Odile de Vasselot, Teenage Aristocrat in the French Resistance, Dies at 103

Odile de Vasselot, who heard Charles de Gaulle’s World War II appeal to resist the Germans on a makeshift radio at the family château in south-central France and jumped in, first delivering mail and messages to the Resistance and later helping to escort Allied airmen across the Belgian front, died on April 21 in Paris. She was 103.

Her death, at a retirement home for nuns and priests, was announced by the Order of the Liberation, the organization that awarded her a medal established by General de Gaulle to honor heroes of the French Resistance.

Ms. de Vasselot (pronounced de-VASS-euh-low) was one of thousands of young Frenchwomen and men who quietly went to war against the Germans invaders after the country’s defeat in 1940 during the Battle of France. She began modestly, chalking the Lorraine Cross, adopted by General de Gaulle as a symbol of the Resistance, on walls and tearing down the propaganda posters of the Germans and their French Vichy-regime confederates. By the war’s end, she was going on dangerous nocturnal missions.

“One had to do something,” she said in an interview many years later. “One never has the right to just sit there and do nothing.”

She recalled being incensed, as an 18-year-old, by the sight of the giant Nazi flags over the Rue de Rivoli in Paris: “It was unthinkable, with those huge banners flying with the swastika on them.”

At her death, President Emmanuel Macron of France saluted “a great lady who honorably answered all the appeals, throughout her life, and did so with a courage that can only edify us.”