Solange Alexandre

Solange Alexandre died during the night of 7 to 8 November 2026 in Le Mans, aged 104, two months after her 104th birthday. No cause of death was made public.

Her death was announced on 9 November by the departmental council of the Sarthe. Its president, Frederic Beauchef, paid tribute to a woman whose commitment and bravery were matched only by her humility, saying that like all Resistance fighters she was the honour of France. President Emmanuel Macron also paid tribute to her on X.

Solange Rose Marguerite Dubuisson was born on 9 September 1922 in Mamers, in the Sarthe. Her father, Albert Dubuisson, was a gendarme at the gendarmerie school in Mamers who later left the force after fifteen years to work at the prefecture of the Sarthe. Both her parents had suffered in the First World War: her father was wounded and her mother lost her first husband. She was raised in a family of strong patriotic feeling.

When the Second World War broke out she was a student at the ecole normale, the teacher training college, in Le Mans. She later recalled that General de Gaulle's appeal of 18 June 1940, heard while on the road during the exodus, was the moment she decided to commit herself.

In 1941 she met Lieutenant Said Belhaffaf, a retired French army officer of Tunisian origin, a friend of her father and an early Resistance member. Through him she joined the Organisation civile et militaire as a liaison agent in Maine, Brittany and Normandy, taking the code name Corlay. Travelling mostly by bicycle, she carried messages to Laval, Alencon and Rennes and gathered intelligence, and she twice narrowly escaped the Gestapo.

On 5 April 1944, with her friends Michel and Jean Gadois and with Guy Deliot, a gendarme who had deserted rather than help the Gestapo arrest a Jewish couple, she founded a maquis at the Pas de Boeuf pond near Ruille sur Loir. Made up mainly of young men evading forced labour in Germany, and survivors of a maquis destroyed by the Gestapo, it numbered about thirty fighters under her command.

The group: - carried out sabotage, including against a munitions train on the Tours to Le Mans line - sheltered Allied airmen - fought German forces, losing Michel Gadois in an attack on 8 August 1944 - took part in the liberation of Tours and its region alongside a reformed battalion of the 65th Infantry Regiment

After the liberation she was appointed departmental head of the social service of the French Forces of the Interior, welcoming returning deportees and freed prisoners, and she ended the war as one of its officers.

On 7 April 1945 in Le Mans she married Guy Deliot, and they had three children, Jean-Pierre, Marie-France and Francoise. In 1951 she followed him to New Caledonia, where, with no teaching post available, she became general secretary of the Chamber of Agriculture in Noumea. The family moved many times with his postings. In 1960 he was killed on duty in Martinique during violent demonstrations.

She returned to Le Mans with her three children and taught until she retired in 1978. In 1981 she married Bernard Alexandre. In later life she lived for 26 years at the Front de Sarthe residence in Le Mans, where staff remembered her as cheerful, joyful and fond of life.

Solange Alexandre was one of the last surviving members of the armed Resistance and one of the rare women to command a maquis. Into her hundreds she welcomed school and college students to hear her account of the occupation, determined that the price of freedom should not be forgotten.

Honours came late because she resisted them, saying she had only done her duty. On 17 September 2022 Loir en Vallee, which had made her an honorary citizen, renamed its town hall square after her. She was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, receiving the insignia in April 2025 at the age of 102, and also held the Croix de guerre 1939 to 1945, the Resistance Medal and the Cross for Volunteer Combatants of the Resistance. A book, Solange s'engage dans la Resistance by Antoine Louvard, was published in 2015.