schema:articleBody
| - A former French Resistance fighter famous for pleading after World War II to spare a Nazi collaborator the guillotine, has died aged 100, the French presidency said. Noella Rouget died in the Swiss city of Geneva, the office of President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement, hailing her ability to forgive. She was aged only 20 when she joined the Resistance, helping to transfer parcels and weapons for French fighters as well as British intelligence. She got engaged to fellow Resistance activist Adrien Tigeot in 1943 but they were then both denounced and arrested. Adrien Tigeot was tortured and then shot dead within days. Noella Peaudeau, as she was then known, was then deported to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. She survived the war and settled in Switzerland. But the memory of World War II caught up with her in 1962 with the arrest of Jacques Vasseur, a French collaborator with the Nazis and member of the Gestapo. He was held responsible for 310 deportations, including her own, and 230 deaths, including that of Adrien Tigeot. Opposed to capital punishment, she urged leniency in the trial which saw Vasseur in 1965 condemned to be executed by guillotine -- still employed for capital punishment in France at the time. She then asked former Resistance leader turned president Charles de Gaulle to commute his sentence and in 1966 a term of life imprisonment was imposed instead. She wrote to Vasseur regularly in prison, without him ever showing the slightest sign of repentance. Macron in a statement hailed her as "a supporter of freedom who was the supreme incarnation of the values of fraternity and forgiveness." The Elysee added that her act of forgiveness was "all the more impressive as it was met by the hostile incomprehension of her contemporaries and the refusal of the culprit to repent" and had shown an "immense generosity of soul and unfailing humanism." Rouget died days after Daniel Cordier, who as secretary to famed French resistance leader Jean Moulin helped orchestrate his country's fight against its German occupiers in World War II, died aged 100. Cordier's death leaves 100-year-old Hubert Germain as the only fighter still alive among the 1,038 decorated by Charles de Gaulle as Heroes of the Resistance. el-sjw/tgb
|