Early Life
Rassinier was born on March 18, 1906, in Bermont in the Territoire de Belfort, into a politically active family. During World War I Paul's father Joseph, a farmer and a veteran of the French colonial army in Tonkin (present day Vietnam) was mobilized, but was put into a military prison for his pacifist attitudes, something his son Paul never forgot.
After the war, his family favored the post-war socialist revolutions, and he joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1922. He secured a post as a teacher at the Ecole Valdoie, and in 1933, he became a Professor of History and Geography at the College d'Enseignement General at Belfort.
In 1927, he served in the French Army in Morocco, where his pacifist views were reinforced by the brutal colonialist repression and military corruption he witnessed. He later described how "We became deadened to scandalous scenes of torture, which had no reason to envy those of the Middle Ages, and saw the apparatus of dictatorship not retreating, but even advancing in the face of an assassination!" Upon his demobilization, he returned to his teaching post and his political activism. It is also around this time that he became a member of War Resisters' International.
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