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1943: The five martyrs of the lycee Buffon

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On this date in 1943, Nazi guns immortalized five student martyrs of the French Resistance.

The Five Martyrs of the lycee Buffon were Parisian high school students who greeted the fascist occupation of their republic with every form of opposition they could command.

Jean-Marie Arthus (“Marchand” by his nom de guerre), Jacques Baudry (“Andre”), Pierre Benoit (“Francis”), Pierre Grelot (“Paul”) and Lucien Legros (“Jeannot”)* started small with subversive pamphleting and placarding but soon moved on to sabotage and armed opposition in affiliation with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans.

The arrest of one of their teachers, Raymond Burgard, in 1942 spurred them to lead a student demonstration whose mass arrest they barely escaped. By that time their identities were known, and the boys had to go underground; for their remaining months at liberty they lived on the run and participated in occasional (albeit not very damaging) armed attacks on occupying forces — until that summer, when French intelligence arrested Arthus, Baudry, Grelot and Legros, and French police later caught Benoit.

All five were handed off by their collaborationist countrymen to the eager claws of the Germans, who condemned them as terrorists at a military trial.

A number of public places in France honor their memory, like the 14th arrondissement’s Place des Cinq-Martyrs-du-Lycée-Buffon. Their touching and determinedly optimistic last letters to their families can be read at the Cinq martyrs‘ French Wikipedia page.

* A sixth school chum, Michel Agnellet, could easily have joined them at the execution posts and in the martyrologies, but the five who were captured did not permit their interrogators to extract his name.

On this day..