French Resistance hero Daniel Cordier dies

Aged 19 and about to join the French army to fight the Nazi invaders, Daniel Cordier heard on the radio in June 1940 that France’s military head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, had capitulated to the Germans.

“I naively thought, as my parents did, that Pétain was going to launch France’s victorious counteroffensive,” Cordier recalled in a 2010 interview with the public radio channel France Culture. “Instead, he announced the end of the fighting, that is to say the end of hope. I burst into tears, went up to my room and sobbed.”

Then, mustering a choice epithet about Pétain, he regrouped.

Cordier became a key member of the French resistance, helping coordinate and unify the disparate guerrilla groups who set out to attack Nazi trains and bases to weaken, confuse and distract them in the run-up to the 1944 Allied landings at Normandy. After the war, he became a leading modern art gallery owner in Paris as well as a prolific author on his wartime experiences.

Cordier died Nov. 20 at 100 at his home near Cannes, in southern France, of unspecified causes, according to a statement by French President Emmanuel Macron. In 2018, Macron awarded Cordier the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, the highest level of that prestigious national order.

In addition to 100-year-old Hubert Germain, Cordier was the last surviving resistance fighter of the 1,038 — including six women — honored by resistance leader Gen. Charles de Gaulle at the end of World War II with the title Companion of the Liberation.

Cordier was best- known as the personal secretary and right-hand man of legendary resistance leader Jean Moulin, who had served as first president of the National Council of the Resistance. In that role, Moulin pulled together French patriots from all walks of life — and from far right to communist — to disrupt the Nazis and support the Allies before, during and after the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944.

Based in the city of Lyon, Moulin was the senior onthe-ground resistance member appointed by de Gaulle from his exile headquarters in London. Although he carried a pistol and dagger while on the streets, Cordier’s main task was to code and decode radio messages between London and Lyon, some of them via the BBC Radio World Service.