Solange Alexandre, heroine of the French Resistance who founded her own unit, has died

The death of one of the last heroines of the Resistance

Solange Alexandre, one of the last members of the French Resistance during the Second World War, has died at the age of 104 in a nursing home in Le Mans. This was reported by BBC News. French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on social media: “She said she was only doing her duty. But her duty was our freedom. France will never forget. Thank you.”

The path to the Resistance and her own unit

Alexandre (née Dubuisson) was born in 1922 in the Sarthe department in western France into a patriotic family that had suffered in the First World War: her mother lost her first husband in the war, and her father was wounded in 1917. In June 1940 she heard General de Gaulle's appeal from London on the radio and, in her words, decided from that moment to join the fight. A few months later she was recruited by her father's friend — a native of Tunisia and veteran of the French army, Saïd Belhaffaf. Under the code name Corle, she rode a bicycle around the outskirts of Le Mans, gathering information and delivering messages: “There were no mobile phones then, and because of the shortage of petrol there were no private cars either. The bicycle was king,” she recalled in an interview two years ago.

The Pas-de-Boeuf unit and the liberation of Tours

In 1943 she met her first husband, Guy Delileau — a gendarme who had deserted after refusing to arrest Jews. In April 1944, before the Allied landings, they went into the maquis. After serving as a courier from 1941, Alexandre founded the Resistance network Pas-de-Boeuf near the town of Ruillé-sur-Loir in 1944: under her command were about 30 people, mostly deserters from the German forced labour programmes and surviving fighters of a destroyed group, as well as two airmen — an American and a Canadian. The unit carried out sabotage operations, sheltered Allied airmen, and after the Normandy landings took part in battles with the occupiers. “The Gestapo came for me twice, and twice I slipped out of their hands,” she recalled. After taking part in the liberation of Tours in September 1944, she ended the war with the rank of sub-lieutenant in the French Forces of the Interior (FFI).

The honour accepted only in 2024

After the war, Alexandre worked as a schoolteacher and moved with her gendarme husband around France's overseas territories; he died in 1960 in Martinique, and in 1981 she remarried. Twice she declined the Legion of Honour, believing she had merely done her duty and that others were more deserving, and agreed only in 2024. “It is a great joy and a great honour. I am very proud — even if only weeks or months remain before my death,” she said at the ceremony. In its coverage of other Resistance veterans — Danièle Cordier, the conspirator who broke an 80-year silence, and the escape from the Gestapo — the BBC noted that the generation of those who fought the occupation has almost gone, and Alexandre's death underlines how rare such witnesses have become.

Image source, Site Pôle Jean Moulin