Aimée Bologne-Lemaire

Aimée Bologne-Lemaire (6 January 1904 – 20 December 1998) was a Belgian feminist, member of the resistance, and Walloon activist.

Estelle Aimée Lemaire was born into a middle-class family in Saint-Gilles, Belgium. Her father was a lawyer, socialist and university professor; her mother was a school teacher. Aimée studied at the ULB, where she joined the student socialist society, graduating in 1926. She became a teacher, first in Charleroi, then in Ixelles until 1943, then returning to Charleroi to take up the post of director of the Athénée Royal Vauban.

In 1929 she married Maurice Bologne, an activist in the Parti Ouvrier Belge, predecessor of the modern Belgian socialist parties (Socialist Party and Socialist Party – Different). During the 1930s, the couple were active in left-wing circles, including support for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and membership in the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes. In 1938 Lemaire-Bologne was among the founder-members of the "Historical Society for the Defence of Walloon Culture".

During the German occupation of Belgium in the Second World War, she was associated with the Wallonie Libre organisation. She continued to work for a Walloon cultural renaissance, and headed the Wallonia-Association's female arm, which attempted to save Jewish children from deportation, and to feed undernourished children. She also undertook clandestine work distributing socialist newspapers, and running the secretariat of the banned Socialist Party. In 1943, as a result of her work in thwarting the German efforts to conscript young women in Charleroi into German industry (the so-called arbeitseinsatz), she was obliged to go into hiding.

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