During the liberation of Chartres a Life magazine photographer spotted Simone Segouin and snapped a photograph, turning the 19-year-old into an icon of the French Resistance and the Liberation.
Photographer Robert Capa and reporter Jack Belden had driven into the embattled city in August 1944 with soldiers from General George S. Patton’s Third Army.
Intrigued by the ‘The Girl Partisan of Chartres’, as Life would dub her, the two newsmen followed her to Paris and gained her trust for an interview.
They discovered that, using the codename ‘Nicole’, Simone had been a courier for the FTP before becoming involved in sabotage and killing her first German soldier on July 14, 1944.
Simone was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1946 but, according to the display celebrating great French women which I saw on the Champs-Élysées earlier this year, she did not continue to attend ceremonies commemorating the war – and she turned down the Légion d’Honneur in 2021.
‘It’s true, the Germans were our enemies, it was the war, but I don’t draw any pride from it,’ she said.
Simone Segouin, icon of the Resistance, died in 2023, aged 97.
Greg Lewis 
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