Lucie Aubrac

The French Resistance Heroine Who Defied the Gestapo

Sian Rees (Michael O’mara, 256pp, £20, Oldie price £18)

LUCIE AND HER HUSBAND, Raymond Aubrac, were French Resistance leaders operating in the area around Lyon. Lucie ‘was a fearless, often reckless, agent who even when heavily pregnant took on the most dangerous assignments’, explained Laura Freeman in her Daily Mail review. Among her exploits she planted delayed-action devices on rooftops for the distribution of anti-nazi leaflets and transported explosives inside teddy bears, but her most courageous stroke came when she broke her husband out of Gestapo custody in a Citroën van bristling with submachine guns. ‘Raymond’s rescue, detailed by Rees, was so courageous, complicated and bold as to seem almost impossible,’ wrote Caroline Moorehead in the Sunday Times. Given these dra- matic facts, Freeman was disappointed ‘that Rees’s account of her life is so ploddingly told. The raw ingredients are there but the pan never sizzles.’

When the Aubracs were in their seventies they were hauled before a commission of French historians and challenged over inconsistencies in their versions of events. Essentially what had happened was that Lucie had embellished the facts to sex up her memoirs, published in 1984. She and her husband were eventually exonerated. ‘Rees examines the court proceedings in forensic, interrogative detail and there is never any doubt that the Aubracs are the good guys,’ Freeman concluded. ‘But Rees might, for the sake of suspense, have kept her readers guessing about just how much of Lucie’s tales of mousetraps and exploding teddy bears to believe.’ Moorehead was more generous in her assessment of the book, which she found fascinating because of what it says ‘about the enduring difficulties France has had in coming to terms with “les années noires”, the four dark years of German occupation’, and praised it as ‘a calm, judicious and gripping account of these tangled events’.