A Tailor, a Concierge and the Photographer of Occupied Paris

In summer 2024, Le Monde identified Raoul Minot, an employee at the Printemps department store, as the man behind hundreds of clandestine photographs of Nazi-occupied Paris and its suburbs, taken between 1940 and 1942 without the Germans' knowledge. More than eight decades after the war, the question of who betrayed him now points at a couple: Marie Breux and Georges Robinson.

The pair lived in Bécon, a neighborhood of Courbevoie west of Paris, at 36 Rue du 22-Septembre. Breux worked there as a concierge. Robinson, a self-employed tailor in the same building, was younger — perhaps in his thirties, with what his identification photo suggests was a distinguished air. Breux appeared to be in her forties, her glasses giving her a stern expression.

Who were the suspected denouncers?

Robinson insisted his surname be pronounced the English way, out of pride in his British roots. Locals reportedly called him a "sacré loustic" — roughly, a "real character." He was said to have an extensive criminal record and to have performed illegal abortions.

The rumors around the couple were not idle gossip, at least as the neighborhood judged such things. In this corner of the suburbs, where nothing stayed secret for long, people kept their distance. Breux and Robinson were said to have boasted about denouncing several residents hostile to the Germans.

What does this have to do with Raoul Minot?

Minot was a Courbevoie resident himself, which placed him in the same small world where the couple's reputation circulated. The suggestion raised by the revived interest in the case is that Breux and Robinson may have played a role in his tragic fate — the circumstances under which his clandestine photography ended.

His story is remarkable on its own terms. Between 1940 and 1942, while Reich forces controlled part of France and ruled it through repression, Minot took hundreds of photographs in Paris and its suburbs, secretly, under the noses of the occupiers. For decades the images circulated without a named author; Le Monde's 2024 series changed that, restoring his identity and, with it, the texture of daily life under occupation as seen from below.

Now the photographic record is acquiring a darker second narrative — not what Minot saw, but who may have seen him. The names of Breux and Robinson have emerged from obscurity because of that suspicion, and the story of occupied Courbevoie is now a story of betrayal as much as documentation.

Whether the case against the concierge and the tailor can be pressed further, eight decades on, depends on records that wartime France kept fitfully. The identifications give historians a thread to pull.