Daniel Cordier- One of France's Last Resistance Heroes

"When Daniel Cordier was parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to meet Resistance leader Jean Moulin he had no idea he would become Moulin's closest companion.
Cordier was sent over in July 1942 on the orders of General Charles de Gaulle, based in London. But he did not even know Moulin's name.
Cordier was under instructions to report to a certain "Rex" at an address in Lyon.
"Rex" would vet him, then assign him to another Resistance leader, Georges Bidault. That was what Cordier had been told.
What happened instead was the turning-point in Cordier's life. It would also be a year that led to Moulin's death.
"When I went to the address, I saw 'Rex' and he told me to meet him at a certain restaurant that evening near the opera," Cordier recalls.
"So we met up and we talked late into the evening. And then we walked along the quays by the Rhone, and when we got to where 'Rex' was living he said to me: 'Remember the street number. Tomorrow you turn up here at seven. You are now my personal assistant'."
Moulin, given the task of uniting the Resistance by the leader of Free French forces in London, was killed on 8 July 1943. He had been betrayed to the Nazis, then tortured, and he died on board a train to Germany.
Remarkably, 75 years later, it is still possible to hear living testimony from the man who served him so intimately in the last crucial period of Moulin's life.
At 97, Daniel Cordier is one of only a handful of people still alive who bear the title "Compagnons de la Libération" (Companions of the Liberation). And of these few heroes, he is by far the most important.
He tells his story in the charmingly disordered living room of his flat overlooking the Corniche in Cannes. Piles of art books are a reminder of Cordier's later incarnation as a leading Paris gallery-owner.
Born into a wealthy family in Bordeaux, in his teens he adopted the far-right politics of his milieu. He was a member of the ultra-nationalist Action Française and sold its newspapers on street corners. By his own account he was "fiercely anti-Semitic".
But then came the German invasion of 1940, and the French collapse. With his mother and stepfather he listened to the radio address made by Marshal Philippe Pétain, urging the French army to surrender.
"As my mother collapsed into my stepfather's arms, I raced upstairs and flung myself on my bed, and I sobbed. But then it must have been half an hour or so later, I suddenly drew myself up, and I said to myself: 'But no, this is ridiculous.
"[Pétain] is just a stupid old fool! We have to do something. But what? I did not know."
What Cordier did, with help from his wealthy stepfather, was to board a ship from Bayonne which took him to England and, though he did not know it at the time, to De Gaulle's Free French.
His first glimpse of De Gaulle came a few weeks later, when the general came to review recruits at the Kensington Olympia hall in London."
France's last Resistance hero from World War Two