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Mont Valérien: a site of history and remembrance

Une sentinelle allemande monte la garde devant l'entrée de la forteresse du Mont-Valérien

The Cross of Lorraine at the Mont Valérien Memorial. Source: Creative Commons Licence Photo: Remi Jouan.

For centuries, Mont Valérien was an important Christian pilgrimage site. Then, in the mid-14th century, a fort was built there, as part of Paris’s defensive fortifications.

During the Second World War, it was used as the main execution site by the German authorities in France.

La bataille de la Dyle - mai 1940

10th May 1940. The arrival of French regiments in Belgium

1918 - Les Américains au combat

Maquis du Mont Mouchet

Memorial to the Resistance on Mont Mouchet (Haute Loire, France).

The Maquis du Mont Mouchet, along with the Maquis du Vercors, was no doubt the largest grouping of French Résistance fighters at a single location in the nation.

Liberation of the camps

Entrée de camp allemand nazi Birkenau (Auschwitz II), vue depuis l'intérieur du camp. Source : Libre de droit

Sixty years after the collapse of the National Socialist dictatorship and the end of the Nazi concentration camp system, certain questions have yet to be answered despite everything we have learnt about the subject.

In the end, nobody will ever know exactly how many victims were lost during that period, nor how many prisoners were still living in the camps when they were liberated by the Allied troops.

The overseas soldiers in the Second World War

Captain N'Tchoréré, commanding the 7th Company of the 53rd RICMS

La Flamme sous l'Arc de Triomphe

1918: the Second Battle of the Marne (27 May - 6 August)

Le mémorial des batailles de la Marne. Dormans. Source : GNU Free Documentation License

Following the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, on 3 March 1918, Germany hastened to transfer its troops from Russia to France. Now with numerical superiority over its British, French and Belgian adversaries, in order to secure victory it had to launch a series of offensives before the Americans arrived at the front.

The resistance in Corrèze and Creuse

Photograph of armed resistance fighters from the Maquis of Neuvic, winter 1943-1944 © Musée départemental de la Résistance à Neuvic

The Combat movement was established in Haute-Corrèze

The Resistance and the Networks

They rubbed shoulders with death to keep London informed, to help prisoners escape, to get pilots back home, to organise sabotages… They were part of a network.

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