Born Raymonde Barbé on 22 October 1915 in Puteaux, she married the communist Charles Nédelec in 1935.
[1] An early member of the Resistance, Tillon was arrested in 1941 and sentenced to twenty years hard labor by a court in Toulon.
She was imprisoned in Marseille, Toulon and Lyon before being captured by the Germans in June 1944 and deported first to Saarbrücken, and then to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
[2] She married Communist leader Charles Tillon in 1951 and had two children, Itea (1950) and Nadia (1952).
[1] After a strong condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, she was banned from the Communist Party.