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NY Times, May 20, 2020
Cécile Rol-Tanguy, French Resistance Fighter, Dies at 101
By Eva Mbengue
Cécile Rol-Tanguy, a heroine of the French Resistance who helped lead a
popular uprising against the German occupation of Paris, died on May 8
at her home in Monteaux, about 130 miles from Paris. She was 101.
Her family announced the death.
Ms. Rol-Tanguy joined the Resistance at age 21, after the Nazis moved
into Paris.
She acted as a clandestine liaison officer for her husband, Henri
Rol-Tanguy, a prominent Communist and a colonel of the Forces Françaises
de l’Intérieur (French Forces of the Interior), who worked alongside
Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s London-based Free French Forces.
Not afraid of taking risks, Ms. Rol-Tanguy would sometimes disguise
herself by changing her hairstyle and adopting a code name. Using forged
documents, she was allowed to pass through German checkpoints and go
from one part of Paris to another. She carried machine guns, grenades,
ammunition and sensitive documents, sometimes hidden in sacks of
potatoes in her child’s baby carriage.
“I never had fear in my stomach,” she said in an interview with the
television network France 24 in 2014. “If you do, you can’t do anything.”
In August 1944, hidden in the catacombs of Paris, she helped her husband
organize the uprising. On Aug. 19, she put up posters calling for
immediate revolt against Hitler’s occupying forces: “France is calling
you! To arms, citizens! To arms!”
A week later, Paris was liberated and General de Gaulle drove
triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées. Ms. Rol-Tanguy was the only woman
he invited to a reunion to thank the Resistance, held on Aug. 26 in
Paris’s City Hall.
At the end of the war, General de Gaulle designated 1,038 people
Resistance heroes. Only six of them were women. Ms. Rol-Tanguy was not
one of them.
Marguerite Marie-Cecile Le Bihan was born on April 10, 1919, in Royan, a
resort on the French Atlantic coast. Her parents moved to a Paris suburb
when she was a year old and later settled in the 19th Arrondissement of
Paris.
Her father, François Le Bihan, was an electrician who had served in the
French Navy and helped found the French Communist Party in 1920. As a
Communist, he was sent in 1943 to Auschwitz, where he died. Her mother,
Germaine Jaganet, was a homemaker who was also a member of the Resistance.
Ms. Rol-Tanguy was brought up in a highly political environment,
dedicated to international Communism and the fight against fascism. When
she was a teenager her family offered shelter to political exiles from
Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
She left school at 16 and joined Jeunes Filles de France, a Communist
Party organization that fought for gender equality and worked to end the
poor housing conditions in which working-class families used to live.
That same year she started doing secretarial work for the Paris
metallurgical workers union. There she met Mr. Rol-Tanguy, a foundry
worker and union official.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Mr. Rol-Tanguy fought
alongside the Spanish Republicans against Franco’s right-wing rebellion.
Ms. Rol-Tanguy worked with the Aid for Spain Committee. He returned
wounded in 1938, and they married a year later.
She is survived by their four children, Hélène, Jean, Claire and
Francis, and a number of grandchildren. Mr. Rol-Tanguy died in 2002.
Ms. Rol-Tanguy was emblematic of the role women played in the Resistance.
In 2014, she agreed to accept the medal recognizing her as a grand
officer of the Legion of Honor, the highest distinction in France, in
the name of all women Resistance fighters. “I am sad to see that women
have been forgotten,” she said. “Many were arrested, tortured and deported.”
“I have always said that de Gaulle didn’t give women the right to vote.
We won it,” she said in an interview, referring to an ordinance de
Gaulle issued in April 1944.
In 1996, she became co-president of the organization Les Amis des
Combattants en Espagne Républicaine (Friends of the Spanish Republican
Fighters). She frequently gave talks about the Resistance in schools.
“When I visit schools,” she told France 24 in 2014, “I keep telling
children that liberty always needs to be defended.”
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