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    Lucie Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo
    Unavailable
    Lucie Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo
    Unavailable
    Lucie Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo
    Ebook292 pages3 hours

    Lucie Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo

    By Sian Rees

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In May 1943, a young Frenchwoman called Lucie Aubrac engineered the escape of her husband, Raymond, from the clutches of Klaus Barbie, the feared Gestapo chief later known as the "Butcher of Lyon." When Raymond was arrested again that June, Lucie mounted a second astonishing rescue, ambushing the prison van that was transporting him. As a founding member and leader of the important French Resistance group Liberation-Sud, Lucie served as a courier, arms carrier, and saboteur who engineered these and other escape plans on behalf of her husband and other Resistance fighters.

    Spirited out of France with Raymond by the RAF, Lucie arrived in London a heroine. For the postwar generation the couple embodied the spirit of "the real France": the one that resisted, and eventually expelled the Nazis. However, in 1983, Kalus Barbie made the bombshell claim that the Aubracs had become informers in 1943, betraying their comrades. The French press and the couple themselves furiously denounced this as slander, but as worrying inconsistencies were spotted in Lucie's story, doubts emerged that have never quite gone away.

    Who was Lucie Aubrac? What did she really do in 1943? And was she truly the spirit of la vraie France, or a woman who could not resist casting herself as a heroine? SiÂn Rees's penetrating, even-handed account draws from letters, newspaper articles, and other archival materials, as well as several interviews, to decipher the truth behind Lucie and her husband's wartime endeavors and near fall from grace. It offers a thrilling portrait of a brave, resourceful woman who went to extraordinary lengths for love and country.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChicago Review Press
    Release dateJun 1, 2016
    ISBN9781613735701
    Unavailable
    Lucie Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo
    Author

    Sian Rees

    Siân Rees was born and brought up in Cornwall, spending much of her childhood in boatyards and at sea. She read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. Her first book, The Floating Brothel, was written after living in Australia, and published in 2001. It was followed by The Shadows of Elisa Lynch (2003) after a stint in South America, The Ship Thieves (2006), and Sweet Water and Bitter: the ships that stopped the slave trade (2009), and Moll: the Life and Times of Moll Flanders in 2011. She lives in Brighton and France.

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    Reviews for Lucie Aubrac

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      I would suggest potential readers of Lucie Aubrac's story - certainly those who know nothing of the Aubracs but might be interested in the story of the French resistance - catch up quickly with Patrick Marnham's review of this book in October's Literary Review. Marnham - biographer of Jean Moulin - points out Sian Rees' opening words: "`All her life, Lucie Aubrac was a storyteller'. According to her account she 'sprang her husband from Gestapo custody twice " but I have to agree with Marnham; how likely is that frankly? Barbie was the 'Butcher of Lyon' - or was this ruthless Gestapo chief just a big pussy cat?!! Rees has obviously looked at Aubrac's 'novel' 'Ils partiront dans l'ivresse' - but no where does she call a spade a spade - until the last 20 pages of this otherwise rather rose-tinted view of resistance. Aubrac's account is just that, a 'novelisation'. For those who don't know - and Rees does pulls her punches here - Aubrac and her husband were Communist Jews, they were opposed to de Gaulle's official representative in France (Moulin) and opposed to attempts to organise the resistance from London - Moulin of course was captured and tortured by Barbie in Caluire, a suburb of Lyon, in June 1943. That was the end of him and nearly the end of the French resistance. Somebody betrayed him. Barbie said the Aubracs were in on it. Gerard Chauvy's book 'Lyon 1943' - mentioned by Rees in those last 20 pages - told the whole story from this perspective. Needless to say the Aubracs got it banned and pulped. Moulin's secretary Daniel Cordier didn't pull any punches either when he participated in left-wing French newspaper Liberation's commission of enquiry into what the aubracs really knew and really did. In my view the Aubracs - especially Lucie- were liars and fantasists and particularly unpleasant people, but of course they've had the chance to tell their own 'stories' which Rees really relies far too much on. One of the main espisodes of Aubrac's book is her attempt to liberate her husband, captured at the same time as Moulin and held by Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. The facility with which she is able to come and go from Gestapo headquarters in Lyon beggars belief - the Aubracs must have colluded in some way with Barbie - to secure Raymond Aubrac's release from German captivity about which the 'truth' will never be known. Either that or many elements of Raymond Aubrac's subsequent escape are pure invention. Of course Klaus Barbie muddied the waters somewhat at his trial in the late 80's but the usual brutal portrayal of him simply begs the question...how could he possibly have been taken in as Aubrac suggests? Rees now needs to do some real research, perhaps a book on husband Raymond, responsible among other things for the 'cleansing' of the city of Marseille after the Allies retook the town in August 1944, ie summary executions of 'collaborators' and the like, which didn't stop until around 1949. These activities sit rather uneasily with the somewhat rose-tinted view of the Aubracs presented here.