Agnès Humbert

Agnès Humbert
Agnès Humbert, with the Cross of Lorraine
Born	Agnès Dorothée Humbert (1894-10-12)12 October 1894 Dieppe, France
Died	19 September 1963(1963-09-19) (aged 68) Valmondois (Val d'Oise), France
Nationality	French
Other names	Agnès Sabbagh, Agnès Sabbert
Occupation	Art historian and ethnographer

Agnès Humbert (12 October 1894 – 19 September 1963) was an art historian, ethnographer and a member of the French Resistance during World War II. She has become well known through the publication of a translation of the diary of her experiences during the War in France and in German prisons at the time of the Nazi occupation.

Agnès Dorothée Humbert, known as Agnès Humbert, was born on 12 October 1894 in Dieppe, France, daughter of French senator Charles Humbert and English writer Mabel Wells Annie Rooke.

She spent her childhood in Paris, where she studied painting and design. She was a pupil of Maurice Denis alongside Georges Hanna Sabbagh, whom she married in January 1916. She then continued to paint, using the pseudonym Agnès Sabbert. They had two sons: Jean Sabbagh, a sub-mariner and advisor to General Charles de Gaulle, and television director and producer Pierre Sabbagh. However Agnès and Georges divorced in 1934.

From 1929 Humbert studied the history of art at the Sorbonne and at the Louvre school, and took postgraduate courses in philosophy and ethnography. She then worked as an art historian at the Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires (then at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris) becoming a close associate of the museum's director Georges-Henri Rivière. Her first publication was a book on the painter Louis David, published in 1936. She broadcast on art on Radio Paris at the start of 1936.

From the fall of Paris until her arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo in April 1941, Humbert kept a written diary. Apart from a few scribbled notes, she only resumed writing her diary after her liberation from prison four years later in April 1945.