Historical Figures

Suzanne Buisson, feminist resistant

Suzanne Lévy became Suzanne Buisson (1883 – deported in 1943) is a resistance fighter and a French politician.

"The woman, the activist"

Suzanne Lévy was born on September 19, 1883 in Paris. Her modest family quickly moved to Dijon where Suzanne spent her childhood. In 1899, at the age of sixteen, she returned to Paris with her parents and found work there as a store clerk. Experiencing the precariousness of wage labor, she became a socialist activist. She is interested in politics, participates in meetings, attends a People's University, "Le Réveil des 1er et IIe arr. ". A feminist, she campaigns for complete equality between women and men and for the financial independence of women. In 1905, she joined the SFIO.

Married to Charles Gibault, Suzanne has a child with him. Her husband died in action in the First World War; she finds herself a widow and must raise their child alone. On March 23, 1926, she married Georges Buisson, a member of the CGT. After the war, she became responsible for the section "La femme, la militante", at Populaire and secretary of the National Committee of Socialist Women at the SFIO. Subsequently, she held several positions at the SFIO, including the party's control commission and the permanent administrative commission. In 1931, she was part of the SFIO delegation to the congress of the Socialist International in Vienna.

Suzanne Buisson in resistance

Suzanne Buisson sided with Hitler's opponents before the start of the Second World War. Crisscrossing the country, it carries messages, distributes underground newspapers and supports socialist activists and their families, arrested by the Vichy regime or the German authorities. In 1941, she co-founded the Socialist Action Committee (CAS), a resistance movement in the extension of the SFIO; she becomes its treasurer. In March 1943, the CAS became the clandestine SFIO, and Suzanne was among its political office.

The same year, the Gestapo discovers the meeting place of the leaders of the SFIO. Informed of this discovery, Suzanne manages to alert her comrades but is arrested by the Gestapo. Subjected to torture, she reveals nothing. Resistant and Jewish, she was deported in 1943; she won't come back. Nothing allows, however, to know the place or the date of his death.

In The Popular of February 2, 1946, Léon Blum pays homage to him in these terms:

"She was the accomplished, exemplary militant, of whom the party can ask anything, who never shrinks from any task, who, moreover, is able to fulfill them all by the truly absolute character of devotion and disinterestedness . […] In the normal life of the party, she had not hesitated before any charge; in the clandestine struggle, it did not shrink from any danger. »