Lucie Aubrac ─ The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo

Brilliant, intensely political, and inseparable for nearly 70 years, Lucie Aubrac and her husband, Raymond, are legendary figures of the French Resistance. Founding leaders of Liberation-Sud, one of the most important resistance movements in France, they ran the underground newspaper Liberation and served as couriers, arms carriers, and saboteurs. In 1943, when the Gestapo captured and imprisoned Raymond, Lucie engineered a daring plan to rescue him from the clutches of Klaus Barbie, the feared Gestapo chief later known as the “Butcher of Lyon.” When Raymond was arrested again, Lucie mounted a second astonishing rescue, ambushing the prison van that was transporting him.

Secreted out of France with her husband by the Royal Air Force, Lucie arrived in London a heroine. For the post-war generation, the couple embodied the spirit of “the real France”—the one that resisted, and eventually expelled, the Nazis. However, in 1983, Klaus 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 the allegation, which was also disproven by historians, but Lucie was found “guilty” by many of embellishments and inconsistencies in the tales she weaved around herself.

Who was Lucie Aubrac? What did she really do in 1943? And was she truly the spirit ofla vraie France? Sian Rees’s penetrating account—the first full English-language biography of this extraordinary woman—provides a long-needed corrective to Lucie Aubrac’s own admittedly “impressionistic” memoir and a fascinating exploration of the intersection of history, legend, and mythologizing.

Sian Rees studied Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. She is the author of The Floating Brothel, which was made into a documentary of the same name on BBC2. She is also the author of The Shadows of Elisa Lynch,The Ship Thieves, Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders, and Sweet Water and Bitter.