The invisible infrastructure
In most accounts of the French Resistance, women have functioned as footnotes. The celebrated names are predominantly male. But the daily operational infrastructure of the resistance depended enormously on women — in part because they attracted less routine suspicion at checkpoints and in occupied public spaces. A woman on a bicycle with a shopping basket was, to the occupying security services, a far less suspicious figure than a man of military age carrying a parcel.
Women carried encoded messages across occupied France, often memorising their contents to avoid travelling with incriminating paper. They provided shelter to Allied airmen shot down over French territory, sometimes for months at a time. They maintained courier routes, ran safe houses, and gathered military intelligence transmitted to London through the Special Operations Executive and the nascent French intelligence services.
The networks they ran
Several of the most significant resistance networks in occupied France were founded or led by women. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade directed the Alliance intelligence network, which at its peak comprised several thousand agents across the occupied and unoccupied zones. Andrée de Jongh, a Belgian courier who began working with the resistance at twenty-four, created the Comet Line — a network that guided downed Allied airmen from Belgium across occupied France and over the Pyrenees to neutral Spain.
No one gave a second look to a woman on a bicycle with a shopping basket. That was our uniform and our cover. We carried the war in our bags.
The cost
Resistance work was no less dangerous for being conducted primarily outside armed combat. Women who were caught by the security services faced the same interrogation, imprisonment, and transportation as male resistance members. Many were sent to camps in Germany and Poland. A significant number did not survive.
After the war, the formal recognition given to female resistance members lagged significantly behind that awarded to their male counterparts. The Médaille de la Résistance was awarded to women as well as men, but the narratives of post-war commemoration tended to centre on armed action over the courier and shelter work that women disproportionately performed.
Recovery of their history
The systematic historical recovery of women’s roles in the French Resistance began in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, driven by a generation of historians working with oral testimony and newly accessible archival collections. The picture that emerged was of a resistance movement whose operational continuity depended on networks of women whose work had been rendered largely invisible by the priorities of post-war commemoration.