Marguerite Gonnet (13 October 1898 - 27 May 1996) was a member of the French Resistance during World War II. She was from the city of Grenoble in southeastern France. At age forty-four, married with nine children, she joined the resistance group Libération-sud. She became the head of the resistance cell in the department of Isère. She was one of the only female heads of a resistance cell, along with Marie Reynoad.
In April 1942, she was arrested by the Nazis for carrying illegal newspapers. A German military prosecutor asked Gonnet why she had taken up arms against France's occupiers, to which she said, "Quite simply, Colonel, because the men had dropped them". This quote was used by American author Sarah Rose as the epigraph of her 2019 book D-Day Girls. Gonnet was sentenced to two years in prison, and her leadership role in the resistance was taken up by Jean Weber.
She died in Paris on 27 May 1996 at the age of 97. There is a street in Grenoble named after her. In 2020, author Olivier Vallade published a book about Gonnet Marguerite Gonnet: Déterminée à Sortir de l’ombre (English: Marguerite Gonnet: Determined to Emerge from the Shadows).
References
- ^ "19 MAI 1942 : LA LEÇON DE COURAGE DE MARGUERITE GONNET" [19 MAY 1942: THE LESSON OF COURAGE OF MARGUERITE GONNET]. Grenoble Le Changement (in French). 19 May 2016. Retrieved 26 August 2019.
- ^ Shonfield, David (26 November 2015). "Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance". Counterfire. Retrieved 26 August 2019.
- Lowe, Keith (2017). The fear and the freedom: how the Second World War changed us (1st U.S. ed.). New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 122. ISBN 978-1-250-04395-5.
- ^ "Marguerite Gonnet: Déterminée à sortir de l'ombre". Culture.Isḕre (in French). Retrieved 14 April 2021.
- Rose, Sarah; Recorded Books, Inc (2019). D-day Girls: the untold story of the female spies who helped win World War II. New York: Crown. ISBN 978-0-451-49510-5. Retrieved 2019-08-26.
{{cite book}}:|first2=has generic name (help) - Douzou, Laurent (1995). La désobéissance: histoire d'un mouvement et d'un journal clandestins, Libération-Sud, 1940-1944 [Disobedience: History of a clandestine movement and newspaper]. Histoire / Editions Odile Jacob (in French). Paris: O. Jacob. p. 460. ISBN 978-2-7381-0293-5.
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