The Robur-Alfred Escape Line, Operating Between the Channel Islands and the Pyrenees

A report on another somewhat little known example of the libertarian escape lines operating in occupied France during World War Two

Here we go again with our unavoidable end-of-month entry. Being, as I have been, wrestling with a lengthy text about the Resistance in France, it was plain what my topic for the day would be. Whilst tidying up my facts and trying to introduce a modicum of order to my everyday chaos of information, names, photos and what have you, I found that I had enough material to justify an article on one of the libertarian escape lines, known to me only by its name. So, scratching around a little here and surprising myself slightly here and certain that there must be a lot that I am missing, I have come up with the text that you are about to read. Today we shall be following up the trail of the Robur-Alfred network. 

Far from being as well known as the Ponzán network, the Robur-Alfred line was made up, for the most part, of CNT personnel, primarily based in the Nazi-occupied zone.  Its members included Juan Andreu Fontcuberta, Sebastián Bru, Josú Martí (its liaison on the French-Spanish border), Constancio Durban, Joventino Moliner Barreda, José Rosell Pivingut aka Pepito (one of the organizers) and the Agustina brothers, Juan Bautista aka Tomaset and María Dolores Tomás Chale. Those are the names that we have on record for now, but I am sure that there will be additions to that list to follow.

The seed of the organization was planted by the French woman Suzy Chevet who had previously organized a network operating between Angers and Saint Malo and was the woman who had helped José Rosell aka Pepito to settle in the latter city and then put him in touch with labourers working for the Germans. In fact, Chevet’s daughter, Claudette Rousseau aka Petardo finished up as Pepito’s partner and joining the network herself.

According to José Rosell’s testimony, it all started when he found out from a CNT report that it was easier to move around inside the occupied zone than inside the Free Zone, thanks above all to the work schemes that the Germans were entrusting to foreign labour squads. The CNT sent him to Saint Malo with the mission of rebuilding the organization, since among the thousands of workers on the Channel Islands there were 4,000 Spaniards, many of them members of the libertarian organization. Since there was no consensus inside the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE) as to whether or not to join the French Resistance, it was left up to the individual to decide that for himself and the main task was getting workers out of the Islands – regardless of whether they were Poles, Spaniards or Jews eager to get out to the Free Zone or indeed to get across the Pyrenees.

From the Islands they made their way to Saint Malo, then on to Angers and after that, Orléans, where phoney papers were forged to get them into the Free Zone. Workers from the U-boat bases or involved in the construction of the Atlantic Wall would switch to a new identity and a different zone in France; some of them, male or female, changed country altogether, crossing the Pyrenees using the network’s guides. Their underground structure meant that they had a network covering the whole of Brittany, offering more than just an escape line and boasting urban guerrilla groups and sabotage teams.  

The network’s primary purpose was to facilitate the escapes of as many comrades as possible from the labour camps on the Channel Islands (in this instance, workers from Jersey, Guernsey and, to a lesser extent, Alderney) so that they might join the Resistance.  Most of the prisoners were German, Austrian, Polish, Russian and Spanish, housed in a barracks known as La Concordia [La Concorde in French]. Cleaners from outside looked after the hut and we have discovered that one of the cleaning team was a comrade of ours. Another of our people, a cook, picked out the prisoners who would most likely be evacuated and he helped him hide among the trash that cleaning staff used to remove for disposal outside. Later, the network would see them as far as Saint Malo, where they were found lodgings and looked after until they received the papers they needed to get them out of the militarized zone. After that they were brought from Rennes to the unoccupied zone. Some of them even stayed in the area to carry out whatever tasks were assigned to them by the organization. That is how things worked, as shown in this example. The resistance groups were not very developed. And the operations mounted were part of an urban guerrilla campaign. 

For those keen to quit France and cross into Spain, the adventure carried on. Inside the Free Zone and more specifically in the town of Ax-les-Thermes in the Ariège department, a prohibited area thanks to its proximity to the border, there was another branch of the network. The sisters María Dolores and Agustina Tomás Chale lived and were active there. Along with another of the leading lights of the Robur-Alfred line, their brother Bautista aka Tomaset, they were tasked with getting the people sent to them by the line across the border. Besides those already named Joventino Moliner and Sebastián Bru, Dolores’s partner, and Agustina’s partner, Pierre, were involved in this. At the beginning of 1943, on 10 March to be precise, the Gestapo arrested Sebastián, Pierre and Augustina; then men were shipped off to the Compiègne camp and Agustina was deported that April to Ravensbruck camp. Bautista and Joventino hid arms for the group in the carpentry shop where they worked.

And in the Free Zone, smack dab in the middle of the Pyrenees in Font-Romeu, Constancio Durban was active. His role in the Robur-Alfred line was as a guide between Upper and Lower Cerdanya, but not only that. The Allies had set up a radio set in his home so that they could keep in contact with London. Such were the services he rendered that the Allies wanted to decorate him and pay him a pension, but Durban declined both offers. In a small town nearby, Osseja, there was a unit of UNE guerrillas and they sentenced him to death at one meeting, possibly due to his having refused to act for them during their cross-Pyrenees invasion. On that occasion their threats were not carried out.

Meanwhile there was no let-up in things further north. In addition to getting workers off the Islands to join the Resistance or to be smuggled into Spain, there was also fighting against the Germans. Broadly speaking, when it came to violent operations, the comrades would chose a city other than the one where the operation was to be mounted, so that the authorities could not trace the origin of the fighting/self-defence groups. So urban guerrilla warfare was everyday fare.

In the spring of 1944, Rosell met up with Charles Fouron, the head of the Libération Nord network, coming away with the firm conviction that an Allied landing was imminent. There were around 12,000 Spaniards then working in Saint Malo, Brest, Rennes or Lorient. A lot of them were CNT members. And if the landings occurred there, there was some heavy fighting in prospect. They began relocating workers and dispatching them far away from the prospective front. But things did not end there.

Ahead of the Normandy landings as much detail as possible was collected about the Channel Islands and the Atlantic Wall. All of this was first-hand information, supplied by the workers themselves. Maps, locations of gun installations, bunkers, casemates, minefields on the beaches … All of these titbits were passed on to the Allied command. 

Once the landings took place, Latinos serving in Patton’s army provided weapons to the forty-odd individuals making up the network in Brittany. 

Members of the network took part in the fighting to liberate Dinard on 15 August, Saint Malo on 17 August and the island of Cézembre on 2 September.

From: El Salto 28 November 2025 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/ni-cautivos-ni-desarmados/cadena-robur-alfred-evasion-islas-del-canal-pirineos 

Le témoignage de José Rosell Pivingut sur l’activité de la CNT en Bretagne pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale by Wally Rosell is at https://gimenologues.org/IMG/pdf/cnt_st_malo_reseau_robur_exils_et_migrations_2024.pdf  

[Image: Some of the members of the Robur Alfred network, in 1943 at the Rocabey barracks in Saint Malo. Source: Imanol]