Valentin Feldman

Valentin Feldman was a French philosopher and Marxist of Jewish-Russian origin who worked on aesthetics, publishing an essay on contemporary French aesthetic theory in 1936 as a pupil of the philosopher Victor Basch. A teacher of philosophy and an antifascist active in the French Resistance during the German occupation, he was arrested in February 1942 after a factory sabotage, tortured, and condemned to death by a German military tribunal. He was executed by firing squad on 27 July 1942, and his death and reported last words to the firing squad later inspired French writers including Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.