Agnès Humbert, a middle-aged art historian working at the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, who was divorced from the artist Georges Sabbagh with whom she had two sons, acted as secretary and typist for the group. She had heard de Gaulle’s appel and, as a natural anti-fascist, was determined to heed it when all around her it seemed that men, former soldiers, were behaving as if it was all over. Nonetheless, she was keenly aware of the ramifications of her actions. ‘Because of my meddling there will be widows, inconsolable mothers, fatherless children … where are all my lofty humanitarian ideals now?’ she asks herself. Moments later, when she sees German soldiers removing huge bolts of cloth and many boxes of shoes back to Germany, she knows the answer: ‘We simply have to stop them. We can’t allow them to colonize us, to carry off all our goods on the backs of our men while they stroll along, arms swinging, faces wreathed in smiles, boots and belts polished and gleaming.’
But, just as swiftly as the resisters had got going, they were denounced to the Gestapo by a priest working as a double agent who had infiltrated the group. The arrests began in January 1941; Oddon and Lewitsky were captured on 10 February, the others a little later. It was Agnès who in this tense atmosphere nonetheless persuaded Pierre Brossolette, a brilliant teacher who had been sacked from his job by Vichy and was now running a bookstore with his wife as a cover for other activities, to write for Résistance. Amazingly, he managed to escape arrest when all the others in the group were picked up, and he took refuge briefly at the Collège Sévigné, where Claire Chevrillon was teaching. This was considered a place of relative safety as most of the pupils, children of academics, were anti-Pétain. But nothing could be taken for granted, even within families, and Claire and Vivou had other cousins on her father’s side, the Pelletiers, who were fervent Pétainistes and ‘thought it went without saying that all good French citizens were Pétainistes’. These Vichyites had harsh memories of their experiences during the Guerre de Quatorze and so put their confidence in Pétain as one who, they believed, symbolized all the values they had fought for then and ‘on which they’d built their lives … patriotism, Christian acceptance of suffering, morality tied to work and discipline, dislike of anything revolutionary or disorderly’.
In April Agnès Humbert was arrested while at her sick and elderly mother’s hospital bedside and was imprisoned in various Paris jails for the remainder of the year, first in the Cherche-Midi, then in Fresnes and finally in La Santé. After a brief, and somewhat bizarre, military trial, all ten resisters were sentenced to death, but the three women, Yvonne Oddon, Agnès Humbert and Sylvette Leleu, had their sentences commuted to hard labour for life and were deported to Germany. The men were shot on 23 February in a clearing near the fortress of Mont Valérien, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne to the west of Paris, a site now preserved as a monument to the resistance. The German prosecutor remarked to Agnès: ‘Madame, if the French army had been composed of women and not men, we Germans would never have gotten to Paris.’ The presiding judge, Captain Ernst Roskothen, by all accounts a decent man who hated the job he was forced to do, was profoundly impressed by the courage and demeanour of all the accused. After the Liberation in August 1944, when Roskothen was arrested and briefly imprisoned, Agnès Humbert and Yvonne Oddon petitioned for his release, citing his humanity and respect for those who had appeared before him.