Yvon Morandat

Marie Léon Ivan "Yvon" Morandat (; aliases "Léo", "Mareuil" and "Arnolphe"; 25 December 1913 – 8 December 1972) was a French trade union leader and member of the French Resistance as an SOE RF Section/BCRA operative, who after World War II became active as a Gaullist politician.

Biography Morandat was born into a family of small farmers in Buellas, Ain. After gaining his end of primary school certificate, he became a farmhand and was an activist for Jeunesse agricole catholique. He left the farm to become a shop assistant in a hardware store in Buellas and then a salesman in a department store in Chambéry, and remained an active trade unionist. In 1937, he became the general secretary of the Syndicats Chrétiens de la Savoie (Christian unions of Savoy).

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he was in a Chasseurs Alpins unit and volunteered for a Norwegian expedition in Narvik in the spring of 1940. On his return from Narvik that year, he took part in fighting in Brittany before being evacuated to England on 18 June, just before the armistice with the Nazis. In the Free France forces, he was attached to Charles de Gaulle's office. Rejecting de Gaulle's offer to broadcast on radio, he stated he wished to continue fighting and accepted de Gaulle's alternative request to leave for France and make contact with the new resistance organizations.

Morandat was played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in the 1968 French-US film about the liberation of Paris, Is Paris Burning?, directed by René Clément. Claire Morandat was played by Marie Versini.

After the anti-Semitic writer, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, hurriedly fled his Paris flat upon the liberation of France, Morandat moved into the flat and lived there for several years. Accusations were made by Céline of Morandat and the latter offered to return property upon Céline's return to France. He refused. Recently, missing manuscripts of Céline have appeared, provided by an anonymous source to the journalist Jean-Pierre Thubaudat who revealed the manuscripts upon the death of Céline's widow, Lucette Destouches, in 2019. Amongst others, there has been speculation that Morandat might have been in possession of the manuscripts.