Decisive help… The highest American officers considered that by harassing the occupiers well before the arrival of the Allied soldiers, the Resistance terribly disorganized the German defense and enabled a dazzling advance after the Landing of Provence. This success is the fruit of the work and sacrifice of Jean Moulin: involved in the Resistance since 1940, this prefect dismissed by Vichy was given the mission of unifying, on French territory, the three main resistance movements: Combat, Franc-Tireur and Libération-Sud.
At the cost of a thousand difficulties, he managed to create the National Council of the Resistance, until his arrest near Lyon on June 21, 1943. Tortured by the head of the Gestapo, Klaus Barbie, Jean Moulin died on July 8. The exceptional journey of this Companion of the Liberation owes a lot to Provence, an often little-known aspect which is covered in a documentary by Sophie Accarias broadcast this week by France 3
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Child of Languedoc and ProvenceJean Moulin was born in 1899 in Béziers, where a former student of the minor seminary of Avignon and the Faculty of Letters of Aix-en-Provence, his father Antoine-Émile had been transferred to teach French and Latin at the college. The birthplace of the family was in Saint-Andiol, north of Bouches-du-Rhône, as Christine Levisse-Touzé and Isabelle Rivé point out in a booklet distributed during exhibitions: “
It was there that Jean was baptized on August 6, 1899. It was also there, sitting in the garden or on the main sidewalk, that his father Antonin read books and newspapers, and sometimes composed a few poems in French or Provençal. He dedicated two to his youngest born Jean. The family's life was thus shared between Béziers and Saint-Andiol where she spent the holidays surrounded by the Escoffier and Sabatier cousins. The children's natural borders were then the Alpilles, the Luberon, the Ventoux and the Montagnette. They traveled the country on bicycles or with their grandmother's little horse.
France
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