Resistance Talk #2 with Sophie De Schaepdrijver

The non-profit organization Heroes of the Resistance would like to invite you to the second edition of our Resistance Talks on Friday, September 25 at 19:00 at Sainctelettesquare 17 in Brussels. Gabrielle Petit, or the heroism of a girl of nothing On July 21, 1923, Brussels unveiled the first statue in history for a woman without social status: the bronze monument on the Sint-Jansplein for Gabrielle Petit, a young heroine from the resistance of the war that had just ended, executed by firing squad in 1916 in Schaerbeek. Resounding speeches praised Petit as a “simple girl of the people.” She was not simple at all. Petit was brilliant, witty, difficult, and could not stand injustice: a girl of nothing with a big mouth, like so many who walked around the city. The war offered her the chance to finally prove herself: “I am no longer worthless,” she wrote, and joined the English intelligence service. For months she sent reports on the German army at the Western Front, until an infiltrator brought down her network. She refused to speak. Een Duitse court pronounced the death penalty. De Keizer herself let it be known that the execution could proceed: there was no need to fear a scandal, because Petit was an unknown. She was executed on April 1, 1916 – the date was deliberately chosen to ridicule her memory. “I have no regrets,” wrote Petit to her sister. Her stoic death was noticed by few. That changed after the liberation: her anonymous grave became a place of pilgrimage, she was elevated to “national heroine,” and all of Brussels went to her solemn reburial in 1919. Petit was the resistance symbol during the Nazi occupation and her memory remained alive until the sixties: a popular cult rather than a state-imposed commemoration.