Raymond Aubrac

Raymond Aubrac (French pronunciation: [ʁɛmɔ̃ obʁak]; born Samuel, 31 July 1914 – 10 April 2012) was a member of the French Resistance in World War II. A civil engineer by trade, he assisted General Charles Delestraint within the Armée secrète. Aubrac and his wife Lucie, both communist Resistance members, were friends with Ho Chi Minh; US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger solicited his help amid the Vietnam War to establish contact with North Vietnam.

Aubrac was born Raymond Samuel into a middle-class Jewish family in Vesoul, Haute-Saône. His father, Albert Samuel, was born on 2 March 1884 in Vesoul, and his mother, Hélène Falk, was born on 2 March 1894 in Crest. His parents were shop owners. In 1939, he married Lucie Aubrac.

After the baccalauréat, he became an intern in Paris at the Lycée Saint-Louis, and entered the École des ponts ParisTech in 1934, from which he graduated in 1937 in the same promotion as the Laotian prince Souphanouvong, future figurehead of the communist left wing of his country and one of the founders of Pathet Lao, then the first president of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos.

Like the majority of high school students, he followed the "PMS" (higher military preparation) and became an officer during his military service. Previously, as a recipient of an American Field Service scholarship, he left for the United States in August 1937 to study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University where he had the opportunity to follow the courses of Joseph Schumpeter.

Samuel was serving in the French army as an engineering officer on the Maginot Line at the outbreak of the Second World War. Samuel was taken prisoner by the German army on 21 June 1940, but he managed to escape from the internment camp with the aid of his wife. He and Lucie joined the French Resistance in 1940. He also became an attaché to the staff of the French Army. He adopted several noms de guerre, among them "Vallet, Ermelin, Balmont and Aubrac". Their Resistance activities started off with buying boxes of chalk and writing graffiti on walls. They then moved on to writing tracts and putting them into people's letterboxes. In the autumn of 1940, they also formed one of the first underground Resistance groups—Libération-Sud—in Lyon. In May 1941, after the birth of their first child Jean-Pierre, they helped Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie to set up an underground newspaper called Libération to promote the French Resistance. Raymond Aubrac was arrested by the Milice on 15 March 1943 in a routine raid. He was operating with fake identity papers under the pseudonym François Vallet. His captors had no idea whom they had captured. He was eventually released two months later.

On 21 June 1943, Aubrac was one of eight senior Resistance leaders, including Jean Moulin, secretly meeting in a doctor's surgery in the Lyon suburb of Caluire when Gestapo officers, under the orders of Klaus Barbie, stormed the place and arrested all the eight leaders. The Caluire meeting was held to select a replacement for Charles Delestraint as the commander of the Armée secrète. Delestraint had been arrested twelve days earlier by the Gestapo in Paris on 9 June. Aubrac was arrested under the pseudonym Claude Ermelin. Taken to Montluc prison in Lyon, the eight leaders were interrogated and tortured under the direction of Barbie. Aubrac was sentenced to death by a Paris court, but the execution was not quickly carried out because the authorities still hoped to obtain intelligence from him. Lucie Aubrac helped to organise his escape from the prison. She claimed to be his fiancée, saying he was named "Ermelin" (one of his aliases) and that he had been caught in the raid while innocently visiting a doctor. She was told that he was to be executed for resistance, and asked to marry him; a French legal clause allowed engaged people to marry if one of them was soon to die. Later, when he was being brought back to prison after the supposed marriage, he and fifteen other prisoners were rescued by résistants in cars, led by Lucie, who attacked the vehicle he was in.

He and Lucie later joined Charles de Gaulle's government in exile.

The Aubracs' wartime exploits made interesting movie material. Two French films, Claude Berri's Lucie Aubrac (1997) and Boulevard des hirondelles (1992), have immortalized the Aubracs in the nation's collective memory.