// BBC WORLD NEWS — MONDO
French wartime resistance heroine Solange Alexandre dies aged 104
Solange Alexandre twice turned down the Légion d'Honneur before relenting in 2024
One of France's last Resistance heroes from World War Two has died at the age of 104. Solange Alexandre was also a rare woman who, with her future husband, created and commanded her own unit of anti-German fighters.
After serving as a Resistance courier from 1941, three years later she founded the Pas-de-Boeuf network near the town of Ruillé-sur-Loir.
With some 30 men under her orders, she organised sabotage operations, sheltered Allied airmen and, after the Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day in 1944, joined the fight against the occupying German forces.
President Emmanuel Macron was among many to pay tribute to Alexandre, after her death was announced at a nursing home in Le Mans.
"She said she only ever did her duty. But her duty was our freedom. France will never forget. Thank you," Macron posted on social media.
Born in 1922 in the Sarthe department of western France, Solange Alexandre, née Dubuisson, grew up in a patriotic family that had suffered in World War One.
"My mother lost her first husband in the war, and my father was wounded in 1917. The words homeland and honour were very important to us. They were in my blood," she recalled in her memoirs.
In June 1940 she heard on the radio the appeal from General Charles de Gaulle in London, calling on the French not to give up the struggle against Germany. She had never heard of him, but that did not matter.
"From that moment I knew I had to join up," she wrote.