Lucie Aubrac
French resistance
heroine whose later years were clouded by allegations that her
husband was a Nazi informer
Julian Jackson
Friday 16 March 2007
23.56 GMT Last modified on Sunday 15 April 2012 21.05 BST
Lucie Aubrac, who
has died aged 94, was one of the legendary figures of the French
resistance, so famous that in 1997 her story was made into a
colourfully romantic film in which she was played by the actor Carole
Bouquet. The movie recounted how Lucie tricked the Gestapo and
organised a daring raid to free her husband, Raymond, from
imprisonment at the hands of the Germans.
A few weeks later,
however, the journalist Gérard Chauvy published a book documenting
inconsistencies in Lucie's account of her life, insinuating that
Raymond, far from being a resistance hero, might have been a German
informer. From being resistance legends, the couple found themselves
mired in one of those controversies that has punctuated the memory of
France's dark years of wartime occupation.
Born into a modest
family of Burgundy winegrowers, Lucie Bernard, a brilliant student,
obtained in 1938 the agrégation in history - the most prestigious
higher degree in France. On the eve of the second world war, she
began teaching history at a school in Strasbourg. This was a period
of great political conflict in France, and during the 1930s she had
become an active supporter of the Communist party, which, like others
of her generation, she saw as the most effective bulwark against
fascism. In December 1939, she married Raymond Samuel, a young
engineer who was also a committed communist.
After the defeat of
France in 1940, Lucie resumed teaching at a school in the unoccupied
zone in Lyon. That autumn, she met in a cafe Emmanuel d'Astier de la
Vigerie, one of those hoping to organise resistance to the German
occupation. It was out of such chance encounters that the first
resistance groups were formed. Lucie and Raymond became founding
leaders of d'Astier's organisation, Libération-Sud, which was to
become one of the most important resistance movements in France.
There were many women involved in resistance, but relatively few in
such prominent positions. This alone would have marked Lucie out as
an exceptional individual.
For the first two
years of the war, she and Raymond continued their professional
occupations - she as a teacher, he as an engineer - while also living
double lives as resistance organisers under various pseudonyms.
(After the war, they officially adopted as their new name Raymond's
resistance alias, "Aubrac"). In May 1941 Lucie gave birth
to her first child, Jean-Pierre. So she was living a triple existence
as teacher, mother and resister; as she wrote in her memoirs, being
the mother of a baby was an excellent cover to divert suspicion from
the Germans, and at one meeting between her husband and General de
Gaulle's envoy, Jean Moulin, in a Lyon public garden, her presence
with her baby boy proved particularly useful.
At the end of 1942,
the Germans occupied the whole of France and Lyon became the
headquarters of the notorious Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie. In March
1943 Raymond was arrested. It seems, however, that the Germans and
Vichy authorities thought they had only caught a small-time black
marketeer, and he was released in May, after Lucie intervened with
the local Vichy public prosecutor. Then, on June 21 1943, Raymond was
arrested again, along with Moulin himself, at a top level meeting of
resisters in a doctor's surgery in the Lyon district of Caluire.
It did not take the
Germans long to work out the identities of Moulin and most of the
others they had captured. Moulin was horribly tortured and
transferred to Paris, where he died. Meanwhile, Raymond was held in
the Montluc prison, in Lyon, and beaten up. Lucie mounted an
extraordinary scheme to release him. Pregnant again, she presented
herself to the Gestapo, claiming to be the recently engaged fiancée
of someone she believed to be called "Ermelin", one of
Raymond's aliases, who, she claimed, had been innocently caught up in
the raid while visiting the doctor. When told that her "fiancé"
was a resister who was to be executed, she begged to be allowed to
save her honour and legitimise her expected child by marrying him
under a French legal clause which allowed an engaged couple to wed if
one of them is about to die. The Gestapo lieutenant swallowed her
story, and on the day Raymond was being transferred back from Gestapo
headquarters to prison after the "marriage", armed
resisters attacked the lorry and freed him and 15 other prisoners.
Lucie and Raymond
went into hiding until a plane could take them to London, where they
arrived in February 1944. Their second child, Catherine, was born a
few days later. On March 20 1944, De Gaulle's provisional government
announced that once France was liberated, women would - for the first
time - be given the vote. In anticipation of this, and before
elections could occur, the general had appointed a consultative
assembly, which Lucie joined as a resistance representative. She thus
became the first woman ever to sit in a French parliamentary
assembly.
In 1945, once the
war was over, she published a short history of the resistance - the
first to appear - and then returned to teaching. In retirement, she
saw it as her duty to ensure that the memory of the resistance lived
on in the memories of younger generations of French men and women,
and she would regularly visit schools to provide her own testimony as
survivor and historian.
This is how Lucie's
life might have ended had she and Raymond not been catapulted into
controversy in 1983 after Barbie's extradition from Bolivia to stand
trial in France. Before his trial, Barbie let it be known that he
would reveal new facts about the resistance, including the claim that
after his first arrest Raymond had turned informer and betrayed
Moulin. The allegations never came to anything, but were troubling
enough for Lucie to write her own memory of the affair (translated
into English as Outwitting the Gestapo).
After Barbie's death
in 1990, however, a document - the so-called Testament of Barbie -
began circulating in newspaper offices and repeating the allegations
about Aubrac. It was also at this point that Chauvy produced his
book. Although distancing itself from Barbie's more extreme
accusations, Chauvy's work was based on genuine archival material,
and its overall effect was to cast a cloud of suspicion over the
veracity of Lucie's account.
Twenty leading
resistance survivors published a protest letter, but the Aubracs were
deeply upset by the book, and asked to be given a chance to explain
themselves before a panel of leading French historians. The newspaper
Libération organised a discussion between the historians and the
Aubracs.
But what had been
intended by the Aubracs as a way of clearing their name turned into
an acrimonious exchange in which they found themselves almost on
trial. None of the historians accepted the idea that Raymond had been
an informer, but they noted inconsistencies and contradictions in the
various versions Lucie had given over the years. There were oddities
in the case which have never been entirely elucidated: what were the
exact circumstances of Raymond's first release from prison?; why was
he the only resister arrested at Caluire not to have been moved to
Paris (thus making it possible for Lucie to save him)?
The arrest of
Moulin, in which the Aubracs were caught up, was the greatest drama
of the resistance. And the Aubrac affair of the 1990s reminded people
that, apart from the cases of betrayal that provide rich fodder for
conspiracy theorists, the resistance was also plagued by internal
conflicts of ideology and personalities. The fact that the Aubracs
remained communist sympathisers long after the end of the war may
have had something to do with the attacks on them.
In exasperation, at
one point, Lucie protested that her memoirs - written 40 years after
the events, when she was in her 70s - could not be expected to be
accurate in every detail: she said she had been writing her story,
not history. To which the historians present could only reply that
their job was to write history, even if it meant unpicking the
stories people wished to tell.
The tragedy of the
situation was that Lucie, herself a historian and historical actor,
was at the end of her life caught between the conflicting imperatives
of historical truth and legendary memory. None of which detracts from
the fact that, whatever happened in Lyon in the summer of 1943, she
was a woman of great courage, character and energy, one of the last
survivors of a generation that, between 1940 and 1945, helped to save
the honour of France. Raymond and her three children survive her.
· Lucie Aubrac,
teacher and resistance leader, born June 29 1912; died March 14 2007
 |
| Lucie Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo by Siân Rees |
In May 1943, a young
Frenchwoman called Lucie Aubrac engineered the escape of her husband,
Raymond, from the clutches of Klaus Barbie, the feared Gestapo chief
later known as the "Butcher of Lyon." When Raymond was
arrested again that June, Lucie mounted a second astonishing rescue,
ambushing the prison van that was transporting him. As a founding
member and leader of the important French Resistance group
Liberation-Sud, Lucie served as a courier, arms carrier, and saboteur
who engineered these and other escape plans on behalf of her husband
and other Resistance fighters.
Spirited out of
France with Raymond by the RAF, Lucie arrived in London a heroine.
For the postwar generation the couple embodied the spirit of "the
real France": the one that resisted, and eventually expelled the
Nazis. However, in 1983, Kalus Barbie made the bombshell claim that
the Aubracs had become informers in 1943, betraying their comrades.
The French press and the couple themselves furiously denounced this
as slander, but as worrying inconsistencies were spotted in Lucie's
story, doubts emerged that have never quite gone away.
Who was Lucie
Aubrac? What did she really do in 1943? And was she truly the spirit
of la vraie France, or a woman who could not resist casting herself
as a heroine? Siân Rees’s penetrating, even-handed account draws
from letters, newspaper articles, and other archival materials, as
well as several interviews, to decipher the truth behind Lucie and
her husband's wartime endeavors and near fall from grace. It offers a
thrilling portrait of a brave, resourceful woman who went to
extraordinary lengths for love and country.
Lucie
Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo /
Hardcover – June 1, 2016
by Siân Rees
Review By E.
Bukowskyon / June 15, 2016
Lucie and Raymond
Aubrac, who died in 2007 and 2012 respectively, are revered in
France, more than seventy years after they risked their lives to
thwart their Nazi occupiers. This valiant couple, who fled their
homeland in 1944, arrived in London when Lucie was eight months
pregnant with their second child. In 1943, the Gestapo captured
Raymond Samuel (who had adopted the alias Aubrac). Obersturmführer
Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon," might have
executed Raymond had Lucie not hatched an audacious plan to free her
husband.
Siân Rees, in
"Lucie Aubrac," focuses on the political and social climate
in France under Field Marshal Philippe Pétain's Vichy government. In
opposition to Pétain's puppet regime, competing groups sprang up,
all determined to resist the German juggernaut. Two of their most
energetic and outspoken leaders were Lucie and Raymond, who hid in
plain sight while helping organize the various factions into an
effective force. Lucie was politically engaged, took risks when she
believed they were warranted, and firmly embraced the values of
social justice, tolerance, and pacifism. She was instrumental in
creating and distributing an underground newspaper and played a key
role in rescuing detainees from "internment camps, military
prisons, and police cells." Lucie and Raymond's home was "both
a political headquarters and a safe house for people on the run."
Rees puts Lucie's
life, before, during, and after the Second World War, in historical
context. Especially galling are the outrages perpetrated by the Vichy
government, whose functionaries actively participated in the
deportation of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. The author
also discusses other important resistance figures, such as Emmanuel
d'Astier and Jean Moulin, some of whom paid the ultimate price for
their selflessness. Lucie Aubrac (she and Raymond adopted the name
"Aubrac" legally in 1950) was not a saint. Some of her
acquaintances considered her to be impetuous and overly excitable. In
addition, she embellished the truth when it suited her, perhaps in an
attempt to make her tales more interesting and entertaining. "Lucie
Aubrac" drags at times, especially in the lengthy section
dealing with the Aubracs' postwar activities. Overall, however, this
is an intriguing and informative portrait of a compassionate and
independent woman. Although she could have emigrated to America,
Lucie chose to remain in France during its "Dark Years."
Freedom fighter such as Lucie and Raymond "upheld French honor
at a bleak time in their country's history."
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