Edmond Michelet distributed tracts calling for continued fighting in all of Brive-la-Gaillarde's mailboxes on 17 June 1940. It is considered to be the first act of resistance of World War II in France. But the Limousin was south of the line of demarcation and the resistance was mainly a passive one against Vichy France. The Maquis du Limousin, the first in France, was formed in 1942. Its first act of sabotage was the dynamiting of a power plant near Ussel in June 1942. Marshal Philippe Pétain's visit to Corrèze in July was seen as a provocation by the population and strengthened popular support for the maquis.
The maquis increased fast, reinforced by many young men trying to escape the German troops who invaded in November 1942 and instituted the STO in early 1943. Maquis operations changed from sabotages in 1943 to massive attacks against occupation troops in 1944. At its peak, the Limousine maquis is estimated to have reached between 8,000 and 12,000 fighters. However, it was troubled by continuing antagonisms between the Armée secrète and the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans concerning operational methods (particularly at Tulle and Guéret), how local powers should be distributed after the liberation, as well as the degree to which "cleansing" of collaborators from the political system should take place.
The Limousine population paid a heavy toll for its resistance. Numerous maquisards were killed, executed, tortured or deported. Following the Normandy landings, the 2nd SS Division Das Reich, stationed in Montauban, was ordered to make its way across the country to help stop the Allied advance. Along their way into Corrèze and Haute-Vienne, the Germans came under continuous attacks from the maquisards. In reprisal, they slaughtered hundreds of civilians in Tulle on June 9 and at Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944. Limousin and France were profoundly affected by these massacres.
The region was entirely freed by the Résistance by the end of the summer of 1944. German troops, mostly made up of veterans from the Eastern Front, underwent so many attacks and sabotages that they called the Limousin "Little Russia". Brive-la-Gaillarde was the first city in France to be freed by maquisards on 15 August 1944, ten days before Paris.
Led by Georges Guingouin for the military operations and Gontran Royer for the Mouvements unis de la Résistance, the best known figures in the Maquis du Limousin were Edmond Michelet and André Malraux —who later both became ministers of Charles de Gaulle—, Roger Lescure, Louis Lemoigne, René Vaujour and Marius Guedin. Jacques Renouvin, André Delon, Martial Brigouleix, Raymond Farro and Florentin Gourmelen, also prominent maquisards in Limousin, were killed during the war.
The Maquis du Limousin was led from Brive-la-Gaillarde and Limoges. The maquis was split into several main sectors:
Maquis Armée secrète de Basse-Corrèze (at Brive-la-Gaillarde), Moyenne-Corrèze (at Tulle) and Haute-Corrèze (at Neuvic-Ussel)
Maquis Francs-tireurs et partisans between Corrèze and Dordogne
Beau (Georges), Gaubusseau (Léopold), Les SS en Limousin, Quercy et Périgord, Paris, Presses de la Cité, 1966. (in French)
Maquis de Corrèze, ouvrage collectif, 5e édition, Naves, Imprimerie du Corrézien, 1995, 797 p. (in French)
Plas (Pascal, dir.), Genèse et développement de la Résistance en R5, 1940-1943, Actes des colloques de Brive-la-Gaillarde (September 1998) et de Soudaine-Lavinadière (September 2001), Treignac, éditions Les Monédières; Brive-la-Gaillarde, Centre Edmond Michelet, 2003, 339 p. (in French)
The Maquis were rural guerrilla bands of French Resistance fighters, called maquisards, during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. Initially, they were composed of young, mostly working-class, men who had escaped into the mountains and woods to avoid conscription into Vichy France's Service du travail obligatoire to provide forced labor for Germany. To avert capture and deportation to Germany, they became increasingly organized into active resistance groups.
Corrèze is a department in France, named after the river Corrèze which runs through it. Its capital is Tulle, and its most populated town is Brive-la-Gaillarde.
Tulle is a commune in central France. It is the third-largest town in the former region of Limousin and is the capital of the department of Corrèze, in the region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Tulle is also the episcopal see of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulle.
Brive-la-Gaillarde is a commune of France. It is a sub-prefecture of the Corrèze department. It has around 50,000 inhabitants, while the population of the urban area was 89,260 in 1999.
The Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français (FTPF), or commonly the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), was an armed resistance organization created by leaders of the French Communist Party during World War II (1939–45). The communist party was neutral at first, following the Soviet Union's official view that the war was a struggle between imperialists, but changed to a policy of armed resistance against the German occupation of France after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Three groups were formed, consisting of party members, young communists and foreign workers. Early in 1942 they were merged to form the FTP, which undertook sabotage and assassinations of the occupation. The FTP became the best organized and most effective of the French Resistance groups. In March 1944, before the Allied forces returned to Normandy, the FTP was theoretically merged with the other Resistance groups. In practice, it retained its independence until the end of the war.
Limousin is a former administrative region of southwest-central France. On 1 January 2016, it became part of the new administrative region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. It comprised three departments: Corrèze, Creuse, and Haute-Vienne.
Combat was a large movement in the French Resistance created in the non-occupied zone of France during the Second World War (1939–1945).
The 3 arrondissements of the Corrèze department are:
Arrondissement of Brive-la-Gaillarde, with 96 communes. The population of the arrondissement was 128,863 in 2016.
Arrondissement of Tulle, with 104 communes. The population of the arrondissement was 70,741 in 2016.
Arrondissement of Ussel, with 80 communes. The population of the arrondissement was 41,931 in 2016.
The following is a list of the 19 cantons of the Corrèze department, in France, following the French canton reorganisation which came into effect in March 2015:
The National Council of the Resistance (also, National Resistance Council; in French: Conseil National de la Résistance, was the body that directed and coordinated the different movements of the French Resistance: the press, trade unions and members of political parties hostile to the Vichy regime, starting from mid-1943.
The Tulle massacre was the roundup and summary execution of civilians in the French town of Tulle by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich in June 1944, three days after the D-Day landings in World War II.
Paul Chenailler, better known under the pseudonym Colonel Morice, was in charge of the French resistance in the Morbihan region Brittany during World War II.
The armée secrète was a French military organization active during World War II. The collective grouped the paramilitary formations of the three most important Gaullist resistance movements in the southern zone: Combat, Libération-sud and the Franc-Tireurs.
André Girard was a French civil servant and Resistance worker with the ALLIANCE network.
Henri Romans-Petit was a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War. He organised several maquis, notably the maquis de l'Ain et du Haut-Jura and the maquis de Haute-Savoie.
The Organisation de résistance de l'armée, O.R.A. was a French paramilitary resistance organisation during the Second World War. It was created on 31 January 1943, following the November 1942 German invasion of the zone libre as a self-styled apolitical organisation bringing together former French military personnel in pursuit of active resistance against the German occupiers, but rejecting Charles de Gaulle.
Georges Guingouin was a French Communist Party (PCF) militant who played a leading role in the French resistance as head of the Maquis du Limousin. He was controversial as a result of extortion committed under his authority during the épuration sauvage in Limousin during 1944.
Brive-la-Gaillarde is a railway station serving the town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France. The station opened on 17 September 1860 and is located on the Orléans–Montauban railway, Coutras–Tulle railway, Brive-Toulouse railway and Nexon-Brive railway.
Corrèze is a railway station in Saint-Priest-de-Gimel, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France. The station is located on the Tulle–Meymac railway line. The station is served by the TER Nouvelle-Aquitaine regional service operated by the SNCF.
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