française pour le Droit des Femmes (LFDF) of Maria Vérone. During the campaign for the legislative elections held the same year, Halbwachs took part in a demonstration calling for the registration of women on electoral lists and spoke at various electoral meetings insisting on the need for women's suffrage. She wrote in the magazine , created by Marianne Rauze, asking women to stop the war, citing the example of Italian women who had lain down on railway tracks to prevent trains of soldiers from leaving the station during the Italo-Turkish War. The rallying of the SFIO, trade unions, and feminist movements to the Sacred Union at the start of World War I dismayed Halbwachs. outraging the LFDF leadership, On May 22, Halbwachs sent a letter to the writer Romain Rolland, explaining how helpless she felt, to which he replied: (Never despair). on the campus of Paris Nanterre University. Others documents are archived are in the municipal library of Nîmes.