The authorization came from a decree signed on 25 February 1946 by the President of the postwar provisional government, and officially transcribed at the appropriate town hall on 12 March 1948.

[3] Yves Gilbert Edmond Hirsch was born at his parents' home along the Rue La Boétie in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.

The Hirsch family traced their origins back to Strasbourg, but after the frontier changes of 1871 they were given and took up the option of retaining French citizenship, which meant leaving Alsace.

[2] Gilbert Hirsch-Ollendorff was born into a Jewish family but with the post-revolutionary French state deeply committed to "Laïcité" he seems to have been able to carry his religion lightly: at some stage he converted to Roman Catholicism.

During the 1930s, like many upwardly mobile young executives, he obtained a pilot's license, apparently from motives which were, at the time, purely recreational and social.

[2] Général de Gaulle's famous rallying speech was transmitted from London on 18 June 1940, and during the same month[3] Hirsch-Ollendorff made contact.

In November of that same year he became the CDLR's head of military organisation in the area designated by the movement as "Region C", which comprised eight eastern departments including three - those comprising Alsace-Moselle - that for historical and linguistic reasons the Germans were treating as fully integrated parts of the German state (Gau Baden-Elsaß and Gau Westmark).

Another senior resistance member in the region with whom he worked on the national directorate of the CDLR was the future prime minister, Michel Debré.

It is claimed that two days before the American army entered the city itself Grandval with his resistance forces had already extinguished the last remnants of the German military presence, but the truth of the matter is hard to pin down.

[3] De Gaulle visited the city on 25 September 1944 and personally greeted local resistance leaders including Grandval, on whom he conferred the Order of the Liberation.

He gained valuable experience, reconfiguring the local resistance era "Forces of the Interior" into appropriate postwar military structures, and also rebuilding the underpinnings of civil society which during the occupation years had fallen into the hands of now discredited Vichy officials.

With something approaching postwar normality appearing on the horizon, Grandval let his family know that he was preparing for a return to civilian life and the world of business.

It took Général de Gaulle to change his mind: With the western two thirds of Germany after May 1945 divided into four military occupation zones, de Gaulle's plans for Grandval involved appointing him military governor in Baden-Baden, as "right-hand" to General Kœnig, with whom he had already worked very closely during the closing months of the war.

[3] Plans were then developed for him to be offered the military governorship of the Saarland, a highly industrialised region with a unique political and economic status, where it was felt that Grandval's hands-on experience of the industrial sector could be particularly valuable.

Looking ahead, it was hoped that in the event of another referendum on the matter, voters in the Saarland might be persuaded to back union with France in preference to a return to a German state.

[2] Despite the military nature of his posting, Grandval's preoccupations were increasingly with tangible fundamentals of the region's civilian economy: coal, steel and reconstruction.

Preparation of the constitution had involved extensive wrangling between the wartime allies, but the appointment of Gilbert Grandval as High Commissioner, following the abolition of the post of Military Governor for the region, provided an element of continuity.

[3] On 25 January 1955 the West German ambassador in Paris, Herbert Blankenhorn (who was known to be a close confidant of Chancellor Adenauer) agreed with Georges Henri Soutou, France's deputy cabinet head, that Grandval's Saarland posting should end three months before the Saar Statute referendum, scheduled for October of that year.

His mission, he said, had been "one of the most uplifting tasks that could be given to any Frenchman" ("eine der erhebendsten Aufgaben, die heute einem Franzosen gestellt werden können").

[3] In September 1958 he was appointed to a government position as Secretary of State for the French merchant navy,[3] in succession to Maurice-René Simonnet.

[4] Gilbert Grandval, like many of his generation, retained a deep personal and political loyalty towards Général de Gaulle, who during this period returned to power and inaugurated the "Fifth Republic".