A-Infos (en) France, UCL AL #362 - Trade Unionism - Obituary: Talkative and excitable, Claude Beaugrand has passed away (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

He barely missed May Day, but Claude Beaugrand (1949-2025) wasn't there 
this year, having reached the end of a journey that led this libertarian 
communist railway worker from May '68 to solidarity with Ukraine. When 
you ran into him-at protests, at the La Brèche bookstore, or at the Noir 
et Rouge book fairs-Claude would grab your sleeve and unfailingly engage 
you in conversation about the social movement, the CGT, SUD-Rail, the 
UCL, etc. He would start the conversation in an eminently serious tone, 
his eyes narrowed, full of compunction. But the marble would soon crack. 
With little or no transition, he was buzzing, delivering jubilant 
remarks, tit for tat, wide-eyed, delighted to share laughter and 
anecdotes, often gleaned from the history of the labor movement, of 
which he was a passionate fan. At the 1st Federal Congress of SUD-Rail 
in 1996, he distinguished himself with an analysis of the Hamburg 
dockers' strike of... 1896-1897, as long and off-topic as it was 
fascinating and knowledgeable. But he had other ways of impressing the 
audience. Like during that impromptu soccer game at the 2015 congress of 
Alternative Libertaire (AL), where, at over 60 years old, he showed off 
to even the younger generation! On the side of the "Rail enchaîné"
A young worker at Citroën in May 1968, Claude Beaugrand joined the 
Anarchist Revolutionary Organization (ORA) the following year. Highly 
committed, he was editor of the ORA's newspaper, Front libertaire, from 
1972 to 1976, as well as the newsletter Portugal Libertario (1973-1974), 
published by immigrant workers.

Having joined the SNCF, he became an activist in the CFDT and 
participated, along with Henri Célié and Serge Torrano, in the 
publication of the libertarian communist newsletter Le Rail enchaîné, 
from 1973 to 1976. That year, during the split that saw the exclusion of 
the UTCL tendency and the transformation of the ORA into the OCL, Claude 
and Serge opted for the OCL. They remained there until its dislocation 
to the Paris region in the early 1980s.

A CFDT union member in Paris-Austerlitz, Claude Beaugrand actively 
participated in strikes, including those of 1986 and 1995, and joined 
SUD-Rail the following year. At the time, he readily contributed his two 
cents to AL's public meetings. From 2007 onward, while still declaring 
himself a libertarian, he participated in the creation of the NPA. He 
broke away from it in the early 2010s and rejoined AL.

Claude Beaugrand at the inauguration of the FACL in 2017.
The death of his old accomplice Serge Torrano in 2015 deeply affected 
him: "End of an era," he said, which prompted him to bid farewell to 
activism. He nevertheless joined UCL for a short time in 2019.

In solidarity with the Ukrainian people, he joined the Koltchenko 
Committee in 2014, the libertarian trade unionist from Crimea imprisoned 
for five years in Russia. In 2022, following Putin's invasion, he joined 
the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine, never missing a meeting.

We will fondly remember this lover of culture and poetry who, in the 
course of a conversation, was capable of reciting verses from 
Lamartine's Lake - that, too, was Claude Beaugrand!

Guillaume (UCL Montreuil), Laurent (UCL Aveyron), Christian (UCL 
Banlieue sud-est)

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Necrologie-Volubile-et-exalte-Claude-Beaugrand-s-en-est-alle
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