Odile de Vasselot, Teenage Aristocrat in the French Resistance, Dies at 103

New York Times

01-05-2025

Odile de Vasselot, who heard Charles de Gaulle's World War II appeal to resist the Germans on a makeshift radio at the family château in south-central France and jumped in, first delivering mail and messages to the Resistance and later helping to escort Allied airmen across the Belgian front, died on April 21 in Paris. She was 103.
Her death, at a retirement home for nuns and priests, was announced by the Order of the Liberation, the organization that awarded her a medal established by General de Gaulle to honor heroes of the French Resistance.
Ms. de Vasselot (pronounced de-VASS-euh-low) was one of thousands of young Frenchwomen and men who quietly went to war against the Germans invaders after the country's defeat in 1940 during the Battle of France. She began modestly, chalking the Lorraine Cross, adopted by General de Gaulle as a symbol of the Resistance, on walls and tearing down the propaganda posters of the Germans and their French Vichy-regime confederates. By the war's end, she was going on dangerous nocturnal missions.
'One had to do something,' she said in an interview many years later. 'One never has the right to just sit there and do nothing.'
She recalled being incensed, as an 18-year-old, by the sight of the giant Nazi flags over the Rue de Rivoli in Paris: 'It was unthinkable, with those huge banners flying with the swastika on them.'
At her death, President Emmanuel Macron of France saluted 'a great lady who honorably answered all the appeals, throughout her life, and did so with a courage that can only edify us.'
Mr. Macron recalled that, after the war, Ms. de Vasselot founded the Lycée Sainte Marie d'Abidjan, a girls' school in Ivory Coast, where girls' education was woefully underserved.
Ms. de Vasselot's Resistance career resembled that of many others, with one key difference: In a largely working-class movement, she was an aristocrat who had to deceive her watchful mother to go on her first missions.
She came from a family of military officers, though — her father was a lieutenant colonel in the French cavalry, her grandfather was a general, and an ancestor had fought for the Americans as a naval officer during the Revolutionary War — and they had known and admired General de Gaulle, and his visionary conviction about the importance of mobilized combat, before the war.
In an interview with the Charles de Gaulle Foundation on the occasion of her 100th birthday, Ms. de Vasselot recalled ascending to her bedroom on the evening of June 18, 1940, in the keep of the castle in the Poitou region that had been in her family since the 15th century. 'There was a little radio built by my brother,' she said. 'And all of a sudden I heard, 'Me, General de Gaulle, I'm calling on officers, junior officers, combatants.''
She continued: 'I was astonished to hear someone I actually knew speaking on the radio. I came down to the living room, and I said, 'You know what I just heard — de Gaulle is in London. He's calling people to come to him, quickly.''
Her grandfather, the elderly Gen. Jean Gaspard Marie René de Cugnac, exclaimed, ''You hear that! The war isn't over!'' Ms. de Vasselot recalled. 'Right away, we were all with General de Gaulle.'
She took part in the famous student demonstration of Nov. 11, 1940, the first public act of resistance against the Germans in Paris, but chafed at how powerless she felt. 'The Resistance was a fortress for me, and I couldn't find the door,' she said in an interview in 2021.
Her chance came, she said, when a friend put her in touch with a member of a Resistance group known as the Zero network, in June 1943. (Other accounts offer a different chronology.) She was asked to deliver Resistance mail and newspapers to network members in Toulouse, taking the night train on Friday and returning the next day.
'I could have been struck by lightening, and I wouldn't have been more shocked,' she said in a video interview with Agence France-Presse. 'Because, at that time, young women were kept under close watch. Everything I did, I had to tell my mother about it.'
But she accepted the mission, lying to her mother about her weekly absences. 'Women had a lot of advantages,' she recalled. 'They didn't arouse suspicion.'
'The Germans didn't think women could be underground.'
By the end of the year, arrests had made it dangerous to work with the Zero network. Ms. de Vasselot joined another group, known as the Comet network, and for two months, until early 1944, walked through mud and swamps at the Belgian front, meeting up with Allied airmen and parachutists, giving them money and forged papers, and accompanying them to France, where they could make their way to neutral Spain.
One morning in January, on the Lille-Paris train with two of her 'boys,' she said, her blood ran cold when she heard a German voice demanding, 'Identity papers!' The young men didn't understand, and they were immediately arrested.
'What still astonishes me is that the Germans didn't realize the escort was a young woman,' she later recalled. 'But since I was exactly to their taste — blonde, blue-eyed, young — they didn't ask me any questions.'
She rejoined the Zero network that summer, as the allies were creeping their way toward Paris, and was sent on new missions throughout France.
With the end of the war came numerous medals and recognition, and the renewed pursuit of studies that would lead to a career in education.
Odile de Vasselot de Régné was born on Jan. 6, 1922, in Saumur, the seat of the French cavalry school, in the Loire Valley, to Gaston de Vasselot de Régné and Chantal de Cugnac.
She grew up largely in Metz, studying with the nuns of the Sacred Heart. Her father was stationed there before the war, as was Colonel de Gaulle, who headed the 507th Régiment de Chars, or Mobilized Unit. She recalled playing with de Gaulle's son, Philippe, as a child.
She received her baccalaureate degree in 1939 and, after the war, a degree in history from the Sorbonne. In 1947, she joined the religious congregation of the Sisters of Saint Francis Xavier. In 1959, the congregation sent her to Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, to start a girls' school in cooperation with the progressive government of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the country's first president.
The school opened in 1962, and Ms. de Vasselot remained its director until 1988, when she returned to France. The Ivorian newspaper Fraternité Matin wrote recently that 'under the enlightened direction of Mme. de Vasselot, this establishment, far more than a school, became the key institution that forged the female elite of this country.'
No immediate family survives Ms. de Vasselot. Her funeral mass was held on Tuesday at the Cathedral of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides in Paris, an honor reserved for France's war heroes.
In November, as Mr. Macron was decorating her with the National Order of Merit at the Élysée Palace, she responded with bracing words: 'What I want to say to young people is, 'Never give up, never give up, whatever difficulties you face.''