A history teacher who became a member of the French Resistance, Lucie Aubrac is honoured in her native country for the audacious rescue of her husband, Raymond, from a Gestapo prison van in 1943.

The armed attack by her and other Resistance fighters, which delivered her husband and a number of other prisoners from the clutches of Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons”, has become one of the most famously romantic episodes of the French Resistance.

It was also the inspiration for several French films, most notably Lucie Aubrac, which came out in 1997. Directed by Claude Berri and based on Lucie’s autobiography, Outwitting the Gestapo, the film tells the tale of a husband-and-wife comradeship in arms conducted against the backdrop of the privations of occupied France.

Lucie Bernard was born in Macon in 1912, the daughter of a winegrower. After leaving school she went to Paris and was involved in leftwing political activity and human rights protests on behalf of the refugees of authoritarian European regimes. At the same time she graduated from the Sorbonne and took a post as a history and geography teacher in Stras-bourg. There she met Raymond Samuel, a civil engineer, and they were married in December 1939.

After the fall of France in June 1940 she joined the resistance group Libération sud, founded by him in Lyons. At that point the pair dropped the Jewish surname and adopted the nom de guerre Aubrac. She helped the Lyons network in sabotage operations as well as forging papers for fugitives and distributing clandestine literature. She also worked on the newspaper Libération.

Rayond Aubrac was arrested by the Vichy authorities on June 15, 1943, but released the same day. Arrested for the second time on June 21, he was taken into Gestapo custody, under the aegis of Barbie, in Montluc prison, Lyons. Arrested with him was Jean Moulin, later to be tortured to death by the Gestapo.

Lucie, by now pregnant, persuaded Barbie to allow her to visit her husband in prison, and there intimated to him that rescue was on the way. She and 11 other resistance fighters attacked the covered truck that was transferring Raymond and 13 other prisoners of the Gestapo, and released them all. With France by then too hot to hold them, the pair made their escape to London in early 1944.

As France began to be liberated later that year, Raymond returned to become regional commissioner for the Marseilles region in 1944-45. Lucie, who had been appointed to the Légion d’honneur, returned to teaching but was also active in human rights protests in Morocco and during the war against French rule in Algeria. She continued to be active on human rights issues for the rest of her life.

In 1984 she published her autobiography, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse(translated as Outwitting the Gestapo), and in 2000 La Résistance expliquée à mes petitsenfants.

Lucie Aubrac is survived by her husband and by a son and two daughters.

Lucie Aubrac, French Resistance fighter, was born on June 29, 1912. She died on March 14, 2007, aged 94