Teenage girl became a symbol of French resistance in WWII

Her name was Simone Segouin, but she was known by her nom de guerre, Nicole.

That’s how Jack Belden, a Life magazine war correspondent, came to know that armed teenage French resistance fighter after he entered Chartres, France, with the United States Third Army in August 1944, around the time of the city’s liberation from German occupation.

“She was clad in a lightbrown jacket and a cheap flowered skirt of many hues, which ended just above her knees,” Belden wrote. “Her legs were bare and brown. About her arm went a ribband bearing the legend FTPF. In the waistband of her skirt was stuck a small revolver.”

The FTPF, the Francstireurs et partisans français, was one of the most effective militias of the French resistance.

“Under my stumbling French questioning,” Belden wrote, “she admitted that she was a partisan fighter.”

His article, headlined “The Girl Partisan of Chartres” in the Sept. 4, 1944, issue of Life, made “Nicole” an international symbol of the French resistance. Its sub-headline — “Pretty 17-year-old Nicole tells Life’s war reporter the story of how she killed a Boche,” French slang for a German — offered a whiff of the sensational.

When President Emmanuel Macron of France announced her death, in Courville-sur-Eure, France, on Feb. 21, he cited the article in the second sentence of a news release. She was 97.

Simone Segouin was born Oct. 3, 1925, in Thivars, France, south of Chartres. After the war began, her father let partisans use the family farm as a hide-out. Through those encounters, she met Lt. Roland Boursier, a local resistance leader, code-named Germain, in early 1944.

“When I discovered she had French feelings, I told her little by little about the work I was doing,” Boursier told Life. “I asked her if she would be scared to do such work. She said, ‘No it would please me to kill Boches.’”

Given false papers saying she was Nicole Minet, of Dunkirk, Segouin ferried messages and weapons among members of the local partisan network on a bicycle she had stolen from a German. Boursier said he taught her how to use submachine guns, rifles and handguns.

After the war, she was promoted to lieutenant and received the Croix de Guerre, a military honor for heroism in combat. She worked as a pediatric nurse. A street in Courville-sur-Eure was named after her.