Helene Metzger (1889–1944)

Hélène Metzger, née Bruhl, was born at Chatou, near Paris, to a wealthy French Jewish family of German descent. Her paternal aunt married the philosopher and anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who was a lifelong influence. Her mother died when she was two years old. Hélène studied crystallography at the Sorbonne and obtained a diplôme d'études supérieures in 1912. The following year, she married Paul Metzger, a young scholar who was killed only a few months later in one of the earliest battles of World War I. During the war, she wrote her first book, La génèse de la science des cristaux (The Emergence of the Science of Crystals). Eventually, she turned her attention to the history of chemistry, and much of her subsequent writing focused on this discipline. They included notably Les doctrines chimiques en France du début du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Chemical Theories in France from the Beginning of the 17th to the End of the 18th Century, 1923); Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et la doctrine chimique (Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave and Chemical Theory, 1930); and La Philosophie de la matière chez Lavoisier (Lavoisier’s Philosophy of Matter, 1935). She then turned to the history of physics and wrote Attraction universelle et religion naturelle chez quelques commentateurs anglais de Newton (Universal Attraction and Natural Religion According to Some English Commentators on Newton, 1938). In 1940, she began writing Lumière et doctrine chimique de Newton à Fresnel (Light and Chemical Theory From Newton to Fresnel), a book she did not live to finish. After the German Occupation of France in World War II, she remained in Paris for a time before moving to Lyon, where she participated in a study group with other displaced Jewish professionals. She was arrested by the Nazis in 1944, transferred to the transit camp at Drancy, and sent on to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, where she died. After the war, her half-brother Adrien Bruhl published the fragments of the final work she had left behind: La Science, l’appel de la religion et la volonté humaine (Science, the Call of Religion, and Human Will).