Lucie Aubrac

Lucie Samuel (née Bernard; 29 June 1912 – 14 March 2007), known as Lucie Aubrac , was a member of the French Resistance in World War II. A history teacher by occupation, she earned a history agrégation in 1938, a highly uncommon achievement for a woman at that time. In 1939 she married Raymond Samuel, who took the name Aubrac in the Resistance. She was active on a number of operations, including prison breakouts. Like her husband, she was a communist activist, which she remained after the war. She sat in the Provisional Consultative Assembly in Paris from 1944 to 1945.

Her life was depicted in the 1997 film Lucie Aubrac by Claude Berri. The Paris Métro station Bagneux–Lucie Aubrac is named after her.

Career In 1940, Lucie was amongst the first to join the French Resistance.

In 1944, Charles de Gaulle established a consultative assembly, which Lucie joined as a resistance representative, making her the first woman to sit on a French parliamentary assembly.

In 1984, Lucie published a semi-fictional version of her wartime diaries, the English translation of which is known as Outwitting the Gestapo. The 1997 film Lucie Aubrac, which stars Carole Bouquet as Lucie, is about her efforts to rescue her husband. She herself endorsed the film.

In April 1997, Jacques Vergès produced the "Barbie testament", which he claimed Klaus Barbie had given him ten years earlier, that purported to show the Aubracs had tipped off Barbie regarding Moulin. Vergès' "Barbie testament" was timed for the publication of the book Aubrac Lyon 1943 by Gérard Chauvy, which was meant to prove the Aubracs were the ones who informed Barbie about the fateful meeting at Caluire where Moulin was arrested in 1943. On 2 April 1998, following a civil suit launched by the Aubracs, a Paris court fined Chauvy and his publisher Albin Michel for "public defamation". In 1998, the French historian Jacques Baynac, in his book Les Secrets de l'affaire Jean Moulin, claimed Moulin was planning to break with de Gaulle to recognize General Giraud, which led the Gaullists to tip off Barbie before this could happen. Twenty leading resistance survivors published a letter protesting against the accusations against the Aubracs, who asked to appear before a panel of leading French historians.

Lucie had three children with Raymond. François Hollande said in a statement: "In our darkest times, [Raymond] was, with Lucie Aubrac, among the righteous, who found, in themselves and in the universal values of our Republic, the strength to resist Nazi barbarism". Lucie's ashes are beside Raymond's in the family tomb in the cemetery in the Burgundian village of Salornay-sur-Guye.