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Step 1: 65 rue Sarrazine, home of resistance fighters Clément and Marie GIRAUD, “Resistance” movement
Marie and Clément Giraud were driven by the desire to resist from a very early age. On June 26, 1940, they hid 3 French officers and 18 soldiers in their home, who were able to escape captivity and take refuge in the unoccupied zone. They then offered refuge to those who refused to join the Compulsory Work Service (STO). Clément Giraud joined the “Résistance” movement and helped distribute the eponymous newspaper. Marie Giraud had been a member of the “Service national maquis” (SNM) since November 1943. Repression fell on this movement in June 1944. On the 19th, the German police arrested Marie Giraud and her daughters Simone and Marguerite, while Clément, warned by neighbors, managed to escape. Transferred to Paris, Marie Giraud was deported to Ravensbrück on June 30, 1944 with her daughter Simone and Jeanne Gibeault. She was gassed there on March 5, 1945. A street in Niort bears her name.
Step 2: 110 rue de Grange, home of Lucile Marie GODRIE, Righteous Among the Nations
From February 1943 until the Liberation, Lucile Marie Godrie Huteau hosted the Bodenheimer family, who had escaped the Vel d'Hiv roundup: the father (a German refugee), Salomon, known as Sadi, the mother (from Strasbourg), Elvire, and two children: Robert (known as Bobby by his parents) and Renée-Laure. The latter worked at the "Carrière et Jutarnon" establishments, artisans making lemonade and other drinks. She obtained wine, which was very rare and rationed, and which was used to "pay" for the relative peace left by the gendarmes. Bobby went to the Saint Joseph college, where the assistant director, Brother Louis, accepted him even though he knew he was Jewish. He was exempted from attending mass. This situation could have been very dangerous, as the chaplain of the college was the chaplain of the Militia. Lucile Marie Godrie was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 2012. (According to the testimony of her great-granddaughter, Virginie Psaltis).
Step 3: 66 rue René Caillié, home of Émile GAURICHON, NAP resistance policeman
Born in 1912 in Couture-d'Argenson (Deux-Sèvres), police secretary in Niort, Émile Gaurichon formed a tandem with the anti-Nazi commissioner Louis Bernard at the end of 1942, becoming his deputy. Despite the latter's suspension by Vichy in March 1943, they founded in May 1943, with three patriotic police officers (Baptiste Bascoulargue, Gérard Chaignault, Pierre Goudouneix), a security group of the Resistance, affiliated with the Noyautage des Administrations Publiques (NAP)-Police, with 14 members at the beginning of 1944. Co-pilot of this group, Émile Gaurichon turned his office into a combat post. In his capacity as clerk of the police station and head of stamps, he informed the resistance fighters and specialized in issuing false identity documents. Having arrested the Vichy prefect Henri Gomot, he participated in the installation in Niort of the Liberation prefect René Hudeley.
Step 4: 35 rue Saint-Symphorien, home of Hélène and Marcel FAURIAT, GALLIA network
Gallia is an intelligence network of the fighting France. In 1943, Jean Schlochow, alias Max, sets up a cell of the network in Niort, in which Hélène and Marcel Fauriat, employee of the Land Registry Service, 35 avenue de Limoges, as well as its director, Armand Moreau, join. This place becomes the PC of the group which radiates throughout the region. The Fauriats accommodate Max, Hélène types the reports, transmitted to London by a transmitter installed in the cellars of the Land Registry. On May 31, 1944, Armand Moreau and Haymard, alias Gérard, assistant to Schlochow as well as Marcel Fauriat are arrested at the Land Registry. On June 1, Hélène is arrested at the headquarters of the Sipo-SD, 12, rue Alsace-Lorraine while she is bringing clothes to her husband. Hélène survived her deportation to Ravensbrück, as did her husband and Haymard, who were deported to Dachau, like Moreau to Vaihingen.
Step 5: 40 avenue Charles de Gaulle, hospital center, place of asylum and rescues
The hospital is a place of asylum where resistance fighters and Jews were protected. Jews rounded up in January 1944 were hospitalized to prevent their deportation. In the hall of the new hospital, there is a plaque in tribute to Dr. Laffitte (1897-1993), surgeon and resistance fighter. He had Jean Hoyoux, the wounded Belgian radio operator, taken to the hospital. Dr. Pierre Suire (1911-1999) was responsible for organizing Jean Hoyoux's escape from the hospital in a vehicle "borrowed" from the Germans with the help of Gustave Souchard, Pierre Ferrand, Edmond Bonneau and Émile Wiard. These two doctors were the regional heads of the "Medical Committee of the Resistance" and the heads of the health service of the departmental Secret Army (AS). Denounced and arrested by the Sipo-SD, they were deported to Dachau. Dr. Epagneul, head of the Resistance health service, arrested in 1944 and imprisoned in Compiègne, was released in August 1944.
Step 6: Maurice CHIRON roundabout, Résistance-Fer
Maurice Chiron, deputy head of the depot at the Niort-Romagné marshalling yard, informant for the Éleuthère intelligence network of the BCRA of the Fighting France, organized the railway resistance in Niortais from 1941. The “Maurice group” carried out a series of sabotage acts despite surveillance by Reichsbahn agents, damaged equipment, slowed down work, hindered the movement of convoys on the Niort-Saintes-Bordeaux routes and especially towards the strategic port of La Rochelle. He protected those who refused to join the STO and organized patriotic demonstrations. At the origin of the “Résistance-Fer” movement in Niort, he was the head of “triangle 31 bis” of “sector no. 7” (Niort-Nord and Niort-Ville region) of the departmental Secret Army (AS). The city of Niort paid tribute to him by naming the roundabout after him by decision of the Municipal Council on December 13, 1996.
Step 7: Niort station, steles at the head of platform A. Lower plaque.
The steles bear the names of 19 railway workers who were victims of the war. Among them were resistance fighters, such as the communists André Bernardeau, convicted and shot in Paris on October 5, 1942; Eugène Gréau, deported NN to the special camp of Hinzert, probably convicted by a special court in Cologne or Breslau, detained in the Sonnenburg penal colony where he died of illness on December 20, 1943 (Resistance Medal); Pierre Leroy, who died in Auschwitz on August 11, 1942 (Resistance Medal). Alphonse Renaud, Gaullist resistance fighter, deported NN, died in Dora on April 3, 1945. Also killed in deportation were Raymond Paquet, on July 15, 1944 in Bremen (Bremen)-Farge, Kommando of Neuengamme, and Henri Sorin, on January 31, 1945 in Neuengamme. The other names are those of railway workers killed by acts of war (machine-gunning of their trains, bombing of the station district on June 7, 1944).
Step 8: 25 avenue de Limoges, home of Ernest Pérochon, writer and patriot
Ernest Pérochon, born in 1885 in the hamlet of Tiron in Courlay (Deux-Sèvres), a schoolteacher and veteran of the Great War, was a writer awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1920 for "Nêne", his third novel. Famous and sought after by collaborators, he refused to contribute to La Gerbe, a collaborationist newspaper, and to the regime's radio station, and to go on a lecture tour in Germany. Two of his novels were banned. He was threatened by the Vichy prefect and monitored by the Gestapo. He died on 10 February 1942 of a heart attack a few days before his 57th birthday. An official funeral was forbidden; schoolchildren who had come clandestinely with their teacher placed flowers on his grave. A stele in his memory, designed by the sculptor Albert Bouquillon (1908/1997), was inaugurated on 18 October 1970 in the Square de la Poste. It is now Place du Roulage.
Step 9: 32 rue des Trois Coigneaux, clandestine refuge of Prefect Hudeley (summer 1944)
Arriving in Niort on May 15, 1944, the clandestine prefect, René Hudeley, representing the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF), former high school teacher and municipal councilor of Niort, first hid in the Marais and then at the home of his friend Georges Gaboreau, an English teacher, at 32 rue des Trois-Coigneaux. He set up his clandestine prefecture there. Thanks to the PTT resistance fighters, René Hudeley was provided with a clandestine telephone set that allowed him to be in secret communication with the main leaders of the Resistance. On August 29, 1944, the Germans evacuated Niort. Prudent, Edmond Proust, Colonel Chaumette, head of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), composed of the Gaullist Secret Army (AS) and the Communist Francs-Tireurs and Partisans (FTP), fearing a return of the Germans and reprisals, waited a week before officially liberating the city.
Step 10: Place de la Brèche, Liberation Day, September 6, 1944
September 6, 1944 was the day of the Liberation of Niort. The crowd invaded the streets shortly after noon to attend the great victory parade. The FFI of Colonel Edmond Proust, gathered at the Duguesclin barracks, crossed the city center and headed towards the prefecture. There, they greeted the new prefect, René Hudeley, and the president of the Departmental Liberation Committee (CDL), Joseph Pineau, then on the steps of the town hall, Emile Bèche and the new municipal council. Swelled by an ever-growing crowd, the procession then reached the Place de la Brèche, where La Marseillaise resounded. Warding off the return of a hated past, the crowd then burned the flags and insignia left behind by the Germans, and triumphantly welcomed the return of the men of Triangle 17, who had just delivered the last assault against the Germans.
Step 11: 40 rue de la Terraudière, Secular Patronage, Edmond Proust’s PC
In September 1944, the war was not over. The day after the Liberation of Niort, Edmond Proust took command of the 114th Infantry Regiment, a traditional regiment of Deux-Sèvres, reconstituted with volunteers from the FFI. Colonel Edmond Proust-Chaumette set up the administrative offices of his regiment at the requisitioned Patronage laïque. The 114th would fight until May 1945 on the front of the La Rochelle pocket where the Germans had entrenched themselves. It would then join the 1st Army of General de Lattre de Tassigny in occupation at Frankenthal in Germany – where Colonel Proust is photographed – before being disbanded on October 21, 1945.