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three old letters are sitting next to each other on a white surfacea handwritten letter from the president of france to his wifeseveral old letters are stacked on top of each other on a white surfacean old document with a handwritten letter on it sitting on a tablea black and white photo of a piece of paper with writing on ittwo black and white photos of a room that has been torn aparttwo black and white photographs of a room with a ceiling that has been torn down
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163 - Francisque Girard, a craftsman from the Bresse region, an ac…
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Estimate €1,500 - €2,500
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Description
Francisque Girard, a craftsman from the Bresse region, an activist with Action française and a member of the militia in 1943–1944 A collection of letters and photographs FIND THE FULL AND DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THIS LOT IN OUR ONLINE AUCTION CATALOGUE 26 letters (L.A.S./P.A.S./L.S.), 1927–1944, addressed to René Benjamin, extremely rare accounts from a militiaman from Bourg-en-Bresse in 1943–1944, including Letter from the author, Brou, 10 February 1942; describes the moral, physical and material distress of the Compagnons de France, citing examples, and proposes a review of its organisation Letter from the author, Bourg, 20 September 1942; recounts Marshal Pétain’s visit, the private reception held at the prefecture, and the good fortune of being able to shake the Marshal’s hand on two occasions... Letter from the author, Bourg, 21 December 1942; account of the volatile situation in the Ain, a key department for the Resistance (the Maquis of the Ain and the Haut-Jura led by Romans-Petit) L.A.S., Bourg, 16 June 1943; victim of a bomb attack + 4 photographs of the shop ransacked by the bomb attack + typewritten copies of the two letters addressed to Marshal Pétain and Laval L.A.S., Bourg, 13 July 1943; a strongly worded speech against the Resistance Typewritten copy, Grenoble, 12 August 1943, from the mother of a murdered militiaman, who was herself a member of the Grenoble Militia Letter from the author, Bourg, 6 October 1943; expresses his growing bitterness at what he perceives as the ineffectiveness or complicity of the local police towards the Resistance; he gives numerous examples of events that took place in Bourg + a photograph of the leaflet Letter from Bourg, 18 April 1944 My dear friend, (...) I wanted to tell you what had prevented me from writing to you sooner: a thousand worries, as you can imagine. One day it was guarding the tracks, another time an air-raid alert. Then there were complications at work: further conscription of staff, etc.; for this and other reasons, several workers have left. Power cuts at the workshops four days a week; the Bourg station closed to shipments… most of the time. Finally, as a result of all this, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t stay up as late as I would have liked once the ‘work’ was done. I do not know whether you are aware, through Vichy or the radio or even the newspapers, that the Ain region, following Haute-Savoie, was the scene of police operations which, to put it mildly, were severe. The exploits of the maquisards provoked punitive expeditions by the occupiers, which in some instances reached a level of terrible severity. You cannot imagine how foolish the Maquis fighters were to provoke our occupiers. It is a form of guerrilla warfare whose only certain result is to blow up tracks, derail trains, and kill the odd German soldier here and there, but which, at the same time, cuts us off from part of the department, reduces transport links and, above all, leads to appalling reprisals in which many good French people pay the price for the bad ones. Over the past few days, a number of arrests have been made which show just how cynically young men who present themselves as ultra-patriots are prepared to commit any crime. Last week it was a gang led by the son of the Clerk of the Commercial Court, from an honourable family and one of the oldest in our town. Along with him were eight other resistance fighters (two of whom were among our bombers from last June, who had escaped from Neufchâteau prison, more or less in plain sight of everyone, in a stolen car, armed with submachine guns, grenades and automatic pistols). Almost every day there are arrests or ‘discoveries’ of people who make bombs and blow up railway lines, who loot garages, tobacconists’ and farms, extort money from farmers and terrorise an entire region. Here it is an agricultural engineer, the son of an engineer; there, a student from Grenoble, the son of a tax collector, who is the gang leader. Or it is an 18-year-old lad who was carrying 8,000 francs on him, the remainder of the ten thousand francs he received from the Maquis to spend whilst on ‘leave’. Or yet another lad who is in charge of ‘distributing’ several tens of thousands of francs! When these young men, so well-liked by the Gaullists, make more serious confessions – and it must be said that they generally ‘spill the beans’ quite quickly, as they know they will not be released any time soon – their statements corroborate one another and reveal the danger that these gentlemen from the Maquis face in eliminating those perceived as members of the Resistance or prominent figures, so that their murders make a significant impact. There isn’t much variation in these lists of people to be eliminated: after the Head of the Militia, it is my name and that of my son that appear immediately...” FIND THE FULL AND DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THIS LOT IN OUR ONLINE AUCTION CATALOGUE
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About the sale René Benjamin, the 20th-century Balzac scholar
Auction location
Auction time 10/06/2026 at 2:00 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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