Libertaire Rutigliano

Libertaire Rutigliano (19 December 1921 – 6 May 1945) was a French resistance fighter and member of the French Communist Party. Born in Cairo, Egypt, he was deported to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died of tuberculosis shortly after the camp's liberation in 1945.

Biography Libertaire Rutigliano was born in Cairo, Egypt, on 19 December 1921, the son of Nicolas Rutigliano, an Italian born in Cairo in 1888 to immigrant parents. After World War I, Nicolas joined the communist movement. In 1926, the family was expelled from Egypt and relocated to Naples, Italy. They later moved to France, settling in Paris, where Nicolas worked in Nice and then at the shipyards in Saint-Nazaire. The family established residence in Nantes in 1935.

During World War II, Rutigliano joined the Front National, a mass organization affiliated with the French Communist Party. He became a leader of the Front's student section in Paris. In 1943, he abandoned his studies and returned to Nantes, where he founded the city's first university resistance group. He raised funds to support the publication of resistance newspapers, including Front, established in 1942. In 1943, he represented the Front National in the newly formed Departmental Liberation Committee of Loire-Inférieure. By early 1944, he served as the interdepartmental leader of the United Patriotic Youth Forces in western France, temporarily residing in Parthenay, Deux-Sèvres. At Dachau, Rutigliano was assigned prisoner number 72926 and later transferred to the Allach subcamp, where he organized bread collections among prisoners. He died of tuberculosis on 6 May 1945, six days after the camp's liberation, at the age of 23.

In 1948, Nicolas Rutigliano, who had seen his son shortly before his death, sculpted a bust of Libertaire and placed it on his wife's grave in the Gaudinière Cemetery in Nantes. Due to weather damage, the city of Nantes and the National Association of Resistance Veterans commissioned a new bust in 1999.

In 1980, the Port-Boyer college in Nantes, located at 60 Rue de l'Éraudière, was named Collège Libertaire-Rutigliano. A bust of Rutigliano was installed at the college in 1984.