Lucie Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Defied the Gestapo

In May 1943, the young, pregnant Frenchwoman Lucie Aubrac engineered the escape of her husband Raymond from the clutches of Klaus Barbie, the feared Gestapo chief later known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’. When Raymond was arrested again that July, Lucie mounted a second astonishing rescue, pretending to be Raymond's pregnant fiancee in order to stage a marriage in extremis, then ambushing the prison vans in which he was being taken back to gaol. Spirited out of France with her husband by the RAF when she was nine months pregnant, she arrived in London a heroine. After the war, Lucie and Raymond Aubrac became a celebrity couple: writing and lecturing on their wartime experiences, they both incarnated and kept alive the spirit of la vraie France – ‘the real France’: the one which had resisted, and eventually expelled, the Nazi occupier. In 1983, when both Aubracs had retired, Klaus Barbie was extradited from Bolivia and put on trial in France for crimes against humanity. In a 63-page ‘testament’ submitted to the judge, Barbie made the bombshell claim that the Aubracs had been ‘turned’ in 1943, become Gestapo informers and betrayed their comrades. The French press and the couple themselves furiously denounced this ‘slander’, but as worrying inconsistencies emerged in the tales the Aubracs had been telling ever since 1945, doubts emerged and have never quite gone away. Who was Lucie Aubrac? What did she really do in 1943? And was she really the spirit of la vraie France, or a woman who could not resist casting herself as a heroine, whatever the cost to the truth? Although Lucie Aubrac was well-known in her own country, she is less so outside France. This is the first full English-language biography of her, and a compelling one, to say the very least.

About the Author :
Siân Rees read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is now an author and history. Her first book, The Floating Brothel: the extraordinary true story of the Lady Julian and its cargo of female convicts bound for Botany Bay, was written after living in Melbourne, Australia, and published in 2001 to outstanding reviews. It was made into the Timewatch documentary on BBC2. She is also the author of The Shadows of Elisa Lynch: how a nineteenth-century Irish courtesan became the most powerful woman in Paraguay, The Ship Thieves: the true tale of James Porter, colonial pirate (2006) and Sweet Water and Bitter: the Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade. After a decade spent travelling and living abroad, she has settled in Brighton (UK) with her two small sons.

Review :
Fascinating... Calm, judicious and gripping [Praise for The Floating Brothel] History at its most engaging [Praise for Sweet Water and Bitter] A fluent and lively account [Praise for Moll] Rees is a lucid, intelligent guide [Praise for The Ship Thieves] In Rees's hands Porter's story reads like a fictional thriller but imparts the knowledge of a serious historical work