Bernard de Gaulle, nephew of the General, who was to marry Sylvie Geoffroy-Dechaume, the youngest in the family, told me about Marie-France, born in 1919 and given the name France to signify her parents’ satisfaction with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. ‘Marie-France was an angel,’ he says of his sister-in-law. Bernard, a keeper of so many flames, lives today in an apartment in the shadow of the former Cherche-Midi military prison, now a memorial but notorious as the place where Dreyfus was convicted and where, later, several resisters were tortured and shot. It is almost impossible here not to experience a sense of the past enveloping the present. ‘There was something heavenly about her which was a mixture of sincerity and force,’ he adds. Another friend recalled that, after the war, Marie-France could never walk along the Avenue Foch because of her memory of hearing loud cries from torture victims there. Sylvie, born in 1924, was too young at first to take an active role in resisting, and had to live with the torment of knowing that her brother Antoine was a prisoner while another brother, Jean-Pierre, had been captured following Dunkirk but managed to escape and subsequently joined the Maquis in the south. As soon as she was old enough, Sylvie joined him there.
Since 1941 Marie-France had been helping pilots on the run, even taking some of them to hide at Valmondois if they wanted to use Brittany as their escape route. She often worked with a local car mechanic, Fran?ois Kerambrun, a trusted friend of the family, who would drive the boys in his old truck to a house close to the sea and from there, once they heard the all-clear on the BBC, lead them down a steep cliff (so steep they hoped the Germans would not watch it) to the sea. The whole party then waited in caves for the British to send dinghies which would ferry them out to a ship waiting offshore. On one occasion she bought her charges French newspapers to read on the train from Paris to Brittany but was horrified to see that, as a German inspector arrived, one of them was reading it upside down with trembling hands. Luckily their documents were accepted so they did not have to say anything.
But in mid-1943, on seeing a Gestapo officer leave her Paris building, Marie-France realized that she had to move away immediately. Using a false identity, she was sent with a band of resistance fighters to a small house on the north Brittany coast, in the Saint-Malo region, part of an undercover operation intended, among other things, to sabotage the railways and the roads to prevent the Germans from reaching the coast and transporting arms and ammunition. From then on her work became more dangerous as, in addition to helping evaders, she was involved in preparing to lay explosives on railway lines in readiness for the Allied invasion, a task not initially given to women resisters and which required her to carry weapons.
Although many women were volunteering in 1943, other than communist workers who were used to being organized, most were well educated and well intentioned but with no previous experience of political or military work. In January 1943 Andrée (known as Dédée) de Jongh, founder and a key organizer of the Comet escape line,* and a former commercial artist and nurse who had made thirty-two journeys over the Pyrenees, was betrayed and captured at a farmhouse in the French Basque country. Interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo, Andrée eventually admitted that she was the organizer of the escape network. Chaos ensued in the wake of her arrest, as it was hard to know amid the infiltrations and multiple arrests who could be trusted.
Elisabeth Barbier, a thirty-one-year-old divorcee living with her mother in the Rue Vaneau in Paris, had been involved in resistance activities since 1940, working with friends in the Mithridate Franco-British network collecting vital information to help plan military operations. But, late in 1942, she and her mother also became involved in sheltering various resisters, downed pilots or evaders – men on the run trying to avoid being drafted into the STO – in their own apartment or in those of friends until they could be moved on. It was enormously risky work, especially if the men were neither French-speakers nor, in the case of North Americans, French-looking. Money was needed to feed and clothe them or to dye their hair. Cigarettes (important to calm nerves) could be bought for them on the black market but they cost between 150 and 250 francs a packet. Drue Tartière, bringing food from the country, went to visit some of these boys, as she described them, often mere teenagers who were bored hanging about, frustrated at not being allowed outside (since they might all too easily give themselves and others away) and who, she believed, did not appreciate what was being done for them.