Claude Hettier de Boislambert

Claude Hettier de Boislambert (26 July 1906 - 22 February 1986) came to prominence during the German occupation of France in the 1940s as a Resistance leader, appointed by the Général a Companion of the Liberation in 1943.

After this he became a liaison officer with the British, serving on 1st Division of Cuirassiers which was part of a multi-national combined military operation that also included the British Expeditionary Force, and which had been assembled to defend France's northern frontier against a possible German attack through Belgium (as had happened in 1914 at the start of the First World War).

He successfully passed his school final exams (Baccalauréat) in 1922.

He studied Law and went on to study political sciences at the prestigious Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris.

After that, according to one source, he worked as a journalist.

Other sources focus on what might be interpreted as a more self-indulgent life-style.

By the time he graduated he had inherited sufficient wealth to lead a quasi-aristocratic existence, involving much sport and extensive foreign travel in central Africa where it is reported that he carried out "ethnographic research", in Scandinavia, in central Europe and in the middle-east.

His favourite sport was hunting (la chasse).

On 16 January 1928 Claude Hettier de Boislambert, whose father had died two years earlier, married the heiress Solange de Maleville in what was described as "a very elegant ceremony in the Chapel of Beaulieu-Siorac" in the Dordogne region.

The bride's beautiful satin dress by the couturier Henriette Boudreau did not go unremarked in news reports.

He was also a landowner, and by 1939 was running a well-managed farm-estate at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont (between Caen and Cherbourg).

The German army launched an invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939.

The French and British governments reacted by declaring war on Germany on 3 September 1939, albeit without becoming militarily involved in Poland, even after the Soviet army launched its own invasion of Poland from the other side on 17 September 1939.

The French army was more active closer to home, however, and Claude Hettier de Boislambert was called up in September 1939 as part of a generalised mobilisation: he was to serve as a cavalry lieutenant.

Immediately he was sent to Lorraine to take part as leader of a horse-back platoon in a reconnaissance group.

During the brief invasion of Germany which took place from eastern France in September/October 1939, his reconnaissance group was one of the first to undertake some of the many patrols that the French army high command ordered in the occupied Saarland, notably in the Sierck sector adjacent to the Luxembourg frontier.

The anticipated German invasion of Belgium and Luxembourg was eventually launched on 10 May 1940.

Hettier de Boislambert took part with a tank unit in the fighting around Tienen and Louvain in which French and British forces attempted to resist the German advance towards the English Channel.

Then he was ordered to rejoin the main French army which was consolidating a defensive frontline along the Somme.

Because of the way the battle lines had moved this now involved crossing enemy lines as the German invasion forces continued their push towards the sea.

Hettier de Boislambert rejoined the French army at the Somme frontline on 20 May 1940.

He fought in the 1940 Battle of the Somme (generally identified in English-language sources as the Battle of Abbeville) between 27 May and 4 June 1940, and then in a succession of smaller "delaying actions", first alongside the Seine where the Germans were fighting to capture a series of critical bridges before defenders could blow them up, and then further to the west in Normandy and Brittany.

The German invasion of France is nevertheless remembered for the speed with which German forces were able to use their air superiority and pioneer new motorised warfare techniques to capture the northern part of the country.

German armies entered Paris on 14 June 1940 and the French government signed an armistice a few days later.

By 16 June 1940 Claude Hettier de Boislambert was at the port of Brest.

As France fell, he resolved to continue the fight, which meant crossing to Britain, which he did accompanied by those officers and sub-officers who had been fighting under his command who now volunteered to follow him.

They travelled on a liner/troop ship that the English had sent to pick up Polish troops who had been fighting in France against the German invasion, having fled the German-Soviet occupation of their own country.

On reaching England he learned that Général de Gaulle, whom he had come across during the fighting in northern France, was already on London.

On 19 June 1940 Claude Hettier de Boislambert became the first French officer to offer his services to France's self-appointed wartime resistance leader in London.

He was invited to participate in the construction of the general's first staff team and join his first "cabinet".

Before the war Hettier de Boislambert had come to know Africa well thanks to his regular hunting trips.

De Gaulle now teamed him up with resistance commanders René Pleven and Philippe Leclerc for a mission to French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon.

They embarked on 6 August 1940.

Their objective was to rally the French colonial forces to back Général de Gaulle rather than the Vichy puppet government under Philippe Pétain that was being set up in southern France with German backing.

By the end of 1940 French Equatorial Africa had become the strategic centre of Free French activities in Africa, but that was only achieved after several months of fighting against forces backing the Vichy regime.

Hettier de Boislambert took command responsibilities successively in Douala and in Cameroon.

After the war, with Germany under military occupation, he served between 1946 and 1951 as governor of the region that during his period in office was reconfigured as Rheinland-Pfalz.

Subsequently, he became a Gaullist member of parliament ("l'Assemblée Nationale").

From 1960 his contribution to public life was made, principally, as a member of the diplomatic service, notably in Africa.

Claude André Charles Antoine Marie Hettier de Boislambert was born at Hérouvillette (Calvados) just outside Caen into an upper-middle-class family with long roots in this part of Normandy.