Sarkozy leads a nation’s tributes to French Resistance hero

Raymond Aubrac, one of the last surviving leaders of the French Resistance to then Nazi occupation, has died, prompting a flood of tributes to a national hero. He was 97.

Mr Aubrac, whose spectacular rescue from captivity in 1943 was turned into a popular film, died on Tuesday at a military hospital in Paris, his family said.

“These heroes of the shadows who saved France’s honour at a time when it seemed lost are disappearing one after the other,” President Nicolas Sarkozy said. “We have a duty to keep the memory alive in the heart of our collective memory.”

Mr Aubrac’s wife, Lucie, herself a resistance fighter who organised her husband’s escape in 1943, died in 2007.

Mr Aubrac was one of a group of underground fighters arrested in June 1943 by Klaus Barbie, the feared head of the Gestapo in Lyon, alongside Resistance organiser Jean Moulin, who was tortured and killed.

Lucie organised an attack on a German lorry transporting her husband and other Resistance members, and Mr Aubrac escaped.

The couple fled to London, but Mr Aubrac’s parents were arrested in France, deported and died in Auschwitz.

Born Raymond Samuel in 1914 into a Jewish merchant family, Mr Aubrac became a civil engineer. Influenced by Marxism, he and his wife joined the fledging Resistance against the Nazis and the Vichy government in 1940.

“Only one thing guided us: optimism, a belief in what we were doing and that we could change things,” Mr Aubrac said in an interview last month at his home.

Resistance members disrupted German forces through sabotage and guerrilla warfare.