The Maquis were rural guerrilla bands of French and Belgian 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 which provided forced labor for Germany. To avoid capture and deportation to Germany, they became increasingly organized into active resistance groups.
The French Resistance was a collection of groups that fought the Nazi occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy régime in France during the Second World War. Resistance cells were small groups of armed men and women who conducted guerrilla warfare and published underground newspapers. They also provided first-hand intelligence information, and escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind Axis enemy lines. The Resistance's men and women came from many different parts of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, liberals, anarchists, communists, and some fascists. The proportion of French people who participated in organized resistance has been estimated at from one to three percent of the total population.
The National Front for an Independent France, better known simply as National Front was a World War II French Resistance movement created to unite all of the Resistance Organizations together to fight the Nazi occupation forces and Vichy France under Marshall Pétain.
Lucie Samuel, born Lucie Bernard, and better known as Lucie Aubrac, was a French history teacher and member of the French Resistance during World War II. In 1938, she earned an agrégation of history, and in 1939 she married Raymond Samuel, who became known as Raymond Aubrac during the war.
Charlotte Delbo was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French Resistance.
Germaine Tillion was a French ethnologist, best known for her work in Algeria in the 1950s on behalf of the French government. A member of the French resistance, she spent time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Raymond Aubrac was a leader of the French Resistance during the Second World War and a civil engineer after the World War II.
Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier was a member of the French Resistance as well as a photojournalist, Communist and later, French politician.
Libération-sud was a resistance group active between 1940-1944 and created in the Free Zone of France during the Second World War in order to fight against the Nazi occupation through coordinated sabotage and propaganda operations.
Lise Marie Jeanette de Baissac MBE CdeG, code names Odile and Marguerite, was a Mauritian agent in the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization in France during World War II. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.
Events from the year 1943 in France.
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.
Pierre-André Lefaucheux was a leading French industrialist and recipient of the Order of Liberation, awarded to heroes of France's Liberation during World War II.
Danielle Casanova was a French communist activist and member of the French Resistance during World War II. A dentist by occupation, she was a high-ranking figure within the Communist Youth and founded its women's organisation Union des Jeunes Filles de France in 1936. Casanova was arrested on 15 February 1942 as she brought coal to Georges Politzer and his wife; she had been involved in organising actions against the German occupiers. First incarcerated at La Santé Prison in Paris, she was transferred to the Fort de Romainville for causing unrest with the help of fellow prisoners. Casanova was deported to Auschwitz on 24 January 1943, where she began working as a dentist at the camp infirmary. She died of typhus shortly thereafter. She was posthumously awarded the Legion of Honour.
Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux was a French women's and human rights activist. During World War II, she was a member of the French Resistance and orchestrated her husband's release from Buchenwald concentration camp after he was captured by the Gestapo. She was the sole woman in the French delegation to the first General Assembly of the United Nations. Lefaucheux helped found the UN's Commission on the Status of Women and was its chair from 1948 to 1953.
Hélène Victoria Mordkovitch, spouse of Philippe Viannay, was a French résistante who cofounded the Resistance movement Défense de la France on 14 July 1941.
The clandestine press of the French Resistance was collectively responsible for printing flyers, broadsheets, newspapers, and even books in secret in France during the German occupation of France in the Second World War. The secret press was used to disseminate the ideas of the French Resistance in cooperation with the Free French, and played an important role in the liberation of France and in the history of French journalism, particularly during the 1944 Freedom of the Press Ordinances.
The Convoi des 31000 or Convoy of the 31000s was a deportation convoy that left Romainville, France, for Auschwitz Concentration Camp on 24 January 1943. The women who were transported were mostly Communist Party members or Resistance fighters. Its name stemmed from the fact that the women were assigned numbers between 31625 and 31854 when they reached Auschwitz. It was the only convoy to transport women of the French Resistance to Auschwitz. Out of 230 women who arrived at the concentration camp, only 49 survived their ordeal. A number of women from the convoy testified against the Nazis after the war, wrote autobiographies, were awarded the Legion of Honour or were decreed to be Righteous Among the Nations.
This article is to share the history and details of women in the French Senate.
