Hubert Germain - Memoirs of a Compagnon de la Libération - Hoping for France

Hubert Germain is the last Compagnon de la Libération. He shares his testimony in this work.

PRIX DE L'ARMEE DE TERRE ERWAN BERGOT 2020

"I am going to need you", General de Gaulle said simply to the young Hubert Germain when he arrived in England in June 1940, among the first Free French. Hubert Germain was 19 years old, would become a Knight of the Légion d'Honneur at 21, and a Compagnon de la Libération two years later: "When you are received as a Compagnon, it is as though lightning has struck you", he summarises.

A legionnaire of the mythical 13e DBLE, Hubert Germain fought at Bir Hakeim, El Alamein, in Italy where he was wounded, and then throughout the campaign to liberate France.

He would also serve as mayor, deputy and then minister under Georges Pompidou. "You are a nuisance with your Germain!", General de Gaulle retorted when pressed, twenty years later, to hear from the man who had been sent to meet the emissaries of the putschist generals in Algiers.

Hubert Germain forgives everything in the man he considers his second father.

At a hundred years old, Hubert Germain has never stopped resisting. "When the last of us is gone, the flame will be extinguished. But there will always be embers. And France needs ardent embers today!".

This is the message Hubert Germain wishes to leave in this unpublished testimony, gathered by Marc Leroy. The century unfolds before us, from the unacceptable defeat of 1940 for this son of a senior officer, to the death of General de Gaulle — "the funeral of a great medieval prince of the West" — through to the trials facing France today.