Lucie Aubrac - Origins

As a wife, mother and school teacher, Lucie Aubrac embodied the stereotypical woman of the time. However, by breaking her husband and a dozen other of her comrades out of jail, amongst other subversive actions, it's easy to say that Lucie is no stereotypical woman. Lucie Aubrac, originally Lucie Bernard, was born on June 29th 1912 in the town of Macon, France, in the Burgundy Region. Her parents were winegrowers, and during World War One, her father served in the army and was wounded severely, which she attributes to being her a pacifist in her youth. In the years before the war, Aubrac attended university in Paris where she took strong positions against Fascism, at a time when not too far away from Paris, Hitler’s Third Reich was in Power and becoming a bigger and bigger threat. Also, in Paris, she met an engineer who had worked for the French army corps and had recently come back from studying at MIT, a man named Raymond Samuel, with whom she had fallen in love with. (Aubrac)

Being in France during the occupation, Lucie and Raymond disguised their subversive actions in the French resistance with maintaining the status quo. Both worked, Lucie kept to their home in Lyon for the most part, and it was used to house fellow resistants when there was a need.

During the war, Raymond and Lucie adopted their resistance name, Aubrac, as their last names. Lucie Aubrac gave birth to her son Jean-Pierre, and her daughter Catherine. Charles de Gaulle named her the first French woman parliamentarian in 1944 when she represented the resistance movement. 

 Because Lucie had maintained, for the most part, the illusion of a typical French housewife, mother and school teacher during the French resistance, while secretly being a leading figure against the Vichy government, after the war she was remembered mostly because of maintaining her traditional roles.