In late August 1944, the city of Villeurbanne, a municipality bordering Lyon, was the scene of a full-scale popular uprising led primarily by the FTP-M.O.I. and the combat groups of the UJRE and the UJJ.
On the morning of August 24, 1944, Henri Krischer, “Captain Lamiral,” the military commander of the FTP-M.O.I. in Lyon, was tasked with leading approximately eighty men—from the “Carmagnole” detachment detachment as well as combat groups from the UJRE and the UJJ—retrieve trucks from the police headquarters garage in Villeurbanne.
Spotted by the Germans, the group came under machine-gun fire and retreated to the city center. Joined by several hundred enthusiastic residents, “Lamiral” and his men were urged to occupy various buildings, including City Hall, the telephone exchange, and the police station… Police officers were disarmed, weapons were seized, and “Lamiral” set off to seek advice from the head of the FTP-M.O.I.’s HI4 interregional division, the Hungarian-Romanian Georges Grünfeld, “Commander Lefort.”
The latter, believing that there was no turning back and that a retreat would be perceived by the population as a sign of weakness, or even betrayal, decided to set up his command post at the Villeurbanne town hall—which thereby became the center of the nascent insurrection—and, together with “Lamiral” to form a command team.
For three days, Villeurbanne and certain neighborhoods in northeastern Lyon were filled with barricades and remained completely beyond the reach of the Occupying Forces. Various attempts by German troops to regain the initiative and control of this part of the city failed.
Fighters from all Resistance organizations took part in these events. Admittedly, it was the FTP-M.O.I. of “Carmagnole” that led this uprising, but they rallied numerous Resistance fighters around them, joined—as is typical in any insurrectionary situation— a significant number of last-minute volunteers, who were undoubtedly sincerely ready to fight but had no military training.
On August 26, 1944, an attempt to extend the uprising to other neighborhoods of Lyon failed, and since the various appeals for help from the “military council” based at the Villeurbanne town hall had had no effect, the insurgents negotiated their withdrawal. In exchange for a German promise not to carry out reprisals against the people of Villeurbanne—a promise that would be kept—they released the Germans they had taken prisoner and asked the population to dismantle the barricades; the UJRE and UJJ combat groups went back into hiding.
Villeurbanne is, along with Paris—albeit on an infinitely smaller scale—the only city in the country to have experienced a genuine popular uprising.
Led by foreigners “with names that are hard to pronounce,” it certainly did not end in victory, but it nonetheless represents one of the few moments of Resistance that Lyon, the “capital of the Resistance,” experienced at the time of its liberation […].”
Reference:
Claude Collin, 2006, in *Dictionnaire historique de la Résistance*, published by Robert Laffont.
