Léon-Ernest Halkin

Léon-Ernest Emmanuel Marie Joseph Halkin (1906–1998) was a Belgian historian, a supporter of the Walloon Movement, and a member of the Resistance during World War II.

He was raised in an academic milieu, with both his father and his uncle Joseph Halkin professors at University of Liège, and was educated under the Jesuits at the Collège Saint-Servais.

[1] His doctoral thesis on the 16th-century Prince-Bishop of Liège Érard de La Marck, supervised by Karl Hanquet, was published in 1930.

He attacked Henri Pirenne's vision of Belgian history as effacing the distinctiveness of the principality of Liège, and himself adhered to the Walloon movement.

He set up the underground newspaper Ici, la Belgique libre!, joined the Front de l'Indépendance, and led the Réseau Socrate, as well as hiding a Jewish girl in his own home.