Florine of Burgundy

Florine of Burgundy (1083-1097) was a French princess and a famous participant in the First Crusade.

Florine was a princess of the Duchy of Burgundy, a vassal state of the Kingdom of France. As a teenager she was married to the Danish prince, Sweyn the Crusader, with whom she set out with an army of 1500 Danish horsemen to join the First Crusade. While leading their army at a fast pace across the plains of Cappadocia they were ambushed by Turkish forces which overwhelmed them.

Florine and Sweyn were forced to defend themselves in a prolonged combat for a whole day, while the entirety of their army was slain around them. Florine sustained a number of arrow wounds but the two continued fight their way to safety in the nearby mountains. However they eventually succumbed to their attackers and died in battle. Florine was 14 years old.

Florine's life was later dramatised by William Bernard McCabe in the novel Florine, Princess of Burgundy.

Violette Morris

Violette Morris (1893-1944) was a decorated French athlete, race car driver, military nurse and Nazi intelligence operative.

A wild child from a French noble family, Morris spent her teenage years in a convent where she displayed an incredible aptitude for sports. At the age of 15 she was competing at the highest levels of boxing, swimming, weightlifting, javelin, shot put and discus. She was fond of describing herself with her cheeky motto "Anything a man can do, Violette can do".

Morris married Cyprien Gouraud in 1914 just before the outbreak of the First World War. During the war she served as military nurse driving an ambulance on the front lines during the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme. She also served as a warzone motorcycle courier, wrecking her bike on the crater-filled terrain at least three times, but always completing her mission.

After the war Morris returned to sports, playing for various French Women's Football teams and winning Olympic gold medals for discus, javelin and shot put. Her life driving on the front lines had given her a passion for speed and she competed twice in the Bol d'Or driving a 750cc Benjamin Ruby cyclecar. In 1923 she became the the French national boxing champion. Morris also defied society's expectations of women in her personal life, dressing in men's clothes, smoking heavily and swearing frequently. She was publicly known to be bisexual and was photographed attending the Parisian lesbian nightclub, Le Monocle. In 1929 she had a double mastectomy, stating that her large breasts interfered with her race car driving.

Public opinion eventually turned against Morris. She was banned from entering the 1928 Olympics and was subsequently smeared in the French press. Repeatedly forbidden from entering sporting competitions, Morris became bitter toward French society and in 1935 she agreed to become a spy for Nazi Germany. She was rewarded with a personal invitation from Adolf Hitler to be an honoured guest at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Morris provided Germany with French tank schematics and plans of France's defenses along the the Maginot Line, information which proved integral to the German invasion of France in World War 2.

Following the German occupation of France, Morris became a member of the Carlingue, the French wing of the Gestapo secret police. She operated in counter-intelligence working against British SOE forces that were supporting the French Resistance. She was so effective in infiltrating resistance networks and extracting information through torture that she became known as the 'Gestapo's Hyena'. Her notorious success eventually led to resistance forces plotting to assassinate her. On April 26th 1944 Morris was driving her sports car when she was fatally ambushed by Resistance commandos armed with machine guns. Nobody claimed her body and she was buried in a communal grave.

Virginia Ghesquière

Virginia Ghesquière was a soldier in the French army during the First French Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte during the 19th century.

While little is known of Ghesquière's early life, it is established that she joined the French army in 1806. Ghesquière elected to take her brother Jean Baptiste's place in the French army, disguising herself as a man. Accounts vary as to whether her brother died in battle and she replaced him masquerading as another brother, or if she represented herself as Jean Baptiste himself in order to enlist. Regardless, Ghesquière served in the 27th Line Regiment of the army for 6 years.

Ghesquière had a distinguished military career serving in a number of campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1807 she took part in the invasion of Portugal during the Peninsular War, serving under General Jean-Andoche Junot. Distinguished numerous times for her performance, Ghesquière was promoted to Sergeant for her bravery at the Battle of Wagram, where she saved her captain from drowning in the Danube river. She was also commended for saving the life of a colonel who had fallen from his horse after being shot.

Ghesquière was injured in battle in 1812 and the surgeon treating her wounds discovered her identity as a woman. This led to her immediate dismissal from the army. However for her contribution in the war she was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal by Napoleon himself.

Ghesquière's dismissal from the army brought her a small amount of fame and she was featured in an article of the Journal de l'Empire newspaper. There was also a song composed about her life, which referred to her as the 'jolie sergent' (pretty sergeant). Although her year of birth is unknown, Ghesquière is believed to have been over 100 years old when she died in 1854.

Women Members of the Maquis

Women members of the Maquis display the rifles and pistols they used to fight the Nazi garrison in Marseille before the entry of Allied troops, 1944.

Nancy Wake

Nancy Wake was a journalist turned resistance fighter during the Second World War.

Raised by a poor family in Sydney, Australia, Wake used a small inheritance from an aunt to travel to America and then Europe. By the mid-1930’s she had found work as a journalist and married Henri Fiocca, a wealthy industrialist.

When Germany invaded France in May 1940 she and Fiocca became heavily involved in the French Resistance. The pair were responsible for smuggling thousands of Jewish refugees and Allied servicemen into Spain. Wake often used her looks to get past Nazi checkpoints, later describing herself as “a flirtatious little bastard”.

Wake’s activities caused the Gestapo to declare her their most wanted person, dubbing her ‘the White Mouse’ for her ability to evade capture and placing a 5 million franc reward on her head. However by 1943 Nazi control over Vichy France made her work increasingly dangerous and with the collapse of her network she fled to Spain. Fiocca, who she left behind, was tortured to death for refusing to inform on her.

Wake convinced British special agents to train her as a guerilla operative. In April 1944, she parachuted in southern France to link up with Maquis resistance fighters in preparation for the D-Day invasions. She took command of a 7000-strong unit, winning the men’s respect by repeatedly beating them in drinking competitions. Over the next several months her unit fought 22,000 enemy soldiers, causing 1400 casualties in exchange for only 100 of their own. Wake herself was ruthless. She executed a girl who had been spying on the unit, killed an SS sentry with a karate chop to the neck, and on one occasion biked for 70 hours through enemy checkpoints to deliver radio codes to the Allies.

After the war Wake was heavily decorated by Britain, France and the US. During the 1950’s she worked for the British Air Ministry’s intelligence department, where she married again to a former pilot. She died in 2011, aged 98.

French Resistance Member

“A girl of the resistance movement is a member of a patrol to rout out the Germans snipers still left in areas in Paris, France, on August 29, 1944. The girl had killed two Germans in the Paris Fighting two days previously.”

Source: Histoire Fanatique

Marguerite Delaye

Marguerite Delaye was a woman who fought during the siege of the French town Montelimar in 1569 during the French Wars of Religion.

While details of her involvement are scarce, it is recorded that she lost an arm in the fighting. A statue was erected in her honour after the battle.

Christian ‘Kit’ Cavanagh

Christian ‘Kit’ Cavanagh was an Irishwoman who fought in the British army as a dragoon during the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Born in 1667 in Dublin, 'Kit’ was a wild teenager who eventually settled down to run a pub with her husband Richard Welsh. When Welsh disappeared in 1691, Cavanagh received a letter indicating he had, possibly not by choice, ended up in the British Army and been sent to Holland. Unwilling to lose her husband she left her children with her mother, disguised herself as a man and joined the British Army on a mission to find him.

As an infantryman she fought at the Battle of Landen, where she was wounded and captured by the French. She was eventually returned to the British, but was discharged from the army for killing a sergeant in a duel over a woman. She immediately re-enlisted and joined the Royal Scots Greys Dragoons, with whom she served until the end of the Nine Years’ War. During this time she grew to enjoy the life of a soldier, with a penchant for the looting that followed battle. 

Cavanagh re-enlisted with the Scots Greys when the War of the Spanish Succession began in 1701. She was shot in the thigh during the Battle of Schellenberg, but refused to be sidelined and fought in the Battle of Blenheim a month later. After this battle she was assigned to guard French prisoners, where after 13 years of searching she found her husband. Unfortunately when she found Richard he was courting a Dutch woman. Having rebuked him fiercely she left and returned to her life with the Scots Greys.

Cavanagh’s identity as a man had never been challenged, despite being known as the 'Pretty Dragoon’. However when her skull was fractured at the Battle of Ramillies the surgeon treating her discovered she was a woman. She was discharged but carried on with the army as a sutleress, and some accounts claim she continued to fight on the front lines.

On return to Britain Cavanagh was presented to Queen Anne, who granted her a bounty of £50 and a pension for her services. Following her death in 1739 she was buried with full military honours. 

Jeanne de Clisson

Jeanne de Clisson, also known as the Lioness of Brittany, was a Breton pirate who launched a reign of terror across the English Channel in the 14th century.

Jeanne became embroiled in the events of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France when her husband, Oliver, placed his support behind the English candidate to rule Brittany. For this he was tried and executed for treason by King Philip VI of France.

Enraged, Jeanne swore vengeance for the betrayal. She sold her husband’s remaining land so that she could buy three warships, which she had painted black with red sails. Under Jeanne’s command the ‘Black Fleet’ raided the English Channel for the next 13 years, destroying any French warships they came across. Each time Jeanne had the crew slaughtered, save for one or two French sailors which she sent back to the French king to let him know what she had done.

While an independent privateer, Jeanne formed an alliance of convenience with the English and helped to keep supplies available to the English forces for the Battle of Crécy in 1346. Even after Philip VI died in 1350, Jeanne continued to wreak havoc on French shipping. She made a point of targeting ships carrying French noblemen, which she boarded so that she could personally behead the aristocrats with her axe. 

In 1356, Jeanne retired from piracy and married an English lieutenant. She later returned to France, where she died in 1359.

Soldiers of the Free French Forces

“Soldiers of the Free French Forces (Forces françaises libres), military units who joined “Free France” (la France libre), the Resistance organisation founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1940, assist in mopping up pockets of the German garrison in Paris just prior to Germany’s capitulation and withdrawal from the city. Paris, Île-de-France, France. 16 August 1944.”

Source: bag-of-dirt

The Mino

The Mino, or “Our Mothers”, were an all-female military regiment of the Dahomey Kingdom in western Africa during the 17th to 19th centuries. They were initially established as a royal bodyguard armed with muskets. They were later developed into a fully-fledged militia who were deployed in Dahomey’s war against the neighbouring kingdom of Savi in 1727.

The Mino came to be a semi-sacred order, recruited from foreign captives, Dahomian free women and the king’s own wives. Subject to intense physical training and armed with Danish guns, the Mino developed a reputation as disciplined but ferocious fighters who beheaded their enemies on the battlefield.

By the mid-19th century the regiment numbered in the thousands and made up a third of the Dahomey army. In 1890 the Mino were deployed in the First Franco-Dahomean War. The French sustained heavy losses to the Mino and French Foreign Legionnaires later wrote of the “incredible courage and audacity” of the ‘Dahomey Amazons’.

Despite this, Dahomey’s forces were ultimately crushed by the French use of machine guns, cannons and cavalry. The last Mino is believed to have been a woman named Nawi who died in 1979.

Agustina de Aragón

Agustina de Aragón was a heroine of the Spanish War of Independence and the Peninsular War against France. She is most famous for her bravery at the Siege of Zaragoza.

In 1808, Zaragoza was one of the last cities in northern Spain not to have fallen to the forces of Napoleon and was ill-prepared for a siege. Agustina, a civiilian at the time, was present during the French attack of the Portillo gateway. Broken by the French onslaught, the Spanish began to retreat. With the French troops just a few yards away, Agustina ran forward, loaded a cannon and lit the fuse, shredding a wave of attackers at point blank range. Inspired by her act of bravery, the Spanish forces rallied and assisted her in repelling the attackers.

While this heroic defense bought time for Zaragoza, the siege was only broken for a matter of weeks, after which the French returned and this time were successful in taking the city. Agustina was captured and saw her own son killed by French guards. She later mounted a daring escape and became a low-level rebel leader for the guerrilleros, harassing the French with hit-and-run raids.

Her forces joined the alliance against the French led by the Duke of Wellington. The only female officer in Wellington’s army, Agustina eventually rose to the rank of Captain and acted as a front line battery commander at the Battle of Vitoria, which led to the French being driven out of Spain. 

Following the war she married and later in life became a familiar sight in Zaragoza as a respectable old lady wearing medals. She died in 1857 aged 71.