Henri Frenay

Who was Henri Frenay?

Henri Frenay Sandoval was a French military officer and French resistance member.

Henri Frenay was born in Lyon, France on 11 November 1905, into a Catholic family with a military tradition. He studied the Germanic languages at the University of Strasbourg. Afterwards he became a soldier like his father and studied in Saint Cyr and l'Ecole Superieure de Guerre and reached the rank of captain in 1934. At the outbreak of World War II, he rejoined the French army. German forces captured him in Vosges. He escaped from a POW camp in Alsace on 27 June 1940 and made his way to Marseille.

At first Frenay supported the Vichy Regime but was soon disillusioned by the Nazi tendency of the Pétain regime, and he subsequently formed the French Resistance group Mouvement de Liberation Nationale in 1940. He became an editor of underground newspapers like Verités and had a hand in the formation of the Combat group in November, 1941. In 1943 his group participated in the forming of the Conseil National de la Résistance of Jean Moulin but Frenay refused a seat due to a disagreement over the admission of political parties to the Counseil.

When the Gestapo captured Jean Moulin, Frenay fled to Algiers.