Jeanne Robert
French schoolteacher who founded a resistance network
JEANNE ROBERT, who has died aged 103, founded the French resistance network Victoire and carried important intelligence to wartime London.
She was born on August 11 1914 in Hasnon in the Nord department of France. She was a teacher, married but widowed and living under the name of Mme Delattre when the Germans invaded France in May 1940.
Her resistance to the invasion was spontaneous and immediate. First she and her cousin, Leon Degand, a stationmaster at Lille, helped British and French soldiers escape from the Dunkirk pocket: her role was to obtain false identity documents and ration cards through a friend at the mayor’s office. Next she set up an information-gathering network in Arras, with the Belgium-born printer Maurice Rouneau, codename “Albert”, who was living under the false identity of Martin Rendier.
When the German hunt for Rouneau grew too hot, she hid him until he fled to Pau in Vichy France in March 1941. A few months later she too fled from occupied France, to Orthez and from there to Castelnausur-l’auvignon, close to Condom. There she resumed teaching in the village school, and was reunited with Rouneau.
Starting in April 1942 Rouneau and Jeanne Robert founded Victoire, a French resistance réseau (network). This grew to encompass soldiers of the French 150th Infantry based at Agen, municipal employees, local elected officials, teachers, factory workers, refugees from Alsace-lorraine, Spanish republicans and Italian troops who had escaped from German custody after the Italian armistice.
The Victoire réseau, became one of the largest in the South West of France. It helped downed Allied airmen to escape across the Pyrenees, received parachute drops from Britain, hid and distributed arms and supplies, and liaised with neighbouring resistance groups in the Lyon and Haute-savoie regions.
In September 1942 Jeanne Robert made contact with British secret agents and, with the arrival of Lieutenant-colonel George Starr, code name “Hilaire”, in November 1942 Victoire was incorporated into the Wheelwright circuit, part of the Special Operations Executive’s “F” Section, run from London. Jeanne Robert accommodated Starr and his wireless operator Yvonne Cormeau for several months during 1943, and she also helped another SOE agent, Denise Bloch, to escape from France. Eventually Starr decided that Jeanne Robert’s and Rouneau’s cover was blown and ordered them to leave for Britain.
They crossed the Pyrenees in late October via the snow-covered Pic de Burat, and after a period of custody in the hands of the Spanish police, she reached England in a Dakota on December 29 1943. She was carrying messages from Starr which she delivered personally to Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, in command of “F” Section, early in 1944.
Once in London Jeanne Robert joined the French Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’action, returning to France after the liberation of Paris, while Rouneau was recruited by the SOE, landing in Brittany in April 1944 to join the Racketeer network.
Meanwhile at Castelnau, the Resistance fought a losing battle on June 21 1944 when the Germans attacked the village and razed it to the ground: Castelnau-surl’auvignon is now the only commune of the Gers to hold the Croix de guerre.
A son was born in 1944; Jeanne Robert married Maurice Rouneau in 1950, but divorced in 1955.
She settled in the Gironde but regularly visited Castelnau, and in 2016 she was, at last, made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. A fighter to the end, only a few weeks ago she wrote to the minister of education to protest against the decision to close the school at which she had taught.
Jeanne Robert, born August 11 1914, died September 7 2017