Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (born Vogel; 3 November 1912 – 11 December 1996) was a member of the French Resistance as well as a photojournalist, Communist and later, French politician. Biography Photojournalist Vaillant-Couturier's father, Lucien Vogel was an editor who created Vu magazine in 1928. Her mother, Cosette de Brunhoff, whose brother Jean de Brunhoff created Babar the Elephant, was the first editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris. Vaillant-Couturier became a photojournalist at a time when the trade was overwhelmingly male, which earned her the nickname of “the lady in Rolleiflex”. She joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR) and in 1934 the Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF), the Communist Youth Movement of France, as well as in 1936, the Union of the Girls of France. In 1934, she married Paul Vaillant-Couturier, founder of the Republican Association of Ex-servicemen, a communist and chief editor of L'Humanité, who mysteriously died in 1937. She became a photographer for L'Humanité, which she later took over, and got to know Gabriel Péri and Georges Cogniot. Attached to the Vu team as a photographer but also as a German speaker, she took part in an investigation in Germany into the rise of Nazism and travelled there in 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler came to power. Her report on the Oranienburg and Dachau camps was published upon her return to France. She also reported for Regards, in particular on the International Brigades. The prohibition of L'Humanité in September 1939 due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, influenced her change of activities. Resistance and deportation Vaillant-Couturier participated in the Resistance and helped produce clandestine publications, including leaflets such as: l'Université Libre (first issued in November 1940); Georges Politzer's pamphlet Sang et Or (Blood and Gold) which presented the theses of the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg (November 1941); and a clandestine edition of L'Humanité with Pierre Villon (her second husband, whom she married in 1949). She strengthened the relationship between the civil resistance (Committee of National Front Intellectuals to fight for the Independence of France) and the military resistance (the Organization spéciale (OS), which later became the Franc-tireurs et Partisans Français (FTPF), French Snipers and Partisans. She even transported explosives. She was arrested in a trap laid by French police on February 9, 1942 with other Resistance activists, including Jacques Decour, Georges Politzer, Jacques Solomon, and Arthur Dallidet, all of whom were shot by the Nazis at Fort Mont-Valérien. Vaillant-Couturier