Pierre Georges, whom the Resistance would call Fabien, left at seventeen to fight in Spain with the International Brigades. On 21 August 1941, on a platform of the Barbès station, he shot down a German officer: it was the first act of urban armed struggle in France, and the reprisals would see dozens of hostages shot. He then organised the Francs-tireurs et partisans, and died in 1944.
The story
The son of a baker's labourer, Pierre Georges joined the Communist Youth at fourteen and went to fight in Spain at seventeen, in the International Brigades. Wounded three times, he came home to France in 1938 with an experience of fire that few resistance fighters would have.
On 21 August 1941, on the platform of the Barbès-Rochechouart métro station, he shot dead with two bullets Alfons Moser, a cadet of the Kriegsmarine. The action was decided by the underground leadership of the Communist Party in answer to the execution, two days earlier, of the militants Samuel Tyszelman and Henri Gautherot. It opened urban armed struggle in France; the German reprisals, immediate, would cost dozens of hostages their lives.
Arrested and then escaped, he took the nom de guerre Fabien and organised the Francs-tireurs et partisans. At the Liberation he raised a brigade of Paris volunteers that became a regiment of the regular army and went off to fight in Alsace.
He died on 27 December 1944 at Habsheim, in Alsace, in the accidental blast of a German mine he was examining with his staff. He was twenty-five. A Paris square carries his name, as does the headquarters of the French Communist Party, built by Oscar Niemeyer.
On site, do not miss
The sobriety of the stone, in a sector where the monuments of the deportation dominate the paths.
Visitors' questions
Where is Colonel Fabien's grave?
In Division 97 of Père-Lachaise, against the eastern boundary wall, in the sector that gathers the Communist graves and the memorials to the deportations. The Communards' Wall stands a few dozen metres away, in Division 76.
The Communards' WallWhat did Colonel Fabien do at the Barbès métro station?
On 21 August 1941, Pierre Georges shot the German naval cadet Alfons Moser dead on the platform there. It was the first Resistance attack on the occupier; it set off a policy of shooting hostages in reprisal.
Guy MôquetHow did Colonel Fabien die?
On 27 December 1944 at Habsheim, in Alsace, in the accidental blast of a German mine he was examining with his staff. He was twenty-five, and was commanding a regiment in the Alsace campaign.
Jacques DuclosWhy does Division 97 hold so many Communists?
Because it adjoins the Communards' Wall. From the 1930s on, the Communist Party gathered its leaders and its martyrs there around the graves of Henri Barbusse and Paul Vaillant-Couturier, building a memorial ground meant as an answer to the Panthéon.
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