Resistance commander Solange Alexandre dies at 104
Alexandre was a rare woman to create and command a French Resistance unit, founding the Pas-de-Boeuf network with her future husband Guy Déliot during World War II.
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Alexandre was a rare woman to create and command a French Resistance unit, founding the Pas-de-Boeuf network with her future husband Guy Déliot during World War II.
Solange Alexandre, née Dubuisson, a French Resistance veteran who co-founded and commanded a unit fighting German occupation during World War II, has died at 104. Her death was announced at a nursing home in Le Mans, the BBC said.
After working as a Resistance courier, Alexandre and her future husband, Guy Déliot, established the Pas-de-Boeuf network near Ruillé-sur-Loir in April 1944. She was a rare woman to create and command her own unit of anti-German fighters.
Alexandre recalled that General Charles de Gaulle’s June 1940 radio appeal to continue fighting Germany convinced her to join the struggle. Months later, Saïd Belhaffaf, a Tunisian-born French army veteran and friend of her father, recruited her into the Resistance. From 1941, she used the code name Corlay while gathering information and carrying messages by bicycle around Le Mans.
She met Déliot in 1943 after he had deserted the French gendarmerie, having refused to arrest Jews. As an Allied invasion approached, they went into hiding in forested hills, where local farmers supplied them with food. Their group included people who had deserted German forced-labor programs, survivors of another Resistance group destroyed by the enemy, and an American and a Canadian airman.
With about 30 men under her orders, Alexandre organized sabotage and sheltered Allied airmen. After the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944, she joined the fighting against German forces and took part in the liberation of Tours in September 1944.
Alexandre ended the war as a sub-lieutenant in the French Interior Forces, the name de Gaulle used for Resistance fighters in the later stages of the war. During the liberation, their units seized bridges, began freeing towns and gathered intelligence as Allied troops advanced.
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After the war, Alexandre worked as a teacher and accompanied Déliot on his gendarmerie postings in French overseas territories. He was killed in Martinique in 1960, and she remarried in 1981.
She accepted the Légion d’Honneur in 2024 after twice refusing it, saying she had only done her duty and others were more deserving. On receiving the honor, she said it was a great pleasure and honor and that she was very proud.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute on social media, saying Alexandre had regarded her service as duty. “But her duty was our freedom. France will never forget,” he said.
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