A leading figure in the French Resistance, an ethnologist and writer, Germaine Tillion drew lessons from her experience of World War II that served her throughout her entire life. At all times she managed to combine testimony, reflection and action.

Germaine Tillion was born on 30 May 1907 in Allègre in Haute-Loire. In 1919, the family moved to the Paris region. During the twenties, she began to study ethnology and obtained a scholarship to study the Berber population in the Algerian Aures region in 1933. Between 1934 and 1940, she stayed with the Chaouias for four long periods and continued to write her thesis.

Back in France, on 9 June 1940, after the Armistice, she decided that "something had to be done". In the company of Paul Hauet, a retired colonel, she began her resistance activities under the cover of an association to help prisoners of war, the National Union of Colonial Combatants. This cell came into contact with similar groups, such as the one at the Musée de l'Homme, bringing together other ethnologists with Boris Vildé at the head. It was in 1946, when Germaine Tillion took care of getting administrative approval for the network, that she gave it the name "Network of the Musée de l'Homme", in tribute to the majority of its founders. The Group had numerous activities: collecting information to be passed on to London, taking care of escaped soldiers or organising prison breaks, sheltering English paratroopers, making false ID papers, spreading calls to combat, eradicating traitors and Gestapo agents.

Even though she was a dedicated patriot, Germaine Tillion never forgot one guiding principle to which she adhered at all times: dedication to truth and justice. In a note to the underground press, she observed that a lot of information concerning the situation at the time was circulating in French society but was contradictory because it came from different sources. She directed her fellow resistants to not skew the truth, to not hide anything, to strive to understand and to judge impartially. "In terms of ideas, at the outset we only know one cause that is dear to us, that of our homeland, it is for love of it that we have come together, to try to preserve its faith and hope." But in no way, in absolutely no way do we want to sacrifice the truth to it, because our homeland is dear to us only on one condition, that we do not sacrifice the truth to it".

An initial denunciation led to the arrest of several members of the Musée de l'Homme cell; in April 1941, a second betrayal led to the arrest of its remaining members. They were tried a year later, in February 1942. Ten people, including several close friends, were sentenced to death. Germaine Tillion, who escaped these arrests, struggled to get them reprieved but in vain: the seven men in the group were shot and the three women deported. She herself was arrested in the street in August 1942 by the German police after being betrayed by a French priest posing as a resistant. Detained for more than a year in the French La Santé and Fresnes prisons, she was deported to the Ravensbrueck camp in October 1943. She was freed in April 1945.

After returning to France, she devoted most of her time to the history of the Resistance and Deportation and published several works on these themes. However, she did not neglect her civic commitments and took part in the campaign against the camps that is still in operation in the communist countries in Europe and Asia.

In 1954, she was sent by the French government as an observer to Algeria, where the insurgency was getting under way. At first, she proposed strengthening the education given to the indigenous population (boys and girls, children and adults) to enable them to emerge from the poverty that economic development had failed to stem. As the conflict intensified, in 1957, Germaine Tillion devoted all her efforts to mitigating the effects of the violence: she campaigned against torture, executions and met with FLN leaders to convince them to stop indiscriminate attacks.

Elected studies director at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1958, she spent the following decades studying North African societies. She also published a new reviewed edition of Ravensbrück, her book about Deportation. She died on 19 April 2008 aged 100. Her autobiographical work, Fragments of Life, was published the following year.

Tzvetan Todorov - President of the Germaine Tillion association. In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 241/december 2013

Resistant in 1940, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was the only woman recognized as the head of a large French resistance network, the Alliance network. Michèle Cointet, her biographer, tells of her extraordinary journey.

Marie-Madeleine Bridou escaped from the conformism of the bourgeois background she was born into in 1909. She lived with her two children in Paris, far from her husband Edward Méric, an Indigenous Affairs officer in Morocco. She divided her time between "Radio-Cité" and Commander Loustaunau-Lacau's General Secretariat of anti-communist and anti-German publications. Loustaunau-Lacau was the founder of the Corvignolles network and La Spirale and the person who initiated her into undercover activities. The love of a mythical homeland gained from a childhood in Shanghai where her father was the General Maritime Messaging Agent and... "honourable correspondent" and a lack of illusions about Marshal Petain inspired her in June 1940 to believe that since the men had put down their weapons, it was up to the women to take them up.

However she let herself be convinced to follow Loustaunau-Lacau in Vichy drawn by a general delegation to the powerful French Legion of combatants. A network centered on Marseilles and Vichy was set up which proved fertile ground from which to recruit officials from ministries and patriotic officers. The break with Vichy was not long in coming when Admiral Darlan expelled Loustaunau-Lacau from the Legion in February 1941. Developments in the war offered them an opportunity to engage actively against Hitler. Indeed, submarine warfare threatened the survival of the British. Getting information on submarine departures from Lorient was vital. Only the French could provide this. In April 1941, contact was established in Lisbon where Loustaunau-Lacau got money and a first transmitting station, the most effective weapon to get round the several weeks delay with conventional mail and finally enabling an immediate response. Alliance owned up to 17 of these stations. Since Marie-Madeleine's cover was not blown, unlike Loustaunau-Lacau in Paris, she organised the Alliance network in the north and west proclaiming loyalty to England and equality among partners. The Germans called it "Noah's Ark" because of the animal nicknames adopted by its members.

Arrested in Algiers in May 1941, Loustaunau-Lacau was found guilty then handed over to the Germans. Marie-Madeleine concluded from this event that it was best to refuse to make political commitments and this led some members who wanted to have closer ties with General de Gaulle, such as General Alamichel, to put some distance between themselves and Marie-Madeleine. Driven by her companions, she took over from Loustaunau-Lacau using a neutral signature: POZ 55. Since the results were exceptional, the British eventually acknowledged her, finally unveiled, as the head of the military intelligence network, the only one to benefit from this status in Europe. A great organizer, authoritative, rigorous, a natural leader and bold, she had enough mental flexibility to follow the advice of the British to decentralise the network into sub-networks such as Sea Star or Georges Lamarque's remarkable Druids.

Alliance recruited heavily among civil servants and was unique in  another way: 24% of members were women, making it the resistant organisation with the strongest female presence. Alliance played its greatest role in the Battle of the Atlantic providing information on train operations (German transports to the east), the first information about the V1 and V2 testing at Peenemunde through Amniarix (Jeannie Rousseau), records of launch pad operations in north-western France and a detailed map of the Atlantic defences. Marie-Madeleine organised General Giraud's submarine departure from Lavandou on 4 November, 1942 to Algiers to facilitate the Allied landing there.

She was held up in England following the arrest of her assistant Faye in September 1943 but got to return to France in July 1944 and, after escaping from a German barracks, carried out intelligence missions ahead of Patton's army.

Sensitive to the material and moral suffering of the members of her hard-hit network, 431 were killed i.e. one third of the total, she spent over twenty years caring for the survivors and their families. She published memories in the form of a memorial entitled Noah's Ark and defends the memory of the Resistance as Chairwoman of the Resistance Action Committee. With her husband, Free French fighter Hubert Fourcade, she helped return General de Gaulle to power in 1958. She was neither a political party icon nor anti-fascist activist and remained faithful to her idea of the Resistance: an efficient patriotic struggle against Nazi Germany.

Michèle Cointet, University Professor Emeritus, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 239/october 2013

For more information:

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade-Un chef de la Résistance, éd. Perrin, 2006.

After attending secondary school in Paris, Alain Savary graduated with degrees in law and political science, then qualified as a naval staff officer at the École du Commissariat de la Marine.

He participated in the Battle of France as a member of the naval staff, then travelled to Britain where, on 8 August 1940, he enlisted in the Free French Naval Forces (FNFL). With the rank of sub-lieutenant, he became aide-de-camp to the FNFL commander, Admiral Muselier. After the territory of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon sided with Free France, he was appointed as its governor, with the rank of lieutenant.

In June 1943, Savary was sent to Tripolitania, first on the naval staff, then as commander of the 2nd Squadron, 1st Regiment of Naval Fusiliers, which became an armoured reconnaissance regiment incorporated in the 1st Free French Division. With his unit, he took part in the Italian campaign, the Provence landings and the liberation of France, before being appointed to represent the Companions of Liberation on the Provisional Consultative Committee in October 1944.

In 1945, he was assigned to the Ministry of the Interior and thus embarked on a career as a senior civil servant and politician.

General secretary of the Office for German and Austrian Affairs in 1946, then councillor of the French Union, deputy for Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon and Minister for Moroccan and Tunisian Affairs, he was the first secretary of the Socialist Party from 1969 to 1971. Deputy for Haute-Garonne (1973-81) and chairman of the Midi-Pyrénées Regional Council (1974-81), he served as Minister for Education from 1981 to 1984.

Alain Savary was an Officer of the Légion d’Honneur and a Companion of Liberation, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre 1939-1945 (with three citations), the Medal of the Resistance and the Silver Star (United States).

Source : MINDEF/SGA/DMPA

The son of a notable Mpongwe family, Charles N’Tchoréré was a student at the Ecole Montfort. Forced to enter the world of employment, he occupied a sales post in Cameroon.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, he left his German colony and returned to Gabon. In 1916, he voluntary enlisted to fight on the front line. At the end of the war, he decided to pursue a career in the military. Appointed to warrant officer in 1919, he fought in Morocco. After joining the officers’ training academy in Fréjus, he left at the rank of major in 1922. Sent to the Levant, Lieutenant N’Tchoréré was gravely wounded during operations in Syria. He was cited in 1925 to the Order of the Division and decorated with Croix de Guerre with a silver star.

Following a brief interlude working at the ministry of war, he asked to be sent to Sudan. In Kati he took the command of the out-of-ranks company of the 2nd RTS (Regiment of Senegalese Tirailleurs), at the same time as being headmaster at the army children’s school.

Promoted to Captain in 1933, he was appointed to the 1st RTS in Saint-Louis (Senegal) where he again was at the head of the school for troop children.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939, he requested to take command of a battalion of Gabonese volunteers. Assigned to the Camp de Sauge, near Bordeaux, he was sent to the front on the Somme River where he took command of the 7th company of the 53rd RICMS (Mixed Colonial Senegalese Infantry Regiment). On 7 June, entrenched in the village of Airaines, near Amiens, Captain N’Tchoréré and his men, overwhelmed by German attacks, were taken prisoner after days of fierce resistance. However, a German officer refused to treat N’Tchoréré as an officer and when he refused to fall in line with the black enlisted soldiers, he was shot point blank.

For his conduct during the campaign in France, Captain N’Tchoréré was posthumously cited to the Order of the Division in October 1940 and then to the Order of the Army Corps in August 1954 and decorated with the Croix de Guerre with the silver gilt star attachment.

The 1957-1959 graduating year of the training academy for officers from overseas territories took the name Captain N’Tchoréré.

Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu graduated from the Naval Academy in 1908 and served first in Morocco and then, during World War I, in the Mediterranean, before joining the Carmelite Order in 1920.

As a reservist he was mobilised in 1939 and assigned to staff headquarters in Cherbourg before being promoted to corvette commander. Taken prisoner on 19 June 1940, he escaped on the 22nd and joined General de Gaulle, who named him chief of defence staff for the Free French Naval Forces. Frigate Captain Thierry d'Argenlieu took part in the rallying operations in Africa in the autumn of 1940. Called back to London in July 1941, he was appointed France’s High Commissioner for the Pacific, where he notably presided over rallying the support of Wallis and Futuna in 1942. After taking part in the Casablanca Conference, he was named commander of the Naval Forces in Great Britain on 19 July 1943. On 14 June 1944, on board the Combattante, he brought General de Gaulle to France and accompanied him all the way to Paris, which they entered on 25 August 1944.

Named Vice Admiral in December 1944, Thierry d'Argenlieu was entrusted with the highest functions from the end of World War II to 1947, including the position of France’s High Commissioner and Commander in Chief for Indochina between August 1945 and March 1947, before returning to the Carmelite Order.

Reverend Father Louis de la Trinité, Admiral Thierry d'Argenlieu, received the honours of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and Companion of the Liberation. He was notably awarded the Médaille Militaire, the War Cross 1939-1945 with three palms, the War Cross for Foreign Operational Theatres with a palm and the Résistance Medal with a rosette.

Alphonse Juin, son of a gendarme, was born in Bône, Algeria, on 16 December 1888. After his studies in Constantine and later in Algiers, he was admitted to Saint-Cyr in 1909. He graduated at the head of his class –the "de Fès" class, in 1912 – the same year as Charles de Gaulle. He chose to join the Algerian Tirailleurs. Assigned to Morocco at the end of 1912, Second Lieutenant Juin took part in the pacification operations in the country.

On 3 August 1914, Germany declared war on France. Lieutenant Juin joined the front with the Moroccan troops. In September 1914, he took part in the Battle of the Marne. Seriously wounded on the Champagne front in March 1915, he partially lost the use of his right arm. Captain in 1916, he joined the 5th battalion of Moroccan Tirailleurs at the Chemin des Dames. In February 1918, he completed army staff training at Melun before being seconded to the French military mission to the American army in October and assigned to developmental training courses for the liaison officers of the American Expeditionary Force.

He earned the certificate of the École Supérieure de Guerre in 1921 and served in Tunisia before returning to Morocco at the end of 1923, where he took part in the Rif Campaign. He returned to France with Maréchal Lyautey in the autumn of 1925 and worked under his orders at the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre. Promoted to the rank of Battalion Chief in 1926, he left for the 7th Algerian Tirailleurs regiment in Constantine the following year.

In 1929 he was put in charge of the military staff offices of the Resident-General of Morocco, Lucien Saint, and played an active role in the last phase of the Atlas pacification plan. Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in March 1932, he became a professor of general tactics at the École Supérieure de Guerre in 1933 before being assigned second in command at the 3rd Zouave regiment in Constantine. He took command of this regiment on 6 March 1935. In June, he was promoted to Colonel. In 1937, he was assigned to the service of the Resident-General of Morocco, General Noguès, and also took courses at the Centre des Hautes Études Militaires.

Named Brigadier General on 26 December 1938, he was assigned to mobilisation at staff headquarters for the North Africa theatre of operations. As the situation in Europe was worsening, he was in Algiers preparing measures relative to raising divisions in Algeria and Tunisia. With the declaration of war in September 1939, he asked to serve in metropolitan France. The following 4 December, he took up command of the 15th Motorised Infantry Division. When the German forces launched their offensive in the west on 10 May 1940, his division entered Belgium, where it fought remarkably at Gembloux on 14 and 15 May. Further to the south, German troops broke through the front at Sedan. Juin received an order to pull back. He successively defended Valenciennes and the outskirts of Lille, providing cover for the retreat 1st French Army toward Dunkirk. He was captured in Lille on 30 May 1940 and imprisoned at Königstein fortress. Named Major General during his captivity, he was released in June of 1941 at Maréchal Pétain’s request as a specialist of North Africa. Named deputy to the Commanding General of the troops in Morocco on 16 July 1941, he was promoted to General of the Army Corps and replaced General Weygand at the head of the North Africa forces on the following 20 November. For the Army of Africa, he pursued the policy adopted by his predecessor: "defence against everybody" (both Axis and Allied forces).

On 8 November 1942, the British and Americans landed in Algeria and Morocco. Juin, who was not informed of the operation, was arrested in Algiers by members of the local resistance movement. The authorities quickly took back control of the city. Juin was freed and intervened to obtain a cease-fire between the landing forces and the French troops. Back in the war on the Allied side, the Army of Africa then participated in taking back France’s national territory, with Tunisia as the first theatre of operations. During this campaign (November 1942 – May 1943), General Juin commanded the French Army Detachment and was named Army General on 25 December 1942. He held the position of acting French Resident-General in Tunisia starting on 8 May 1943. During the summer, he set up the French Expeditionary Corps that he led into the Italian Campaign. After several successful battles, on the Pantano in December 1943, on the Rapido and at Belvedere in January 1944, he was victorious at Garigliano on 13 May, opening up the way to Rome for the Allies. He then moved north to Sienna and northern Tuscany. Juin left the French Expeditionary Corps and Italy in August.

Named general chief of the national defence staff under General de Gaulle, Head of the Provisional Government, he entered liberated Paris on 25 August alongside the General. As France’s liberation continued, he dedicated himself to reorganising the French armed forces to enable them to play a full role at the end of the operations. At the same time, as a military expert, he carried out many missions, notably to Moscow in December 1944 where he took part in the negotiations on the future Franco-Soviet pact and to the United States in April of 1945 for the foundation of the United Nations. In April 1946, General Juin was sent to the Far East to negotiate the withdrawal of Chinese troops occupying northern Indochina.

In 1947, Juin returned to North Africa where he was appointed to the position of France’s Resident-General in Rabat, Morocco. The situation in the Far East continued to deteriorate, however, and in October 1950, the government sent him on a new mission to Indochina. Inspector general of the French armed forces in January 1951, he took on command of the allied forces in the Central Europe sector the following September under the Atlantic Alliance. His functions put him in the centre of domestic and international problems: France’s place in the Atlantic Alliance, the debate on the European Defence Community (EDC), the movement of the North African countries toward independence, the war in Indochina, etc. At the same time, he was promoted to the rank of Maréchal de France on 7 May 1952 and was admitted to the Académie Française on 26 June.

In February 1957, he published his first book, “Le Maghreb en Feu”, and then dedicated himself to writing his Memoires and various books.

Maréchal Juin died on 27 January 1967.

He had received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and held the Médaille Militaire, the War Cross 1914-1918, the War Cross 1939-1945, the War Cross for Foreign Operational Theatres, the Colonial Medal for Morocco and Tunisia, as well as many foreign decorations.

“I was twenty. I won’t let anyone say those are the best years of your life.” These words were written by a young man, Paul Nizan, aged twenty-six at the time. They introduced his first book published in 1931, Aden, Arabie, an extremely inflammatory pamphlet against colonialism, which set the tone for his future work: open, controversial and intentionally despairing.  Waving the flag of mutiny and guided by the principles of communism, Paul Nizan, throughout his short career, relentlessly assailed the established order, ferreted out the failings of bourgeois society and watched out for the harbingers of history. 

Born on 7 February 1905 in Tours to a middle class family, his father had previously worked in rail before the war, at 19 years of age Paul joined the Ecole Normale Supérieure, one of France’s elite universities. His fellow students in his graduating year included philosophers and writers Ray Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre. On reading Aden, Arabie, Sartre, his inseparable friend who was always confused with him (one had a divergent strabismus and one a convergent strabismus), described him as "absorbed in studying his fingernails and releasing his violence with a sly and underhand serenity." But this apparent coolness, this brilliant demonstration of a charming dandy whose lilac outfits and concise way of speaking sent a tremble of excitement running through the ENS student ranks, belied his secret wounds.

"My only original trait is that periodically I suffer from depression," he once confided when chatting to the woman who would later become his wife, Henriette Alphen. "I’m neither joyful nor desperate, but I’ll admit during the main course that life doesn’t make any sense, and during dessert that nobody should be surprised if one day I enter the regular clergy.” Nizan would thus spend entire days in complete silence unless he ran away suddenly only to reappear a few nights later, haggard-looking, declaring his affiliations for somewhere between the extreme right and communism, and then discovered a passion for cinema. Tormented by a profound discontentment that gave him not a moment’s peace, obsessed by death, disgusted by the “official practice of philosophy”, he left to go to Aden, in Yemen, as a private tutor for an English family. Aden, “a compressed version of Europe” would be the opportunity for him to find his political consciousness. He returned a year later and opted for Marxism, the only concrete solution to his revolt. By late 1927, he had joined the French Communist Party. He was almost 23 and had a wife, one child, soon to be two, and the highest diploma for teaching philosophy.

A fervent militant, he stood as a candidate for the French Communist Party in the 1932 legislative elections in Bourg-en-Bresse, where he’d been teaching philosophy for a year. He then went on to pursue a career in literature and journalism and worked as editor in chief of the avant-garde magazine Bifur, which brought attention to Michaux, Sartre and Joyce; a literature critic at L’Humanité where he supported Céline, Breton and Lacan, and foreign politics correspondent for Ce Soir, then directed by Aragon. Between Moscow, where he was staying to organise the International Writers Congress, to Brest, the site of bloody riots as the Front Populaire grew in popularity, passing through England and Spain, the latter a few months before the Civil War broke, he was always on the front line.  A passionate international reporter, he still managed to pursue his literary career and published essays (Les Chiens de garde, Les Matérialistes de l'Antiquité) and novels (Antoine Bloyé, Le Cheval de Troie), one after the other, all to critical acclaim. In 1938, La Conspiration won the Interallié Prize. Ironically, only the French Communist Party remains somewhat reserved and even very critical with regard to his literary corpus since his publications could never be described as orthodox and did not toe the French Communist party line at the time. 

In 1939, his last publication Chronique de Septembre presented a detailed analysis of the negotiation mechanisms employed between Hitler, Daladier, Chamberlain and Mussolini that led to the Munich Agreement and the dismantling of Czechoslovakia.  He was surprised to learn of the German-Soviet Pact between Stalin and Hitler during his holidays in Ajaccio.

He immediately returned to Paris, impatient to find out the party position. The French Communist Party in fact approved the Pact. Faithful to his beliefs and his anti-fascist convictions, Nizan publically resigned from the FCP in September 1939.

Mobilised, he continued to militantly campaign on the front, passionately discussing his position with his fellow men.

Posted in Lille as an interpreter for the British army, he was killed on 23 May 1940 when the Germans attacked Dunkerque. He is buried at the national cemetery La Targette in Neuville-Saint-Vaast.

Hero of Free France

Author of a very successful book, "Le Grand Cirque" (The Big Show), Pierre Clostermann died on Wednesday, 22 March 2006 in Montesquieu-des-Albères. He was 85.

Born on 28 February 1921 in Curitiba, Brazil, son of a diplomat, Pierre Clostermann joined the Free French in England on 18 March 1942 and served in the "Alsace" fighter group.

Captain at the end of the war, he added up over 2,000 flying hours, nearly 600 battle flights, 33 recorded victories and 5 probable victories, as well as a large amount of material destruction: 225 lorries, 72 locomotives, 5 tanks, 2 motor torpedo boats.

Named “Companion of the Liberation” on 21 January 1946, he began a career in politics. He was re-elected 8 times, notably in the Bas-Rhin department. In 1951, he was elected MP for the Marne, then MP for the Seine (1956-1958), MP for the Seine-et-Oise (1962-1967) and for the Yvelines (1967-1969).

Promoted commander, Clostermann served in Algeria where he distinguished himself as lieutenant colonel of the French Air Force (1956-1957). He served as Vice President of the Commission of National Defence and the Armed Forces in the French National Assembly between 1963 and 1969.

Alongside his career as an engineer, he undertook a career as a successful author, notably telling the story of his experiences in World War II in “Le Grand Cirque” (The Big Show), in 1948, a book that sold over 3,000,000 copies.

(Born 7 February 1892: Budapest, Hungary – Died 3 June 1964: Val-de-Grâce, Paris)

Born with the army in his blood, Raoul Magrin-Vernery happily described how at seven years old he wanted to leave his family and enlist with the Boers...

The son of a French teacher posted in Vienna, Anne Magrin, Raoul Charles was taken under the wing of a Hungarian count who looked after his intellectual and moral education. Raised in the cosmopolitan milieu of Austro-Hungarian society, the young man acquired an ease for adapting to his surroundings that would serve him throughout his lifetime. When he returned to France he was raised by his grandmother in Avison in the Doubs. After studying at the Victor Hugo school in Besançon then in a seminary college in Ornans, driven by his life-long dream to wear a military uniform, he ran away at 15 to enlist in the Foreign Legion. Too young to be recruited, he returned to school and finally embarked on his military career on 10 October 1912 when he joined the Ecole Militaire Spéciale, France's foremost military academy, in Saint-Cyr.

Graduating in 1914, in Montmirail’s year, he was propelled into the eye of the storm in the 60th Infantry Regiment: Plaine d'Alsace, Morte-Fontaine (Oise), fighting on the Ourcq and Aisne rivers, a volunteer in the Aumetzwiller offensive (Moselle), the counter-attack in the Bois d'Haumont (Bois des Caures), the offensive on the Somme, Ypres, the battle for the Butte de Tahure in Champagne.

Exhibiting extraordinary bravery, he was gassed, wounded six times and cited 11 times, including seven times to the Order of the Army. Despite having 90% disability, he was promoted captain on 24 June 1916 with the 260th IR and received the Legion of Honour.

During peace time, he was sent to overseas theatres of operations, in Odessa (1919), Syria-Palestine (1920) where his bravery earned him a new citation and the Officer's Cross of the Legion of Honour, in Algeria and in Morocco and then in Tonkin with the 5th Foreign Infantry Regiment. It was these missions that allowed him to fulfil his life’s ambition: to join the Foreign Legion, which he did in 1924.

On 23 February 1940, he quit the post of commander of the 4th Foreign Infantry Regiment in Morocco to take the helm of two marching battalions of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion, a contingent of the expedition to Norway. On 5 May he landed in Ballangen, freed Bjervik and Narvik, liberated 60 allied prisoners and captured 590 Germans. The expedition was cut short and Magrin-Vernerey was sent to Brest on 15 June. When the armistice was declared, he left France with Captain Koenig and 500 of his men to fight under the command of General de Gaulle. Promoted to colonel, he became known as Monclar (the name of a town in Tarn-et-Garonne, his family's birthplace) for Free France. In December 1940, his 13th Demi-Brigade started its journey to Africa, to Dakar, Freetown and Cameroon where he wrote a small treatise on his theory of combat, Catéchisme du Combat. The brigade was sent to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and took part in the campaign in Eritrea alongside the Garbay battalion, taking the capital Massawa, and capturing the admiral and the general commanders-in-chief of the Italian forces. In Syria (June 1941), however, as well as refusing to participate in the rallying campaign in Gabon, he refused to join because he couldn't stand the idea of a fratricidal struggle within the French army. Appointed to brigade general in 1941, he held various commands in Great Britain and then in the Levant. He was named Companion of the Liberation.

After various missions in Algeria, Pakistan and Indochina, he was named inspector of the Foreign Legion on 25 June 1948.

Appointed to general of the army corps on 20 February 1950, and having almost reached the age limit, rather than retire Monclar volunteered to join the command of the French Battalion of Korea which he commanded until 1951 against the communist troops in North Korea.

He retired in Neuilly, on 21 October 1962, a living military legend and crowned with the glory of seventeen national and twenty-one international decorations. He was the successor to General Kienst as the Governor of the Invalides,

He held this post until his death in 1964.

(18th January 1879: Paris - 11th March 1949: Dijon)

From a humble Alsation family who had settled in Paris - his father was a coal merchant - Henri Giraud, a young man with an adventurous nature, excelled in his secondary education at the Stanislas, Bossuet and Louis-le-Grand high schools, joining the ranks of the French army in 1900 on leaving the Saint-Cyr military academy.

He was posted to the 4th Zouaves, in North Africa, with which unit he was sent to the front in 1914. Wounded, he was taken prisoner on the 30th August at the Battle of Guise, during a counter attack by General Lanrezac against von Bulow's Second German Army. He managed to escape at the end of September with the help of Doctor Frère's network, meeting up with the French military attaché at La Haye, who evacuated him to the United Kingdom, from where he was able to return to France. He distinguished himself once again in the autumn of 1917 when the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Zouaves recaptured the fort of La Malmaison, on the Chemin des Dames and then during the offensives planned by Pétain following the crisis of spring 1917. After the war, he joined General Franchet d'Esperey's troops in Constantinople, returning with his Colonel's stripes to Morocco at Lyautey's request to fight against the Berber rebellion movements. He thus contributed to the surrender of Abd-el-Krim (27th May 1926) during the Rif war, for which brave feat he was awarded the légion d'honneur.

Promoted to Military Commander of the town of Metz, he met Colonels Charles de Gaulle and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Made a General in 1936 and Commander of the 7th army and member of the Upper War Council, Giraud, who did not believe in the effectiveness of armoured tanks, was challenging the tactics advocated by de Gaulle when the Second World War broke out. On the 10th May 1940 his units, having been sent to the Netherlands, delayed the German advance, most notably at Breda on the 13th May. He was taken prisoner on the 19th May in Wassigny whilst trying to stand in the way of the Panzer divisions with the 9th Army in the Ardennes. He was imprisoned in Silesia at Koenigstein castle, near Dresden. On the 17th April 1942, Giraud escaped from there with the help of some loyal supporters, Generals Mesny, Mast and Baurès and the British secret services who facilitated his escape from Schandau onwards. He then reached the Alsace and, later, Vichy. His adventure, which quickly became general knowledge and which he relates in Mes evasions (My Escapes), annoyed the German government who wanted him to return to prison, but he escaped this sanction by signing a letter to Marshal Pétain expressing his intention not to oppose his regime. Living under supervision, it was not long before Giraud was contacted by the Allies who were anxious to keep General de Gaulle away from the preparations for Operation Torch. Exfiltrated in November 1942 via Gibraltar, he met Eisenhower from whom he obtained permission to remain in command of the French troops. On the ground, the situation degenerated into a civil war, with Admiral Darlan's men refusing to recognise his authority. The assassination of Darlan on the 24th December put an end to the conflict. Giraud took over as his successor, maintaining the institutions, as well as the exceptional status of Jews and having some of the resistance fighters who had assisted in the landings interned in camps in the Southern Sahara. Present at the conference of Casablanca, he was forced to release these resistance fighters and make his government more democratic. He then went on the board of directors of the French Committee for National Liberation (Comité français de Libération nationale or CFLN) and so the "dual between Giraud and de Gaulle" reached its peak. However, he was quickly overwhelmed by General de Gaulle's rallying actions and had to give in to him. His unfailing support for Pierre Pucheu ended up discrediting him amongst his partisans. Pétain's former Minister of the Interior had in fact persuaded Morocco to serve the colours of the Free French (France Libre), but his move was considered to be too late for someone accused of collaboration with the enemy and participation in the arrest of hostages.

On the 13th September 1943, he sent French troops to support Corsican resistance fighters by landing on the island. It was a military success but Giraud was the subject of much criticism from General de Gaulle for having armed the communist Corsican resistance movement, giving a political tone to the operations for the liberation of Europe and weakening the unification work of the resistance movement. He finally lost his seat on the CFLN. In April 1944, Giraud organised French participation in the Italian campaign, but, considered to be too implicated in the repressive Vichy system, he was discharged from his position of Commander in Chief and had to withdraw from the military involvement with the France Libre. He would share his experiences of these troubled times in his book: Un seul but: la Victoire, Alger, 1942-1944(Just one goal: Victory, Algiers1942-1944). On the 28th August 1944 he survived an assassination attempt in Mostaganem. In 1946, Giraud stood for the position of Deputy in Lorraine for the second National Constitutional Assembly on the list of the Republican Party of Liberty and of the Agrarian Independents. Elected on the 2nd June, he whipped support for the group of independent republicans and contributed to the creation of the Fourth Republic, despite his refusal to vote for the constitution. He took part in debates on the situation of non-repatriated prisoners of war (25th July 1946) and on the general policy of the government in Algeria (22nd August 1946). He sat on the Upper War Council until December 1948 and on the 10th March 1949 he received the Military Medal for his outstanding escape. He died the following day and is buried at Les Invalides.