She was nineteen when her mother, Berty Albrecht, co-founder of the Combat movement, died at Fresnes in 1943. She spent the following decades documenting that life, published the biography Berty in 1986 and pleaded for the women of the Resistance to cease being anonymous silhouettes.
The story
Born in 1924, Mireille Albrecht grew up in a house that was not an ordinary one. Her mother, Berty Albrecht, a company executive and a feminist campaigner, ran the review Le Problème sexuel and took in German anti-fascist refugees: people passed through, people slept there, long before there was anything to hide.
In 1940 Berty Albrecht founded the Combat movement with Henri Frenay, one of the three great Resistance networks of the southern zone. Arrested by the Gestapo in May 1943, she died in Fresnes prison a few days later. Her daughter was nineteen.
Mireille Albrecht spent the decades that followed documenting her mother's life. In 1986 she published Berty, a biography fed by the family archives, and worked without pause with veterans' associations and with schools so that the women of the Resistance should not stay anonymous silhouettes behind the names of men.
She died in 2007 and lies in Division 39, one of the oldest divisions in the cemetery, where figures of the Consulate and the Empire lie side by side.
On site, do not miss
Division 39 itself: its First Empire chapels lined up along the alleys give the measure of the time elapsed between the cemetery's first plots and this twenty-first-century grave.
Visitors' questions
Where is Mireille Albrecht buried?
In Division 39 of Père-Lachaise, in the old part of the cemetery. Division 39 also holds Antoine Parmentier and the sculptor David d'Angers, whose graves are among the most visited in this quarter.
Antoine ParmentierWho was Berty Albrecht?
Mireille Albrecht's mother. Co-founder of the Combat movement with Henri Frenay in 1940, arrested by the Gestapo in May 1943, she died in Fresnes prison. She is one of the six women made Companion of the Liberation.
Political figures at Père-LachaiseWhat did Mireille Albrecht write?
Berty, published in 1986: her mother's biography, written from the family papers. She tells the feminism of the 1930s as much as the years underground, and carried that work of remembrance on until her death in 2007.
Writers & poets at Père-LachaiseWhat other graves are worth seeing in Division 39?
That of Joachim Murat, king of Naples, whose monument is only a cenotaph, that of the Saint-Simonian Prosper Enfantin, and that of the novelist Sophie Cottin. Division 39 is one of the densest in graves of the First Empire.
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