Raymond Aubrac (31 July 1914 – 10 April 2012) was a leader of the French Resistance during the Second World War and a civil engineer after the Second World War. Early life Aubrac was born Raymond Samuel into a middle-class Jewish family in Vesoul, Haute-Saône. His father, Albert Samuel, was born on 2 March 1884, in Vesoul and his mother Hélène Falk was born on 2 March 1894 in Crest. His parents were shop owners. In 1939, he married Lucie Aubrac. Graduate studies in Paris and the United States After the baccalauréat, he became an intern in Paris at the Lycée Saint-Louis, and entered the École des ponts ParisTech in 1934, from which he graduated in 1937 in the same promotion as the Laotian prince Souphanouvong, future figurehead of the communist left wing of his country and one of the founders of Pathet Lao, then the first president of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos. Like the majority of high school students, he followed the "PMS" (higher military preparation) and became an officer during his military service. Previously, as a recipient of an American Field Service scholarship, he left for the United States in August 1937 to study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University where he had the opportunity to follow the courses of Joseph Schumpeter. Second World War Samuel was serving in the French army as an engineering officer on the Maginot Line at the outbreak of the Second World War. Samuel was taken prisoner by the German army on 21 June 1940, but he managed to escape from the internment camp with the aid of his wife. He and Lucie joined the French Resistance in 1940. He also became an attaché to the staff of the French Army. He adopted several noms de guerre, among them "Vallet, Ermelin, Balmont and Aubrac". Their Resistance activities started off with buying boxes of chalk and writing graffiti on walls. They then moved on to writing tracts and putting them into people's letterboxes. In the autumn of 1940, they also formed one of the first underground Resistance groups—Libération-Sud—in Lyon. In May 1941, after the birth of their first child Jean-Pierre, they helped Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie to set up an underground newspaper called Libération to promote the French Resistance. Raymond Aubrac was arrested by the Milice on 15 March 1943 in a routine raid. He was operating with