Teenage fighter in French resistance has died at 97
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 3rd 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 Francs- tireurs et partisans francais, was one of the most effective militias of the French resistance.
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 on Feb. 21, he cited the article in the second sentence of a news release. She was 97.
“The article gave her a larger- than- life profile,” Robert Gildea, author of “Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of French Resistance,” wrote in an email. “Most women resisters operated in the shadow and were modest about their resistance
activities.”
She was hardly in the shadows the morning after her first meeting with Belden, when she and several comrades led into town 25 German soldiers they had captured hours earlier at a mill.
“As the column drew abreast of a group of U. S. soldiers, the GIS let out a series of whistles,” he wrote. “At the end of the column walked the partisan girl, nonchalantly holding a German Schmeisser pistol.”
Simone Segouin was born on Oct. 3, 1925, in Thivars, France, south of Chartres. After the war began, her father let partisans use the family farm as a hideout. 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. According to Macron’s office, she also helped the partisans sabotage German troop trains.
After the liberation of Chartres, she and other
members of her resistance group went to Paris with the American 2nd Armored Division, fighting for several days until Germany surrendered the city on Aug. 25.
During the fighting, she was photographed with two comrades, her weapon ready, by renowned photojournalist Robert Capa. Belden was not the only American to find Segouin a worthy symbol of the French Resistance. George Stevens, the Hollywood film director, took his U. S. Army Signal Corps crew to Chartres but used his personal camera to capture her, with a slight smile, and a submachine gun slung over her right shoulder.
On the day after Paris’ l ib e r a t ion, S e g ou i n marched in a victory parade only steps away from Gen. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces, down the Champs- Elysees.
After the war, she received the Croix de Guerre, a military honor for heroism in combat.
She worked as a pediatric nurse. A street in Courvillesur- Eure was named after her.