The battles at the Fontjun pass and the Béziers shootings seen by Richard Vassakos

Richard Vassakos raconte les combats de Fontjun, mais encore toutes les représailles qui vont découler de cet acte de résistance.

"Juliette and the faces of the Resistance. 1944 in Biterrois, a work by Richard Vassakos published by Aldacom, in bookstores this Thursday, June 6. In this collection the author evokes the episode of the fighting at the Fontjun pass, but also the reprisals which followed in Biterrois.

You are publishing a new work this June 6 with Éditions Aldacom, "Juliette and the faces of the Resistance. 1944 in Biterrois. What is it about ?

The evocation of the fight at the Col de Fontjun, located in the commune of Cébazan between Puisserguier and Saint-Chinian, took place on the night of June 6 to 7, 1944. Five resistance fighters were killed there and 18 others arrested. They were tortured and then shot in Béziers, on the Champ-de-Mars, on the afternoon of June 7, 1944. Among them was a woman, Juliette Cauquil. The work also deals with a lesser known fact which resulted from this battle, the roundup and deportation in retaliation, on June 9, of 179 men from Capestang with numerous resistance fighters who had taken part in the combat and who were from this commune. Fontjun will be one of the precursor signals which show the change in attitude of the occupier and its collaborationist supporters who became radicalized from June 6 throughout France.

Why did you choose to return to this subject, which is well known to the people of Biterrois ?

There were no publications based on archival documents. I went through the Departmental Archives of Hérault, those of Béziers and Capestang, and above all I had access to the files of the National Archives and the investigations carried out after the conflict by the department dedicated to crimes of war. Thanks to these precious documents, I was able to cross-reference the writings of several participants in the event and I managed to establish certain facts which were still open to debate. But this work went beyond June 1944 since I was interested in the memory of this episode, the uses that were made of it and the questions generated by this drama.

Is such historical work accessible to the greatest number of people?

This could have been the case, but under the impetus of my publisher, Alain D’Amato, I decided to write this book in the form of an essay on 128 pages, educational, accessible and rhythmic, which combines story and analysis over the course of short chapters. If the basic work remains that of a historian, in terms of form we wanted it to be accessible to all. This is what we call popularization, a much more complicated exercise than it seems.

You have chosen to describe this drama through different faces. Why ?

Because it was necessary to tell this story on a human scale and above all to place the different actors in a much more complex context than the one we can imagine today. It was therefore necessary to know the faces of these women and men as well as the origins of their commitment to better understand what it meant to “resist” in 1944.

Why did you particularly highlight the figure of Juliette ?

Juliette Cauquil quickly became an emblematic figure of the execution of the Champ-de-Mars through her attitude and her courage and choosing her as a guiding principle seemed obvious. She embodies a largely invisible but fundamental part of the Resistance: women.

We feel moved when you talk about this subject.

I was raised in a family where on Sundays after meals we talked about history and inevitably brought up little anecdotes and major events of resistance in the region including Fontjun, in doors of this Somail refuge of the maquis where my grandmother had spent the war. It was therefore quite naturally that, later, I looked into the question during my career as a researcher.

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