- Guy Môquet
Guy Môquet was a young French Communist militant. During the German occupation of France during World War II, he was taken hostage by the Nazis and executed by firing squad in retaliation for attacks on Germans by the French Resistance. Môquet came down in history as one of the symbols of the French Resistance.
- Jean Moulin
Jean Moulin (June 20, 1899-July 8, 1943) was a high-profile member of the French Resistance during World War II. He is remembered today as an emblem of the Resistance primarily due to his courage and death at the hands of the Germans.
- Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian of medieval France in the period between the First and Second World Wars, and a founder of the Annales School. Bloch was shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France for his work in the French Resistance and for his Jewish ancestry.
- Charles Delestraint
Charles Delestraint (March 12,1879 - April 19, 1945) was a French general and member of the French Resistance during World War II. He was born in Biache Saint-Waast, Pas de Calais. Delestraint was captured in the beginning of the First World War and spent it as a prisoner of war. After the war he remained in the army where he was a proponent for the use of armoured forces. He also befriended Charles de Gaulle.
- Édith Piaf
Édith Piaf was one of France's most beloved singers, and became a national icon. Her singing reflected her tragic life, with her specialty being the poignant ballad performed in a heartbreaking voice. Among her famous songs are "La vie en rose" (1946), "Hymne à l'amour" (1949), "Milord" (1959), "Non, je ne regrette rien" (1960). A filmed biography on her life, titled "La Vie En Rose", is currently in release (June, 2007).
- Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 - April 12, 1975) was an American-born French entertainer, most noted for her singing career, while in her early career she was a celebrated dancer (she is often credited as a movie star, although she only starred in 3 films in her early career). She was given the nicknames "Black Venus" or "Black Pearl" and "Créole Goddess", while in France she was known in the old theatrical tradition as "La Baker". She became a citizen of France in 1937.
- Lucie Aubrac
Lucie Samuel née Bernard, better known as Lucie Aubrac, was a French history teacher and member of the French Resistance. In 1939 Lucie Bernard, the daughter of a wine grower, married Raymond Samuel (born 1914) whom she met in Strasbourg. Raymond Samuel would be known during and after the war as Raymond Aubrac, having changed his Jewish surname due to the open anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews at the time.
- Albert Camus
Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 - January 4, 1960) was a French author and philosopher. Although he is often associated with existentialism, Camus preferred to be known as a man and a thinker, rather than as a member of a school or ideology. He preferred persons over ideas. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: “No, I am not an existentialist.
- Henri Frenay
Henri Frenay was a French military officer and French resistance member. Henri Frenay was born in Lyon, France on November 11, 1905, into a Catholic family with a military tradition. He studied the Germanic languages at the University of Strasbourg. Afterwards he became a soldier like his father and studied in Saint Cyr and l'Ecole superieure de guerre and reached the rank of captain in 1934. At the outbreak of World War II, he rejoined the French army.
- Jacques Lusseyran
Jacques Lusseyran (1924-1971) was a blind French author. Jacques Lusseyran was born on September 19th, 1924, in Paris, France. He became totally blind in a school accident at the age of 7. He soon learned to adapt to being blind and maintained many close friendships, particularly with one boy named Jean. At a young age he became alarmed at the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and decided to learn the German language so that he could listen to German radio broadcasts.
- Pierre Brossolette
Pierre Brossolette (June 25, 1903 - March 22, 1944) was a French socialist, journalist and member of French Resistance.
- René Hardy
René Hardy was a French resistor during World War II. He was apparently captured by the Gestapo and tortured for the information leading to the capture of Jean Moulin. However, many other résistants felt that he was a collaborator due to his swift release after being captured by the Gestapo and the later arrests of a number of resistance leaders on June 7th, 1943, at a meeting where Hardy escaped. However, after the war, Hardy was tried for collaboration, …
- Louis Jourdan
Louis Jourdan (* June 19, 1919 in Marseilles; bourgeois name Louis Gendre ) is a French actor. Jourdan grew up in France, Turkey and England and was at the Ecole Dramatique in Paris for the actor trained. His first appearance as a movie actor, he had 1939. During the Second World War he turned to movies, until he was asked to propaganda films of the Nazis cooperate, he dismissed the call back and joined the Resistance to.
- Prince Louis Jerome Victor Emmanuel Leopold Napoléon
Napoléon VI, Prince Imperial, born as Louis Jerome Victor Emmanuel Leopold Marie Bonaparte and known as Louis Napoléon, (23 January 1914 - 3 May 1997) was the claimant to the Imperial throne of France in the Prince Napoléon pretentious line from 1926 until his death.
- Andrée Borrel
Andrée Raymonde Borrel was a French heroine of World War II. Andrée Borrel was born into a working-class family at Natzwiller, Bas-Rhin, in the suburbs of Paris, growing up an active girl who liked hiking and most other outdoor activities. At the age of fourteen she left school to work in a bakery shop but when World War II broke out, …
- Charlotte Delbo
Charlotte Delbo, (August 10, 1913- March 1, 1985), was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French resistance.
- Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 - 22 December 1989) was an Irish dramatist, novelist and poet. Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and, according to some interpretations, deeply pessimistic about the human condition. His work grew increasingly cryptic and attenuated over his career. The perceived pessimism in Beckett's work is mitigated both by a great and often wicked sense of humour, and by the sense, for some readers, …
- Jacques Duclos
Jacques Duclos (October 2, 1896 in Louey, Hautes-Pyrénées-April 25, 1975 in Montreuil) was a French Communist politician who played a key role in French politics from 1926, when he entered the French National Assembly after defeating Paul Reynaud, until 1969, when he achieved a substantial proportion of the vote in the Presidential Elections. During World War I, Duclos fought in the Battle of Verdun, where he was wounded.
- Dimitri Amilakhvari
Prince Dimitri Zedguinidze-Amilakhvari, more commonly known as Dimitri Amilakhvari (October 311906 - September 241942) was a French military officer of Georgian extraction who, as a Lieutenant Colonel of the French Foreign Legion, became a hero of the Free French Forces during World War II. He was nicknamed Bazorka after the place he was born.
- Missak Manouchian
Missak Manouchian was an Armenian-French communist militant in the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI) and the Resistance movement against the Nazi occupation of France.
- Georges Bidault
Georges-Augustin Bidault was a French politician and active in the French Resistance and Organisation armée secrète (OAS).
- Jacques Chaban-Delmas
Jacques Chaban-Delmas (March 7, 1915-November 10, 2000) was a French Gaullist politician. He served as Prime Minister under Georges Pompidou from 1969 to 1972. Jacques Chaban-Delmas was born Jacques Delmas; in the resistance underground, his final pseudonym was "Chaban", and, after World War II, he formally changed his name to "Chaban-Delmas". General of a brigade in the resistance, he took part in the Parisian insurrection of August 1944.
- Henri D'Astier de la Vigerie
Henri d'Astier de la Vigerie was a French soldier, "Résistance" member, and conservative politician. Henri d'Astier was born in Villedieu-sur-Indre, a small village in the Indre département of central France. His military career began in 1915, and by the end of World War I, he had reached the rank of lieutenant, and had been awarded the Legion of Honor. Politically, d'Astier was strongly conservative and Roman Catholic.
- Abbé Pierre
L'Abbé Pierre was a French Catholic priest, member of the Resistance during the World War II, and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP). He founded in 1949 the Emmaus movement, which has the goal of helping poor and homeless people and refugees. "Abbé" means abbot in French, and is also used as a courtesy title given to Catholic priests. He was one of the most popular figures in France, but had his name removed from such polls after some time.
- Nancy Wake
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake AC, GM (born August 30 1912), was the Allies' most decorated servicewoman of World War II who fought alongside the maquis groups of the French Resistance
- Danielle Mitterrand
Danielle Mitterrand is the widow of François Mitterrand and president of the foundation France Libertés Fondation Danielle Mitterrand.
- Odette Sansom
Odette Marie Celine Sansom, GC, MBE, Chevalier de la légion d'honneur, (April 28, 1912 - March 13, 1995) was an Allied heroine of World War II. Odette Marie Celine Brailly was born in Amiens in the Somme département of France. Her father was the First World War hero Gaston Brailly who was killed at Verdun when she was six years old, in 1918. She married the Englishman Roy Sansom in 1931, moving with him to England.
- Denise Bloch
Denise Madeleine Bloch was a heroine of World War II. Bloch was from a Jewish family who were rounded up by the Gestapo by the middle of 1942 in occupied France. In the city of Lyon, Bloch was recruited to work for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). She began resistance work with SOE radio operator Brian Stonehouse until his arrest near the end of October that year.
- Louis Armand
Louis Armand was born in Cruseilles (Haute-Savoie) on January 17 1905 and died on August 30 1971 in Villers-sur-Mer. He was a French engineer who managed several public companies and had a significant role during the World War II as an officer in the Resistance. He is unrelated to the Australian poet who publishes under the same name.
- Pierre Villon
Pierre Villon (August 27 1901 in Soultz, Haut-Rhin - November 6 1980 in Vallauris, Alpes-Maritimes was a member of the French Communist Party and of the French Resistance during the war. With his true name of Roger Ginsburger, he was an architect. In spring 1944, with Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont and Jean de Voguë, he was one of the three leaders of the Committee of Military action created by the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR).
- Suzanne Spaak
Suzanne Spaak, World War II heroine. Suzanne Spaak was born into a prosperous Belgian banking family sometime around 1905. She married Brussels-born dramatist Claude Spaak (1904-1990), the brother of screenwriter Charles Spaak and Paul-Henri Spaak, one of Belgium's most important statesmen. Living in Paris, France with her husband and two children, Suzanne Spaak enjoyed a life of luxury and prestige as one of the city's leading socialites.
- Georges Mandel
Georges Mandel (June 5, 1885-July 7, 1944) was a French politician, journalist, and French Resistance leader, born Louis George Rothschild in Chatou, Seine-et-Oise, the son of a tailor: his family (not related to the banking dynasty) was Jewish, and had fled from Alsace in to preserve their French citizenship when Alsace-Lorraine was annexed by the German Empire at the end of the Franco-Prussian War.
- Emmanuel D'Astier
Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie (January 9 1900-June 12 1969) was a French journalist, politician and member of the French Resistance.
- Roger Carcassonne
Roger Carcassonne-Leduc (January 12 1911 in Marnia - December 10 1991 in Paris), was a member of the French Resistance. An French industrialist in Oran, he served as a second lieutenant with the 8th Regiment. Sent to Tunisia, at the time of the armistice he appeared in front of the military justice for having posted and distributed the texts of the call of June 18 from General de Gaulle.
- René Cogny
René Cogny was a French Général de division, World War II veteran and later commander of the French forces in Tonkin, North Vietnam during the First Indochina War and notably the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Known to his men as Le General Vitesse (General Hurry-Up), Cogny was killed when his Air France Caravelle jetliner crashed near Nice in the Mediterranean.
- Simone Weil
Simone Weil (February 3, 1909 - August 24, 1943) was a French philosopher and mystic.
- Johan Hendrik Weidner
Johan Hendrik Weidner (October 22, 1912, Brussels, Belgium - May 21, 1994, Monterey Park, California, United States) was a highly decorated hero of World War II. Johan Weidner, born to Dutch parents, grew up in Collonges, France in the Ain département near the Swiss border where his father served as the minister of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Following his education at French public schools, he studied at the Seventh-day Adventist Seminary in Collonges, …
- Robert Benoist
Robert Marcel Charles Benoist, (March 20, 1895 - September 9, 1944) was a French Grand Prix motor racing driver and war hero.
- Charles Tillon
Charles Tillon (July 3, 1897 - January 13, 1993) was a French politician.
- Pierre Georges
Pierre Georges (1919-1944), better known as "Colonel Fabien", was one of the two members of the French Communist Party who committed the first assassinations on the brutal invading army in World War II (see Military history of France during World War II). By then many French communists had died in concentration camps just as many French former soldiers had died on building projects as slave laborers in Nazi Germany, …