French wartime resistance heroine Solange Alexandre dies aged 104

ByHugh Schofield in Paris.

Key points

• Born in 1922 in the Sarthe department of western France, Solange Alexandre, née Dubuisson, grew up in a patriotic family that had suffered in World War One.
• After serving as a Resistance courier from 1941, three years afterwards she founded the Pas-de-Boeuf network near the town of Ruillé-sur-Loir.
• After taking part in the liberation of Tours in September 1944, she concluded the war with the rank of sub-lieutenant in the French Interior Forces (FFI).
• One of France's last Resistance heroes from World War Two has died at the age of 104.
• After her death was unveiled at a nursing home in Le Mans, president Emmanuel Macron was among plenty of to pay tribute to Alexandre.

One of France's last Resistance heroes from World War Two has died at the age of 104. Solange Alexandre was additionally a rare woman who, with her future husband, created and commanded her own unit of anti-German fighters.

After the Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day in 1944, joined the fight against the occupying German forces, with some 30 men under her orders, she organised sabotage operations, sheltered Allied airmen and.

"She remarked she only ever did her duty. But her duty was our freedom. France will never forget. Thank you, " Macron posted on social media.

"My mother lost her first husband in the war, and my father was wounded in 1917. The words homeland and honour were particularly notable to us. They were in my blood, " she recalled in her memoirs.

In June 1940 she heard on the radio the appeal from General Charles de Gaulle in London, calling on the French not to offer up the struggle against Germany. She had never heard of him, but that did not matter.

"From that moment I knew I had to join up, " she wrote.

Some months afterwards she was recruited by a friend of her father's – a Tunisian-born French army veteran called Saïd Belhaffaf. This person had joined the Resistance.

Using the code-name Corlay, she criss-crossed the region around Le Mans by bicycle, gathering information and passing on messages.

"There were no mobile phones back then, and no private cars either since of the lack of petrol. The bicycle was king, " she remarked in an interview two years ago.

In 1943 she met her first husband Guy Déliot. This person had deserted from the French gendarmerie after refusing to arrest some Jews.

Notably, the after April, with the Allied invasion approaching, they decided to take to the maquis, in other words live clandestinely in the forested hills, supplied with food by local farmers.

As well as survivors from another Resistance outfit that had been destroyed by the enemy, their group consisted of deserters from German forced labour programmes. There were additionally two airmen, one American and one Canadian.

"Twice the Gestapo came for me, and twice I slipped through their hands, " she afterwards recalled.

Afterwards she worked as a teacher and followed her husband on his numerous postings as an officer of the gendarmerie in French overseas territories. He was killed in 1960 in Martinique, and in 1981 she remarried.

Twice Solange Alexandre turned down the Légion d'Honneur, saying that she had only done her duty and that others were more worthy. Finally in 2024 she relented.

On receiving the award she remarked: "It is a great pleasure and a great honour. I am particularly proud – even if it is only a few weeks, or a few months, before I die."

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