For decades after the end of World War II, the thousands of women who took part in France’s resistance against Nazi German occupation in WWII rarely got a mention in history books.
The stories of Lucie Aubrac, a teacher who broke her husband Raymond out of a lorry transporting him to a Gestapo jail, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, a Resistance leader who was smuggled to Spain in a mailbag, and Madeleine Riffaud, a sharpshooter who helped liberate Paris, were exceptional tales in an otherwise male-dominated narrative.
Abroad, perhaps the most famous “resistante” is US-born dancer and singer Josephine Baker, who served as a lieutenant in the French air force’s auxiliary corps during the war and passed on information concealed in sheet music.
The feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s led to a surge of interest in the role played by women in the war.
But it took until 2015 for women resisters in the person of ethnologist Germaine Tillion and Genevieve De Gaulle-Anthonioz, a niece of war hero General Charles de Gaulle, to be honoured with places in the Pantheon mausoleum, France’s secular holy of holies.
French President Francois Hollande stands with family members as they pay their respects in front of four flag-draped caskets representing World War II Resistance fighters during a ceremony on May 27, 2015, at the Pantheon in Paris. Photo: AFPCivilian resistance
Women accounted for between 12 and 25 per cent of all Resistance members, according to Laurent Douzou, a history professor at Lumiere Lyon-11 university.
And yet only six women have been honoured as Companions of the Liberation – an award created by De Gaulle to decorate those who fought for France’s freedom – compared with 1,038 men.
“Civilian resistance, which was mainly the work of women, was not counted,” Vladimir Trouplin, curator of a Paris museum dedicated to Resistance heroes, explained to AFP.
Misogyny also explains why women received so little recognition for the role they played.
“In those days women were not supposed to steal the limelight”, Trouplin noted.
Different objects describing the German occupation of France. Photo: Shutterstock.comNearly 80 years after the end of the war, the race is on to collect the stories of the women who made a strike for freedom in countless vital ways – by for instance ferrying messages and packages, transporting arms in baskets and buggies or acting as escorts for fugitive French or Allied prisoners or spies.
Former member of the French Resistance Odile de Vasselot de Regne poses in Paris. Photo: Thomas Samson / AFP
French Resistance fighter Michele Agniel.
French World War II resistant Odette Niles poses in Drancy near Paris. Photo: Alain Jocard / AFP
Ahead of International Women's Day on March 8, AFP interviewed three of the thousands of women whose stories of wartime heroism had yet to be told: Odile de Vasselot, aged 101, Odette Niles, aged 100, and Michele Agniel, aged 96.
All three took advantage of the fact that women were deemed less suspect and less courageous than men to slip unnoticed through checkpoints and borders.
All three diced with death.
Odette spent nearly three years in French internment camps, Odile was nearly killed during the liberation of Paris and Michele was sent to Germany on the last deportation train from Paris in August 1944.
Between 1940 and 1944, 6,700 women were deported from occupied France, the vast majority of them Resistance members.
Their bravery helped advance the struggle for the emancipation of women. In 1944, French women finally gained the right to vote.
Three heroines of the French Resistance
Without firing a gun or shedding any blood, Odile de Vasselot, Odette Niles and Michele Agniel were among the thousands of women who took part in the resistance against the Nazi German occupation of France during World War II.
Their acts – which included ferrying messages across enemy lines, smuggling packages and helping Resistance fighters and Allied airmen escape – carried the risk of imprisonment, torture and even death.
And yet for decades after the war, the roles played by unsung war heroes like these were greatly underestimated and rarely documented.
“With what is happening in Ukraine, I am reliving June 1940... We did it, why can’t the Ukrainians do it too? We have to help them!” - Michele Agniel, aged 96
Aged 101, 100 and 96 respectively, de Vasselot, Niles and Agniel spoke to AFP on the eve of International Women’s Day about their part in combatting tyranny.
Odile de Vasselot
For 18-year-old de Vasselot, doing nothing was not an option in 1940 when Nazi banners and propaganda posters – either in German or from the collaborationist regime led by Marshal Philippe Petain – started appearing on the streets of occupied France.
Odile Vasselot“I want to fight back!” she said to herself, without knowing how she, a young woman from a well-to-do Catholic family, could help defend her country.
Born in 1922 into a military family, she moved to Paris with her mother and sisters after her father, a soldier, was imprisoned by the Germans.
On November 11, 1940, she took a homemade pompom in blue, white and red to join a student demonstration on the Champs-Elysees avenue, defying a curfew in one of the first public acts of resistance in France.
Two years later, she joined the Resistance as a courier, ferrying packages every week by train between the occupied northern half of the country and the southeastern Free Zone, without daring to peek at the contents.
In 1943, the young woman who went by “Jeanne” on her missions began helping Allied airmen cross France – picking them up from the Belgian border, providing them with papers and buying their tickets to Spain on their circuitous route back to Britain.
Several times she barely escaped arrest.
On January 4, 1944, she was accompanying two British soldiers on a train when the Gestapo raided the carriage.
They arrested the two men, who were sitting a few rows away from Odile to avoid drawing attention to her.
“I still had their ticket stubs in my pocket,” she told AFP. “I ate them”.
Odette NilesOdette Niles
A young Communist militant before the war broke out, Niles sprang into action as soon as the war started, handing out fliers on the streets of Paris while still at school.
Three of the boys were executed and the others were imprisoned.
Niles was sent to the Choisel internment camp in western France, where she was kept in barracks swarming with vermin that had wooden crates for beds.
At the camp, the 18-year-old found fleeting romance with Guy Moquet, one of the young heroes of the Resistance, who was executed by firing squad in October 1941.
A photo of WWII French resistant Odette Niles (fourth from right and second row) at the La Lande camp in 1942. Photo: Alain Jocard / AFPShe was moved from camp to camp for three years before escaping in 1944 and joining the Resistance in Bordeaux. There she met her future husband, Resistance fighter and fellow Communist Maurice Niles.
The pair remained active in left-wing politics for the rest of their lives.
Michele Agniel
Agniel was the 14-year-old daughter of a World War I veteran when the armistice was signed in the summer of 1940, beginning Germany’s occupation of France.
Michele Agniel “Right away my father said, ‘We have to do something’,” said Agniel, who grew up in the Paris suburb of Saint-Mande in a family she described as “profoundly patriotic”.
She started smuggling fliers in her schoolbag “between her music copy and her history book”.
At checkpoints, she would open her bag, but never got searched. Who, after all, would suspect a schoolgirl?
In 1942, the family joined an underground cell that hid escaped prisoners of war, mostly US and British pilots.
Agniel’s job was to meet them in the countryside and have them follow her back to Paris by train. She then took them to a photo booth in central Paris to get pictures of false documents.
If anyone asked what she is up to, she had her answer ready: “They’re deaf mutes on their way to a special facility in Toulouse”, a city in southwest France.
In 1944, two weeks before her final school exams, she was arrested with her parents after an informer alerted the police, and put on the last deportation train out of Paris, just before the city was liberated.
Her father was sent to the Buchenwald camp, where he died.
A portrait of World War II French Resistance fighter Michele Agniel. Photo: Alain Jocard / AFPAgniel and her mother were interned first at Ravensbruck and then at Koenigsberg, where they were liberated by Russia’s Red Army on February 5, 1945, and repatriated to Paris.
After the war, Agniel became a teacher and for a long time kept silent about her past activism. But the rise of a revisionist far right prompted her to begin telling her story in schools.
Today, she said her testimony had taken on new urgency.
“With what is happening in Ukraine, I am reliving June 1940... We did it, why can’t the Ukrainians do it too? We have to help them!”