My Project

I am developing this blog as my presentation for the Scottish Baccalaureate. As a feminist, I have always been interested in women's side of history, a side which is often overlooked and forgotten about. When first thinking about the French Resistance I knew names such as Charles De Gaulle, Jean Moulin or Raymond Aubrac; surely women had to have been a part of this movement too? I worked on the assumption that because men lead the battles, the physical confrontations, that women must have played the underground roles. I began my research online, discovering that the majority of women's stories from this time were available exclusively in French, though overall the most talked about stories of Resistance action remained those of the men. After exploring the scarce internet resources, I went to Lyon, the Resistance centre of World War Two France. I have explored the archives of Centre d'Histoire de la Résistance, and Montluc Prison in Lyon to find the stories featured. Upon returning to Scotland, I have begun translation work to allow these French stories to be shared with the rest of the world. These women played diverse roles in the Resistance movement: they hid escaped prisoners; they delivered messages; they recruited agents; they distributed propaganda; they were brave fighters and their stories deserve to be told.

7 January 2016

France Bloch Serazin

France was a chemical engineer, she maintained contact with an underground Communist group; she hid a mimeograph in her home and printed leaflets. She quickly established connections with the Maquis (rural guerrilla bands of resistance fighters) for whom she made, in a laboratory in her apartment, grenades, detonators and explosives. She herself participated in certain resistance actions.

She was arrested in May 1942; she was tried with a group of 24 resistance members of whom 19 were sentenced to death. She saw many successive prisons in France and in Germany before she was executed in Hamburg in February 1943.

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