Chartres, August 1944. On the steps of the Hôtel des Postes, pointing her submachine gun towards the objective and wearing an armband adorned with a Phrygian cap and the acronym FTP, Simone Segouin, 18, poses under the photographers. The cliché will remain famous, symbolizing the commitment of women in the Resistance.
The last resistance fighter from Eure-et-Loir, where she was born, died on Tuesday February 21, at the age of 97, reported theRepublican Echo. “Our Eurelian Marianne”, paid tribute to the prefecture of the department, welcoming “his strength of character, his ardor and his courage”. In a press release, the President of the Republic also honored “the memory of a woman who risked everything to defend our universal values and liberate France”.
“I was not afraid of anything”
Simone Segouin was born on October 3, 1925, in Thivars, into a family of farmers. His father Robert, a communist municipal councilor, was already involved in the Resistance. At the beginning of 1944, German officers staying at the Château de Spoir, south of Chartres, requisitioned young girls to take care of household chores. Simone’s father refuses the order, claiming that his daughter is a seamstress. The Germans then decide to bring clothes to the family farm to be altered. “Fearing that these comings and goings to the family farm, frequented by FTP resistance fighters [Francs-tireurs et partisans, ndlr] of the sector, do not pose a threat, my father has found another stratagem. Thanks to the complicity of an aunt who worked at the Bon Marché, he explained to the Germans that I had been forced to return to Paris where I had found work. I then had to leave the family home and go into hiding within the FTP which provided me with false papers. I was now called Nicole Minet”, had told in 2020 Simone, at the monthly letter from the Resistance Foundation.
At 18, the young seamstress then went into hiding. After meeting Roland Boursier, known as Germain, a former prisoner of war escaped from the Compulsory Labor Service, Simone joined the FTP. The heads of the network appoint her as a liaison officer between Châteaudun, Dreux and Chartres. On a bicycle, which she had stolen from a German secretary of the Kommandantur, the young woman travels the roads of the department, carrying messages in the lapels of her sleeve and dismantled weapons in the panniers of her bicycle. Arrested one day in possession of weapons during a check, she takes advantage of a bombardment on the city of Chartres to slip under the nose of the gendarmes.
In the department, she carries out sabotage operations on railway lines, standing guard with station masters. On August 20, 1944, near a mill near Thivars, she captured twenty-four German soldiers, with Roland Boursier. It is there that she recovers a submachine gun that she will not let go of until Paris. “Few women took up arms and I was the only woman in this FTP groupshe testified in 2020. Me, I was not afraid of anything. I didn’t think anything could happen to me and yet I tell myself now that I could have been killed. I think that at 19 you are a little unconscious.
“After the war, it was all over for me”
In Chartres, she participated in the last battles liberating the city. Through the jubilant crowd, she met General de Gaulle who, on August 23, after having saluted the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) in arms, delivered a speech in front of the Post Office. “How moved me the magnificent welcome of Chartres, of Chartres liberatedthen launches the man of June 18. Chartres on the way to Paris, that is to say on the way to victory. The crowd then sings a Marseillaise. In Chartres Liberated, an American war photographer, Jack Belden, notices the face of the young resistance fighter.
In September 1944, Belden will devote to the resistant an article in the American magazine Life. He writes : “The first time I saw her she was standing in the courtyard of the prefecture, nibbling on two large pieces of bread covered in a thick and unsavory jam. She neither applauded the haircut nor flirted with the swarms of American correspondents. In the streets of Chartres, on August 16, Robert Capa had photographed this shorn woman, Simone Touseau, holding an infant in her arms. The image, emblematic of the savage purge condemning women accused of having collaborated, will also be published in Life.
The myth created by the American press has however never stuck to the real commitment of Simone Segouin. “She never fired a single shot. She wasn’t a fighter.” explains Albert Hude, president of the Center for Studies and Documentation on the Resistance in Eure-et-Loir, in theRepublican Echo. In LifeJack Belden writes: “Nothing pleased Nicole so much as killing Germans.” His only memory of a gunshot goes back to one night in July 1944, near Dreux. “I was in ambush with two comrades, said Simone in 2014. Two German soldiers cycled past, all three of us fired at the same time.” A few years later, she would say again: “It’s not the role of a woman normally to fight. After the war, all that was over for me. I wanted to go back to a normal life.”
When Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944, she posed again under the lens of Belden, alongside FFI resistance fighters. At the end of the war, Charles Tillon, Minister of Armaments and former head of the FTP, presented him with the Croix de guerre. On July 14, 2021, she was also made a knight of the Legion of Honor. In front of her children, she refused for a long time to mention her involvement in the Resistance. “I did my duty as a good Frenchwoman, she said only in 2020, like other women have done like me in the Resistance.”
