“Sensitive Affairs” retraces the epic story of France’s first resistance fighter, Georges Guingouin

We are in 1941, in Haute-Vienne. South of the demarcation line, the department is then in a free zone. Demobilized after being wounded at the front, the teacher from Saint-Gilles-les-Forêts is back in the village. He is a thirty-year-old with a stentorian voice and broad shoulders, very popular in the region, where he is called “the Great”, “lo Grand” in Limousin patois (“lo” is pronounced “lou”).

The teacher is named Georges Guingouin, and in 1944, he will be the liberator of the city of Limoges. For the moment, he is still an underground activist of the Communist Party, banned under Vichy. And to support the organization, he will take all the risks… EAs town hall secretary, he has access to civil status, and sets up a network of false papers intended for his PC comrades. Wanted, Guingouin flees when the gendarmes arrive… and also the maquis, before everyone else.

“He was both an intellectual and a man of action, the son of a soldier. Guingouin had both physical courage and moral courage, beyond what one can imagine, that is to say say someone who was capable of confronting the whole world.”

Michel Taubmann, author of “The Guingouin Affair. The true story of France’s first resistance fighter”

in “Sensitive matters”

Supported by the region’s peasants, Georges Guingouin found refuge on farms, from where he wrote his militant leaflets. Joined first by a handful of resistance fighters, the man who took the nickname “prefect of the maquis” also fought against the black market with orders regulating the price of foodstuffs. With the group of which he took command, he made this corner of Limousin the nightmare of the German army when it invaded the free zone, from November 11, 1942. This maquis even won against the Nazi occupiers on nickname “Little Russia”…

At the beginning of 1943, the group of communist resistance fighters, formed into the FTP (Francs-tireurs et partisans), launched a series of guerrilla actions. With dynamite stolen from a nearby mine, they blow up the Bussy-Varache viaduct, the main line in the region for convoys of workers requisitioned for the Compulsory Labor Service in Germany. A few kilos of explosive at the foot of a pile, and the STO trains will never pass through here again… Spectacular, the sabotage caused a sensation, and volunteers flocked. Guingouin is now “lo big”… stone in the occupant’s shoe.

The Limousin maquis, one of the most active of the Second War, held out against the Germans for four years. The communist guerrilla would become Colonel Guingouin, inducted head of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) in Haute-Vienne in August 1944. Before being made a Companion of the Liberation by de Gaulle, then elected mayor of Limoges, the city that ‘he released. A dazzling ascent which precedes a descent into hell…

Excerpt from “The Guingouin Affair: the flouted honor of a resistance fighter”, broadcast on May 19, 2024 in “Sensitive Affairs”, a France Télévisions, France Inter and INA co-production, adapted from a France Inter program.

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