← Back to the front page

Remarkable Heroes and Heroines of the French Resistance in World War II

Khalid Elhassan May 12, 2025 18 min

Resistance - Women and men of the French Resistance — Women and men of the French Resistance. Pegasus Battlefield Tours

4. A Teenage Girl With a Gun

Resistance - Simone Segouin — Simone Segouin. Historia Militar

Life Magazine correspondent Jack Belden entered the French town of Chartres in August, 1944, and there encountered a gun-toting teenage girl who stood out from everybody around her. She was Simone Segouin, also known by her nome de guerre Nicole Minet. Belden wrote an article that made her a temporary celebrity.

Born in 1925 into a poor peasant family near Chartres, about 55 miles from Paris, Segouin grew up able to hold her own among men: she was the only girl in a family that included three brothers. She joined the antifascist fight in 1943, when a local French Resistance leader killed a collaborator in the center of Charters, then went on the lam. As he moved about the countryside, he came in contact with then-seventeen-year-old Segouin. Impressed by her poise, he recruited her into the Resistance as a courier.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.