Lucie Aubrac

Lucie Aubrac was a history teacher who helped found the Resistance movement Liberation- Sud in Lyon. To the German occupiers and their French collaborators, resisters were outlaws: the Germans called them bandits and terrorists, and the Vichy regime created the Milice in 1943 to hunt them. Her husband, Raymond Aubrac, was arrested in March 1943 and released two months later after she pressed the Vichy prosecutor. About a month afterwards he was arrested again. Facing execution, he was allowed a sham wedding with Lucie, and on the way back to prison her commando unit attacked the vehicle, freeing him and fifteen other prisoners. In the meantime she had approached Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon, posing as Raymond's fiancee.

She was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1996. In 1997 a lawyer, Jacques Verges, produced a so-called Barbie testament alleging that the Aubracs had tipped off Barbie, and a Paris court fined the author and publisher of a related book for defamation in 1998. Historians found no evidence that Raymond was an informer, though they noted inconsistencies in Lucie's own account. She died on 14 March 2007, aged 94. The line above is widely attributed to her, and a 1999 French television clip records her saying that young people need critical minds so that resistance remains a word of the present.