On August 30

On this day in ...

Nancy Wake

... 1912 (100 years ago today), Nancy Wake was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She, her parents, and her five siblings moved to Sydney, Australia; soon after, their journalist father left them. Wake herself left home as a teenager, eventually traveling to New York and London and settling in Paris, where she was a free-lance writer said to be fond of the French city's nightlife. By the time Nazi Germany occupied France, she was living in Marseilles, the wife of a wealthy French industrialist who would be executed on account of the couple's work for the Resistance. Wake herself went to England and joined the Special Operations Executive, a British spy agency about which we've frequently posted here, here, and here. Parachuted with into France in 1944, Wake worked behind the enemy lines as a spy. The Germans nicknamed her la Souris blanche because she could not be captured. After the war her efforts were recognized with Britain's George Medal, the U.S. Medal of Freedom, and the French Legion d’Honneur. Wake, who published her memoirs, The White Mouse, in 1997, died in London a year ago this month.

(Prior August 30 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'You know, in life there are only three or four fundamental decisions to make. The rest is just luck.'

-- French Résistant and publisher Raymond Aubrac, in a 2011 interview with Le Monde. The quote was reprinted in The New York Times' obituary on Aubrac, who died this past April 10 at age 97. The "fundamental decision" to which he referred? Marrying Lucie Bernard in late 1939, when he was still known by his birth name of Raymond Samuel. Within months the Nazis would occupy Paris, and the couple (left) -- 1st Lucie, then Raymond, would join the underground Résistance. (photo credit) Eventually they adopted one of their noms de guerre, Aubrac, as their legal surname. With Lucie Aubrac's help, as described in the obituary, he would escape torture and a death sentence imposed at the behest of Klaus Barbie -- decades later, the couple attended the trial in which Barbie was condemned for crimes against humanity. She died at age 94, in 2007.

On November 5

On this day in ...

... 1917, a daughter, Jacqueline Marie-Thérèse Suzanne Douet, was born into a weathy family in Challans, a town southwest of Nantes, France. After completing university and art studies, she married the son of a Socialist Party leader, became known as Jacqueline Auriol, and gave birth to 2 sons. During World War II she aided the French Resistance. Becoming a pilot at war's end, Auriol is known as "France's most distinguished aviatrix." Among her achievements, for which she was admitted to the Legion d'Honneur: "the world's first woman test pilot"; setting of "a new women's speed record"; and "second woman to break the sound barrier"; and "one of the first pilots to fly the supersonic Concorde." She did humanitarian work, too:

Madame Auriol worked with the Ministere de la Cooperation, using remote sensing techniques to gather information for agricultural development. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization presented her with the Ceres Medal for her significant contributions.

Auriol, who published her autobiography (above right) in 1968, died in 2000 at age 82.

(Prior November 5 posts are here, here, and here.)

On August 15

On this day in ...
... 1906, a girl, named Suzanne, was born in Rennes, France. She would be the eldest of 7 children whose father was Jules Basdevant (below right), a French scholar and diplomat who from 1946 to 1964 would serve as a Judge on the the International Court of Justice -- President from 1949 to1952. (photo credit) His daughter likewise would become a leading legal scholar specializing in public international law, following in her father's footsteps. In 1932 she became the 1st woman to earn an agrégation de droit public. Following her marriage in the mid-1930s, Suzanne Bastid (above left) served as chef de cabinet for her husband, the French Minister of Commerce. (photo credit) When World War II came she went into exile, but then was repatriated and served in the Résistance. Bastid was the 1st woman to occupy a chair in a French law faculty, at Lyon in 1943 and at Paris in 1946. After the war she launched a 20-year career as a professor at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris. Her many achievements included service on the French delegation to the United Nations, as well as the U.N. Administrative Tribunal, over which she presided from 1953 to 1963. She was the 1st vice president of the Institut de droit international, and was a commandeur of the Légion d'honneur. Bastid, who in 1984 became the 1st woman to receive the Manley O. Hudson Medal from the American Society of International Law, died on March 2, 1995.



(Prior August 15 posts are here, here, and here.)

On April 6

On this day in ...
... 1906, Virginia Hall (right) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. After studying at Radcliffe and Barnard, she traveled through Europe, and in 1931 was hired as a clerk at the U.S. Embassy in Poland. A year later she accidentally shot herself while hunting, and the consequent amputation of her left leg ended her hopes of entering the Foreign Service. She joined the Allied effort as soon as World War II broke out in Europe, 1st as an ambulance aide and eventually as a coordinator of French Underground activities on behalf of Britain's Special Operations Executive. (photo credit) In 1944, as a member of the United States' Office of Strategic Services Special Operations Branch, she returned to occupied France, where her espionage aiding the French Resistance prompted occupying Nazis to distribute this warning on a flyer:

'The woman who limps is one of the most dangerous Allied agents in France. We must find and destroy her.'

After the war she married and worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, retiring in 1966. She died in 1982 at age 76. Hall, who'd received U.S. and British honors during her life, again was honored posthumously in 2006.

(Prior April 6 posts are here, here, and here)

On August 23

On this day in ...
... 1924 (85 years ago today), Madeleine Riffaud (left) was born in Paris, France. When the Nazis occupied her city, the teenager adopted a codename and "joined the 20,000 strong Résistance in the French capital and became one of the 100,000 or so members nationwide." Decades later she told a Deutsche Welle reporter:

'I took the name of a German, out of respect for the author Rainer Maria Rilke, whose poems I loved. We were at war with the Nazis, not at war against the German people. So I became "Rainer" and remained so to the end of the occupation.'

In retaliation for an SS massacre of 600 in central France, Riffaud shot a German soldier to death -- an exploit she recalled in her poem Femmes avec fusils (p. 5) -- and was arrested. She would be released when Allies liberated the city. After World War II she became a journalist, poet, and war correspondent, covering wars in Algeria and Vietnam. (image credit)
... 1990, Armenia declared itself sovereign. It would become independent from the Soviet Union a year later. Today the country (flag at left), which is slightly larger than the state of Maryland, has a population estimated in the neighborhood of 3 million.

(Prior August 23 posts are here and here.)

On December 19

On this day in ...

... 1966, the 2 international covenants, intended to make obligatory and enforceable the promises made decades earlier in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were opened for signature by the U.N. General Assembly. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights was the 1st to enter into force, on January 3, 1976. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights followed by a couple months, entering into force on March 23, 1976.

... 1915, Édith Gassion was born in Paris to a father who was a street acrobat and a mother who aspired to be a cabaret singer. Often she "was left in the care of her Algerian grandmother, a Kabyle woman named Aïcha"; when her father left to fight in World War I, she "was left to her own devices, and generally ran wild with other children in the neighbourhood." After the war she and her father both worked as street entertainers; eventually she "was plucked off the streets, thrown into a chic little black dress and made resident singer of Le Gerny's, one of the most elegant cabarets on the Champs Elysées." Adopting a stage surname that means "sparrow," Édith Piaf went on to become one of France's most famous singers. During World War II she used her entertainers' access to Occupation officers in order to aided the French Resistance. In this video clip, she expresses her nonregrets in one of her signature songs, Non, je ne regrette rien:

On May 30

On this day in ...
... 1992, by Resolution 757 of the U.N. Security Council, an embargo "of any commodities or products" was imposed on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) as a sanction for its failure to end fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
... 1907, Germaine Tillion (left) was born in Allègre, France, to a mother who was a writer and a father who was a judge. An anthropology student at the University of Paris and other schools, she went to northeastern Algeria 4 times in the 1930s on missions to study Berbers and other groups. She would become, in the words of the French daily Libération, "a pioneer in anthropology and a visceral opponent of all totalitarianisms." On August 13, 1942, the Gestapo arrested her for having helped form the French Resistance to Nazi occupation. She endured 3 years at the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women in eastern Germany (a camp about which we posted here in last year's Women at Nuremberg series). At the same camp her mother, Emilie Tillion, perished in a gas chamber on March 2, 1945. In the post-World War II period she condemned torture of Algerians by the French and violence on both sides of the conflict. "As a Gaullist and a Catholic, she worked on several occasions as a 'middle man' between French authorities and Algerian activists." A leading intellectual, Tillion was the author of many works, among them France and Algeria: Complementary Enemies and Ravensbrück. Tillion was honorary director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris when she died on April 19 of this year, at her home in Saint-Mandé, France. Tillion was 100 years old.

In passing: Pearl Cornioley

(Marking the passing of an honorary IntLawGrrl.) Was moved this week by a story about Pearl Cornioley (left), an extraordinary woman who passed away on February 24 in the Loire Valley, France.
She'd been born Cecile Pearl Witherington 93 years earlier in Paris, the daughter of a British family ruined by "[h]er father’s heavy drinking and spendthrift habits." By age 17 she was working as a part-time English teacher. The family fled to London when the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940. But soon after she joined the Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E., and was trained to work as an underground courier between Britain and the French Resistance.
Known to her family as Pearl, by code name as Wrestler, by nom de guerre as Pauline, and in wireless transmissions as Marie,

Ms. Cornioley, who was 29 when she was sent to France in 1943, commanded troops who killed 1,000 German soldiers and wounded many more — while suffering only a tiny number of casualties themselves. She presided over the surrender of 18,000 German troops.

After the war she worked as a secretary for the World Bank. She published her memoirs, a book entitled Pauline, in French; English excerpts here. She received many honors, but later in life (right) (photo credits) turned one down because it was aimed at civilians who'd helped Britain:

She sent an icy note saying she had had done nothing remotely 'civil.'

On this day

On March 3, ....
... 2008 (today), in Geneva, Switzerland, the Human Rights Council of the United Nations begins its 7th session, scheduled to run through March 28. Agenda's here; IntLawGrrls' prior posts on this body, established as a successor to the Human Rights Commission, are here. The new session is not cause for celebration in all corners; on the website of Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme may be found a bitter complaint entitled "L'ONU contre les Droits de l'Homme" ("The United Nations Against Human Rights"). Among the dozens of signatories are Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel and feminist philosopher Élisabeth Badinter (right).
... 1996, author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras died at her home in Paris, France. She'd been born 81 years earlier in Gia Dinh, a village near Saigon in what was then the French colony of Indochina and is now Vietnam, to parents who taught school in the French colonial service. Moving to France at age 18 in order to study law and political science, she eventually worked as a governmental secretary. After Nazi occupation of France she served in the Résistance alongside a future French President, François Mitterand. After the war she joined the French Communist Party. She began publishing her work in 1943. By the time of her death her oeuvre comprised "more than 70 novels, plays, screenplays and adaptations," including The Lover, an account of childhood in Indochina, and the elliptical screenplay Hiroshima, Mon Amour. (credit for 1950 photo)