Wartime French Resistance hero Lucie Aubrac, who famously rescued her husband in a daring attack on a German convoy, died on March 14 in a Paris hospital at the age of 94, her family said.
In October 1943, Aubrac was with a group of fighters who ambushed a truck bearing Raymond Aubrac and 13 other resistance members from Gestapo headquarters in the south-eastern city of Lyon.
It became one of the most celebrated resistance exploits of World War II, and the theme of two films, Lucie Aubrac and Boulevard des Hirondelles.
Tributes poured in for the wartime legend, who after the Lyon attack travelled secretly to London with her husband and young child to join the administration in exile of Charles de Gaulle.
President Jacques Chirac said: “From the first hours of the occupation she rose up against defeatism and surrender. She was an emblematic figure of the central role of women in the resistance.”
Chirac said he had spoken to Raymond Aubrac, who is 92, by telephone to express his condolences.
Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal said Aubrac was “one of the great figures of the republic. This great resistance member embodied the French people’s struggle for freedom, and the participation of women in the combat.”
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, candidate of the ruling centre-right, said that “with Aubrac’s death one of the most beautiful pages in the history of the resistance is turned. In the name of freedom, she rejected submission, hatred and anti-Semitism.”
Born Lucie Bertrand on June 29 1912 to a Burgundy winemaking family, Aubrac became a history and geography teacher.
Married in 1939, she and her husband — whose real name was Raymond Samuel — helped set up one of the first underground groups in German-occupied France. They took their nom de guerre from the Aubrac region of the Massif Central mountains.
In June 1943, Raymond Aubrac was captured alongside De Gaulle’s resistance chief Jean Moulin in a notorious raid by the Gestapo on a doctor’s house in the Lyon suburb of Caluire. Moulin’s importance was quickly discovered. He was transported to Paris and later died from torture.
Over the next weeks, Lucie Aubrac — whose identity was unknown to the Germans — managed to meet Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and other officers in Lyon, and by a trick won permission to see her husband in jail.
The October 21 attack took place as he was being transported back to prison from interrogation by the Gestapo. Four German soldiers were killed and all the prisoners escaped.
After the war, Aubrac was a jury member in the court that tried the Vichy leader Philippe Petain. She returned to teaching, and for the rest of her life gave talks in schools about her wartime experience. She also campaigned for progressive causes, such as Algerian independence.
In 1998, she and her husband won a libel case against a historian who raised questions over their role in the Lyon resistance.
Gerard Chauvy based his book on comments allegedly made by Barbie during his imprisonment in France from 1983 to 1991 to the effect that the Aubracs were traitors to the resistance. The claim is not taken seriously by historians. — AFP