Bruno Vigneron Photographer

On Aug. 20, 1943, General Devigny, then a French Army lieutenant, was taken before Mr. Barbie, who had been holding him prisoner for four months. Mr. Barbie told the prisoner he would be shot within days as a Resistance assassin. he will accomplish the only breakout from the Gestapo's notorious Fort Montluc prison, which held 10,000 Jews and Resistance fighters during the war. In May 1940, he was commanding French troops fighting the Germans in Belgium. He was mistakenly shot by French soldiers. Wounded in the legs, he was taken to a military hospital in Bordeaux, then sent to recuperate at his home in the Savoie region. Two years later, Lieutenant Devigny was recruited by an intelligence network of former French officers run from Geneva by a follower of de Gaulle. On April 14, 1943, Lieutenant Devigny and a fellow Resistance man shot and killed an Italian counterespionage agent who was working for the Germans in Nice. But another German agent had infiltrated their unit. Three days later, Lieutenant Devigny was arrested by the Gestapo. He was tortured over two weeks. But he was undeterred. He had learned to remove his handcuffs with a safety pin. Using a soup spoon he had ground down to a point on the cell's concrete floor, he found that he could remove the vertical wooden slats at the bottom of his cell and squeeze through the opening. At night, when the guards were not making their rounds, he would leave the cell and wander the halls, chatting with the other prisoners. Waiting for the right moment to attempt an escape, he fashioned a rope from his blanket and mattress cover and created a grappling hook from the frame of an old lantern he had found in the hallway. On Aug. 24, 1943, he and another prisoner recently placed with him removed the cell's wooden slats, climbed through a skylight and made their way into a courtyard. Lieutenant Devigny threw a sentry to the ground, then stabbed him with his bayonet. At 3 A.M., after a guard bicycling around the perimeter roadway had passed, he tied one end of his rope to the infirmary chimney and threw the attached grappling hook over the top of an outer wall. The two prisoners then swung themselves over a 15-foot gap and leapt to freedom. Lieutenant Devigny eluded German search parties and dogs by hiding in mud flats along the Rhone and fled to Switzerland with the help of the Resistance. He eventually joined a French commando unit in North Africa and took part in the Allied invasion of southern France in August 1944. At war's end, de Gaulle presented him with the Cross of the Liberation, a coveted decoration and appointed him a senior official in France's foreign-intelligence organization. He had considered entering politics. But he said that he rejected the idea ''when I realized the backstabbing was far worse than anything I'd ever encountered in secret warfare.'

The convoy of 11 August 1944', 70th commemoration of the last deportees of the jail of Montluc.