Serge Ravanel
Serge Ravanel (born May 12, 1920 in Paris as Serge Asher , † April 27, 2009 in Paris) was a French resistance fighter , entrepreneur and politician.
Life
youth
Serge Asher's mother, who had previously been involved in the Czechoslovak independence movement, was a fashion retailer for haute couture after emigrating to France . After an excellent school leaving certificate, Serge Asher was accepted into the École polytechnique in September 1939 .
War and Resistance
He experienced the outbreak of war on April 1, 1940 as an officer student at the Artillery School in Fontainebleau . In October of that year he should have joined the front as a lieutenant , but the defeat of the French army and the armistice on June 22 came before that. With the Chantiers de la Jeunesse , the paramilitary youth organization founded after the collapse of the army, he tried to help organize the resistance against the German occupiers. At first he was loyal to Marshal Pétain , wrongly assessing the situation and believing that he was only carrying out the occupiers' orders in a pro forma manner and was trying to circumvent them: "Dans mon esprit, Pétain ruse avec l'ennemi." In November 1940 he was ordered to resume his studies at the École polytechnique , which had reopened in Lyon .
In April 1941 he prepared to flee to London via Portugal . However, he met General Gabriel Cochet , who persuaded him to join the Resistance. There Serge Asher chose his pseudonym, which he would carry for the rest of his life. He chose the name Ravanel in honor of two mountain guides from Chamonix , Jean and Joseph Ravanel. In June 1942, after completing his studies, he joined the Resistance Liberation Sud as an active member on the recommendation of Jacques Brunschwig .
On November 5, 1942, he was arrested in Marseille . Thanks to the hidden help of French police officers, however, he managed to escape. On March 12, 1943, he was captured again during a large-scale raid in Lyon, in which around 20 Resistance fighters were arrested. He was able to escape again: simulating an illness, he was transferred to the Hôpital de L'Antiquaille . Together with other captured resistance fighters, the Resistance freed him from this hospital in a commando operation. On June 12, 1943, he was appointed leader of the groupes francs (irregulars) of the southern resistance by the leadership of the united Resistance . In this group the previous three groups of the southern Resistance were combined.
On October 19, 1943, Ravanel was arrested a third time. This time he managed to escape by jumping out of a window into the Ain River in the middle of the night . In November, his group managed to free Jean Moulin from Caluire prison .
June 6th 1944 it appointed General Koenig to Colonel ( Colonel ) of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) - he was the youngest French colonel of the Second World War. In this function he coordinated the Liberation in southwest France with its very heterogeneous groups. After Allied troops landed in Provence on August 15, FFI troops entered Toulouse on August 19 . They killed around 1,000 German soldiers and took 13,000 prisoners. In the chaotic weeks after the liberation of the city, Ravanel tried to restore order with the help of militants from the Ariège and Lot departments . These were partly communist, which worried General de Gaulle : "Cet afflux d'éléments communistes ... inquiète de Gaulle, qui craignait la création d'une 'république rouge' dans la région." On September 16, de traveled Gaulle went to Toulouse and removed the leaders of the Resistance there, on the charge that they had taken unfortunate initiatives ( initiatives regrettables ) from their offices.
At the end of the same month, Ravanel was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident in Paris and gave up his military command. At the end of the war he was appointed battalion commander and a little later appointed to the general staff .
After the war
In 1950, Ravanel left the army. As an electronics engineer, he founded several companies and worked as a consultant.
In 1981 he reappeared in the political public as a member of the cabinet of Research Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement . On its list, he ran for the elections to the European Parliament in 1994.
In the last years of his life he devoted himself to studies and publications on the history of the Resistance. He defended Raymond Aubrac's reputation when a 1997 book accused him of causing Jean Moulin's arrest . Ravanel was the driving force behind the creation of the Association pour les études sur la résistance intérieure (AERI).
On May 5, 2009, Ravanel was given the military honor for the dead in the Invalides in Paris.
Honors
- Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor
- Ordre de la Liberation
- Croix de guerre with palm tree
- Médaille de la Résistance with rose window
- Médaille des évadés
- Bronze Star (USA)
literature
- Jérôme Gautheret: Serge Ravanel , Le Monde , May 4, 2009, page 23.
- Serge Ravanel, Jean-Claude Raspiengeas: L'esprit de résistance , Paris 1995: Seuil, ISBN 978-2020190282 .
Individual evidence
Web links
- Serge Ravanel's biography on the Ordre de la Liberation website
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ravanel, Serge |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Asher, Serge (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French resistance fighter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 12, 1920 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 27, 2009 |
| Place of death | Paris |