Pierre Brossolette

Pierre Brossolette (25 June 1903 – 22 March 1944) was a French socialist, journalist and member of French Resistance.

Biography

Pierre Brossolette was born in Paris, France. He graduated from l'École Normale Supérieure in 1925 and joined the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière in 1929. He worked as a journalist for "Notre Temps", "L'Europe Nouvelle" and the socialist party paper "Le Populaire". He also worked for Radio-PTT but when he opposed the Munich Agreement in the air in 1939, he was fired.

When the World War II broke out, he joined the army as a lieutenant and reached the rank of Captain before the fall of France. He disapproved of the Vichy Regime and participated in the founding of the resistance groups Libération-Nord and the Organisation civile et militaire in the Vichy area. He later joined the Comité d'Action Socialiste. When the Vichy regime forbade him to teach, Brossolette and his wife opened a bookstore in Paris. The store became a resistance meeting place.

On the night of 26 April/27 April, 1942 Brossolette left France clandestinely by Lysander aircraft and met with Charles de Gaulle as a representative of the resistance. He worked for the Free French Secret Service, BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignement et d'Action), in liaison with the SOE, and was eventually flown back to France on the night of 26 January/27 January, 1943 and met up with André Dewavrin (a.k.a le Colonel Passy), BCRA's chief, in Paris a month later. Both he and Dewavrin returned to England once more, on the night of 15 April/16 April, 1943.

When he returned to Paris the second time, the Gestapo had gotten his name from an arrested resistance member (René Hardy) and kept him under surveillance. He escaped arrest many times. In February 1944 he tried to return to Britain by boat but the vessel was shipwrecked and the Germans captured him. Initially the Gestapo did not recognize him without papers but he was eventually taken to the Gestapo HQ on Avenue Foch in Paris. Subjected to heavy torture and afraid that he would implicate others, he jumped from a lavatory window on the HQ's sixth floor on 22 March 1944, and died later that evening in a Paris hospital.