SOME, LIKE DE GAULLE AND JEAN MOULIN, WHO UNIFIED THE MOVEMENT, ARE FAMOUS
Others rest in the cemetery reserved to descendants of nobles who were guillotined during the Revolution, with plaques that honor them:
But most are recalled by memories alone.
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Fighting alongside people with contrary values must have made the choice to fight back still harder. By breaking with the prejudices and interests of their class, those descendants of the Versaillais deserve particular respect.
Plaque at the Picpus cemetery
Remember before God
Jean Marie Philibert Victurnien / Marquis de Laguiche / Croix de Guerre 14-18 / Knight of the Legion of Honneur / Born July 9 1889
Deported to Buchenwald and Neu-Strasstrier *
Killed by the SS at Shildau on April 17 1945
and his son
Claude Pascal Marie de la Guiche / Knight of the Legion of Honneur / S/L de la 1er R.M.S.M. de la Div. Leclerc * *
Fallen in Haute-Sarthe * * *
on August 11 1944 at age 22
*Salt mines: "...we left Buchenwald for a destination unknown to us, which turned out to be the salt mines of Neu-Strassfurt." Most of the 459 French prisoners who were sent there died.
-- Thanks to Michael Zwerger for this information
** R.M.S.M.: Régiment de Marche de Spahis Marocains ("Marching Regiment of the Moroccan Spahis"). It fought in Lebanon in 1941, in Tunisia, at El-Alamein in 1943, landed in Normandy with the Leclerc Division in June '44 and fought on until the end of the war.
-- Marc Ambrose-Rendu, military historian, personal communication
*** Haute-Sarthe: the Loire Valley
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After the war, some survivors from both sides became well-known politicians. They might meet for dinner in the private salon of a restaurant known for its discretion.
Sure not to appear together in the next day's press,
they would recall the time
when they were brothers in arms.
-- Told me by the late gastronomical critic Henri Viard
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