The capture of French Resistance hero Jean Moulin is one of the country's darkest chapters of the war. The last surviving Resistance leader, Raymond Aubrac, recalls that night and the audacious escape that followed.
This was the paramilitary body that brought together the fighting units of the various underground groups. In June 1943, it was the sudden arrest of the Secret Army's leader – Aubrac's superior, General Charles Delestraint – that triggered the Caluire conference.
The Caluire meeting remains controversial to this day because of the continuing mystery over who betrayed it.
Aubrac is in no doubt that the most commonly accepted version is the correct one, that the culprit was a fellow Resistance member called René Hardy.
"Hardy was not supposed to be at the meeting. He was too junior. And when it came to the handcuffs, he was the only person not to have them put on. That meant he could make a run for it. And from all the Germans with their sub-machine guns, there were only a couple of scattered shots."
Hardy escaped. It later emerged that in the weeks before the Caluire rendez-vous, he had been detained by the Gestapo, giving rise to speculation he had been "turned". However after the war he was twice put on trial and acquitted.
Much more recently, Aubrac himself came under the spotlight, after a book was published suggesting he was the traitor. The writer based the theory on a number of contradictions and lacunae in the Aubracs' account of what happened. For example, it was not known until long after the war that Aubrac too had been taken prisoner prior to the Caluire meeting.
Raymond and Lucie took the writer to court and a committee of historians and experts cleared them of guilt. But the affair left a nasty after-taste.
Aubrac's subsequent story is another chapter of courage and derring-do. Within weeks of his arrest, he was sentenced to death by a court in Paris.
"But luckily they did not shoot me straightaway. That was standard practice. They would wait because they thought we could still be useful to them in some way." The delay gave Aubrac's wife Lucie time to come up with an escape plan.
How Lucie and her Resistance group sprung Aubrac from the clutches of the Nazis is today one of France's best-known stories from the war – as uplifting for the French as the Caluire episode is grim.
Somehow Lucie managed to persuade the German commander that she was a) pregnant by the prisoner Aubrac (this was actually true) and b) unmarried to him.
By feigning horror at the prospect of the child being born out of wedlock, she got the commander to agree to a pre-execution marriage.
And so on 21 October, the convoy taking Aubrac back to Montluc jail from his "marriage" ceremony at police headquarters was attacked by a heavily-armed Resistance gang. Three Germans were killed and 14 prisoners escaped.
"One of the Resistance cars overtook the truck in which I was being transported, and when the two vehicles were level they shot the German driver," recalls Aubrac, who received a ricochet bullet in the side of the face.
Second child
A few months later Raymond and Lucie were picked up by an RAF Lysander from a secret location north of Lyon and flown to London.
The call sign which was read aloud on the BBC to arrange the rendezvous was the line: "Ils partiront en ivresse" (They will leave drunk).
"It was more or less true," says Aubrac, though presumably with elation rather than alcohol, because just a few days later, Lucie Aubrac gave birth to their second child at Queen Charlotte's hospital in London.
After the Liberation, Raymond Aubrac was appointed commissioner to govern Marseille, where his main concerns were ensuring food supplies and maintaining law and order during the period of rough anti-collaborator justice known as the Epuration.
Later he was given the job of overseeing the destruction of millions of mines and other live ordnance.
His post-war career took him to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome. He advised on decolonisation in Morocco and was a close friend of the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh.
He and Lucie remained a close couple until her death in 2007.
