Resistance in Côtes-d’Armor: 80 years ago… Jean, a schoolboy from Tréguier shot at 17

In the courtyard of Savina high school in Tréguier (Côtes-d’Armor), a beautiful tribute was paid to a young resistantformer schoolboy and shot at the age of 17: Jean Raoul.

For Jean Raoul’s family, this ceremony was responsible foremotionnotably for his niece Marie Namia.

For my mother, who was her sister, it was a tragedy that she carried all her life.

He was only 17

Jean Raoul, son of Baptiste Raoul, was born in 1926 in Paris where his father was a Republican Guard. At the start of the war, he schooled in Pommerit-Jaudy where his grandparents lived.

Then he boarded in Guingamp and joined the Tréguier college (today Savina high school). He is passionate about drawing and wants to join the navy.

Without being old enough to be enlisted in the STO, he is often rcommandeered in 1944 to install barbed wire at the Bilo castle. After the landing, he left high school to join the Kerrès maquiswhere he learned how to use weapons.

On July 17, 1944, he was arrested in Langoat, while he was riding his bike. He would have hidden a message in the handlebars of his bike. He is interrogated on a nearby farm, then transferred to Uzel, headquarters of the Gestapo.

So he is tortureThen shotin the woods of the Hermitage-Loge with around forty comrades. Their bodies, summarily buried, were discovered in October 1944.

These abuses will be prosecuted as war crimes, against the SS of the Gestapo and members of the Breton Bezen Perrot militia.

“Why did you take the plunge? »

At the origin of this memory workthe Working Association for Patriotic Memory of the canton of Tréguier (ATMP) which works with teachers and schoolchildren.

In 2024, the work was therefore dedicated to Jean Raoul.

It allowed the students to understand what the Resistance in Brittany through visits to the Coat-Mallouen museum in Connan, to Uzel and finally to L’Hermitage-Lorge, where young Raoul was shot.

Anne Cantel and Estelle Viallon, both history and geography teachers, then designed exhibition panels where the students displayed archives which bear witness to this resistance.

When I saw Jean Raoul’s photo, I was surprised by his youth and his very modern face. Why did he take the plunge one day? He fought so that we could live freely today

“Whoever forgets his past…”

Pierre Poncet, president of the ATMP, recalled that “to commemorate is to come together, and also to remember”, and quoting Primo Levi “whoever forgets his past is condemned to relive it”.

For young high school students, this work was an opportunity to raise awareness of commitment and democratic values.

We cannot know what we would have done in the same circumstances. The fact that he’s our age makes us think. In any case, it makes us interested in politics.

At the end of the ceremony, the students then read resistance texts and sang together The song of the partisans.

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