For decades after the end of World War II, the thousands of women who took part in France’s resistance against Nazi German occupation in WWII rarely got a mention in history books. The stories of Lucie Aubrac, a teacher who broke her husband Raymond out of a lorry transporting him to a Gestapo jail, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, a Resistance leader who was smuggled to Spain in a mailbag, and Madeleine Riffaud, a sharpshooter who helped liberate Paris, were exceptional tales in an otherwise male-dominated narrative. Abroad, perhaps the most famous “resistante” is US-born dancer and singer Josephine Baker, who served as a lieutenant in the French air force’s auxiliary corps during the war and passed on information concealed in sheet music. The feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s led to a surge of interest in the role played by women in the war. But it took until 2015 for women resisters in the person of ethnologist Germaine Tillion and Genevieve De Gaulle-Anthonioz, a niece of war hero General Charles de Gaulle, to be honoured with places in the Pantheon mausoleum, France’s secular holy of holies. French President Francois Hollande stands with family members as they pay...
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