Women in the French Resistance

Although women were typical partisan anti-German resistance fighters in Italy, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia and the German-occupied Soviet Union, feared and numerous, they were a minority in the maquis in France.

Women organized demonstrations of housewives in 1940, were active in the comités populaires of the clandestine PCF, and ever present with encouragement and material aid for strikers, as in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais in May 1941, as well as supporting the maquis.

[1] They were indispensable as typists, and above all as liaison agents—in part because the Germans distrusted women less, and also because the numerous identification controls against resistors of the Service du travail obligatoire (STO) did not apply to them.

[2] Madeleine Riffaud, a student midwife who volunteered with the Communist Party-aligned Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP),[3] recalled being "cross at being told always to carry weapons across town for the men to use".

On 23 August, Riffaud commanded an FTP that trapped a train carrying loot and munitions in the Buttes-Chaumont tunnel and secured the surrender of the 80 German soldiers aboard.

She organized the escape of François Mitterrand, the future President of France; Boris Holban, founder of the network FTP-MOI in March 1942; and General Henri Giraud on April 17, 1942.

Some clandestine combatants survived the war as part of a couple, and that their Resistance participation would have been impossible or unsurvivable without the support of their companion at their side: Cécile and Henri Rol-Tanguy, Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, Paulette and Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, Hélène and Philippe Viannay, Marie-Hélène and Pierre Lefaucheux, Cletta and Daniel Mayer, and many others were inseparable.