The réseau Gloria SMH (Gloria network) was a

French Resistance The French Resistance ( ) was a collection of groups that fought the German military administration in occupied France during World War II, Nazi occupation and the Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy#France, collaborationist Vic ...

network under the

German occupation of France during World War II The Military Administration in France (; ) was an interim occupation authority established by Nazi Germany during World War II to administer the occupied zone in areas of northern and western France. This so-called ' was established in June 19 ...

. The Gloria network was founded by Gabrielle Picabia, alias "Gloria", who was running it with Jacques Legrand (

chemical engineer A chemical engineer is a professional equipped with the knowledge of chemistry and other basic sciences who works principally in the chemical industry to convert basic raw materials into a variety of Product (chemistry), products and deals with ...

). It counted among its members Alfred Péron, '' normalien'' and English professor at the ''

Lycée Buffon The Lycée Buffon is a secondary school in the XVe arrondissement of Paris, bordered by boulevard Pasteur, the rue de Vaugirard and the rue de Staël. Its nearest métro station is Pasteur. It is named for Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon ...

''. The network depended on the British

Secret Intelligence Service The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 (MI numbers, Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of Human i ...

, in conjunction with the SOE. The network's mission was to gather military and naval information about the occupiers. Its members were

intellectual An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and Human self-reflection, reflection about the nature of reality, especially the nature of society and proposed solutions for its normative problems. Coming from the wor ...

managers Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a government bodies through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administr ...

, and artists including an engraver who was very useful for producing false documents. The Gloria network was infiltrated by Father

Robert Alesch Robert Alesch (6 March 1906 – 25 January 1949) was a Catholic priest and collaborator with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Biography Alesch was born 6 March 1906 in Aspelt, Luxembourg. He claimed that his father was a Lorraine French ...

and was decimated in August 1942. Most of the operatives, including Péron, were arrested by the

Nazi Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...

and his companion Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, were warned by Péron's wife and escaped arrest, fleeing to their friend the writer

Nathalie Sarraute Nathalie Sarraute (; born Natalia Ilinichna Tcherniak (); – 19 October 1999) was a French writer and lawyer. She was nominated in 1969 for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Nobel Committee member Lars Gyllensten. Personal life Sarraute wa ...

in the free zone. In total, more than 80 members of the network were deported and many never returned from

Mauthausen Mauthausen was a German Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen (roughly east of Linz), Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern ...

Buchenwald Buchenwald (; 'beech forest') was a German Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich (Old Reich) territori ...

. The head of the network, Jacques Legrand, died in Mauthausen, and Péron died in Switzerland two days after his return from Mauthausen.

References

Sources

* Bureau Résistance and family archives * * Davies, William (2020). ''Samuel Beckett and the Second World War''. London: Bloomsbury. 1942 disestablishments in France Organizations disestablished in 1942 French Resistance networks and movements {{World-War-II-stub