Lucie Aubrac

Lucie Bernard, teacher and wartime resister: born Mâcon, France 29 June 1912; married 1939 Raymond Samuel (Raymond Aubrac; one son, two daughters); died Issy-les-Moulineaux, France 14 March 2007.

Lucie Aubrac was one of France's greatest Resistance heroes. She twice rescued her husband, Raymond, from German hands. On the second occasion, in June 1943, she organised and led an armed attack on a Gestapo convoy while pregnant. This was the only time during the Second World War that members of the Gestapo, the Nazi political police, were attacked on the street in France.

Aubrac's life was the subject of a number of films, most recently the internationally successful Lucie Aubrac (1997), directed by Claude Berri with Carole Bouquet in the title role.

After the war, she refused offers of a political career and returned to teaching. She protested against the French colonial war in Algeria in the 1950s. She remained an active campaigner for human rights - and a formidably courageous woman - until the end of her life. In the late 1990s, a young man tried to steal an old woman's handbag in a supermarket carpark near Paris. He had picked the wrong target. Lucie Aubrac, then in her eighties, ran him over with her supermarket trolley and raised the alarm.

She was born Lucie Bernard, in 1912, the daughter of a wine-producing family from Mâcon, in southern Burgundy. A brilliant student, she left her conservative, Catholic family at the age of 17 to study in Paris. In the capital, she earned her living as a plongeuse or washer-up in a restaurant.

Already involved in left-wing politics, she became deeply disturbed by the rise of Nazism after visiting Germany during the 1936 Olympic Games. In the winter of 1938-39, while working as a history teacher in Strasbourg, she met and married a young, Jewish engineer and army officer called Raymond Samuel. "My first impression of her was rather favourable and I guess that you could say that it was love at first sight," he said.

After the fall of France in June 1940, it was Lucie who first joined the "Resistance" which was then little more than a civil disobedience movement. Raymond, captured with the surrender of the French army, was in a military hospital in Sarrebourg. Lucie smuggled him some civilian clothes. He jumped over the hospital wall and they fled to Paris.

In 1941, the couple joined a group which produced the underground newspaper Libération. They moved to Lyons, where Raymond Samuel became a high-ranking resistance leader. He operated under various code names, including finally "Aubrac".

In June 1943, the Gestapo captured Raymond Aubrac along with Jean Moulin, the man sent by Charles de Gaulle to try to co-ordinate the squabbling underground forces. Lucie, pregnant with her second child, went to see the local Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie. She said that she was unmarried and begged permission to marry Raymond in prison so that her child would not be illegitimate.

Barbie, who was tried in the 1980s for war crimes, agreed that Lucie could meet Raymond. He was brought from his cell to the Gestapo headquarters. Lucie Aubrac took up the story in an interview with The Independent 11 years ago:

When Raymond was being taken back to the prison, we drove alongside the truck and killed the driver and the guy next to him. The truck came to a halt and the soldiers who were in the

back got out and we went "Bang, bang". Raymond jumped out of the truck too quickly and was wounded, but we put him in another car and drove him off to his hiding place.

Within a few months, Raymond and Lucie and their children had been smuggled to London to join de Gaulle's Free French forces.

After the war Lucie Aubrac served on the consultative committee of de Gaulle's provisional government in 1945. She also served on the tribunal which tried Marshal Philippe Pétain, the head of the collaborationist Vichy regime.

In 1984 she published her memoirs, Ils partiront dans l'ivresse, translated as Outwitting the Gestapo (1993). After she retired from teaching, she toured French schools talking about her wartime experiences.

"Resistance is not just something locked away in the period 1939-45," she once said. "Resistance is a way of life, an intellectual and emotional reaction to anything which threatens human liberty."

John Lichfield

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