When France on Tuesday inaugurated the commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the French liberation, President Emmanuel Macron’s very first visit went to the tiny pre-Alps village of Vassieux-en-Vercors, in the Vercors Massif, reports FRANCE 24.
The choice of location was no coincidence.
During World War II, the village and its surroundings served as a refuge for a French Resistance group known as the Vercors Maquis. The group used the mountainous terrain to train its fighters and organise the wider French Resistance against the Nazis. Shortly after the Allied forces landed in Normandy in June, 1944, Vercors then became the first French region to claim its independence from German and Vichy rule, sparking the Vercors Uprising.
The German response that ensued was brutal. An estimated 10,000 German soldiers stormed Vassieux-en-Vercors, completely devastating the village and dealing one of the most serious single blows to the French Resistance. Today, 187 white crosses and some tombstones stand in the village cemetery, marking the final resting place for the many civilians and Resistance fighters who met their deaths in the Vercors battles. But some names stand out, like that of Abdesselam Ben Ahmed, Ahmed Ben Ouadoudi and Samba N'dour.
Ben Ahmed and Ben Ouadoudi both worked on a local construction site when they picked up arms for France, while N’dour joined the movement after having served as a Senegalese tirailleur within the French Army’s colonial infantry.
But how these “colonials” – as they were referred to at the time – ended up in the French Resistance is still a mystery historians are trying to piece together. What has been established, however, is that the foreign fighters played an invaluable role in the Resistance that the Vercors Maquis was able to put up on the mountain.
“The memory of them has not been passed on,” Didier Croibier Muscat, the secretary-general of the National Association of Volunteer Combatants and Pioneers of Vercors, said. “Sometimes you can find a trace of them in a testimony, in a book or in our association’s news publications, but it’s completely random. They have never been the subject of any in-depth research,” he explained.
Not all foreign contributors have gone unnoticed, however – in particular, a group of Senegalese soldiers who fought for the Vercors Maquis as a unit between June and September, 1944. “They had been assigned to the Doua barracks in the (Lyon suburb of) Villeurbanne and worked at the Édouard Herriot port in Lyon, under the supervision of German soldiers. They weren’t taken prisoner in 1940 during the fighting," Croibier Muscat explained.
Julien Guillon, an historian and scientific supervisor to the Resistance Memorial in Vassieux-en-Vercors, said they joined the Maquis after the group’s leaders “came up with the idea of getting these 52 or 53 Senegalese riflemen and bring them back to Vercors so they could form a fighting unit. Which they did”.