Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

by Lynne Olson

The air in the barracks detention cell was hot and sultry—typical July weather for the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence.

My town!

Over the course of the conflict, Fourcade, the only woman to head a major resistance network in France, commanded some three thousand agents, who infiltrated every major port and sizable town in the country.

“resisters shared one characteristic besides bravery: contrariness. They were disputatious, argumentative, non-conformist, did not enjoy being ordered about.” Fourcade is the embodiment of that observation.

In the late 1920s, France boasted the second-largest colonial empire in the world, with a population of 100 million people and territory of 4.5 million square miles spread over Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

the early and mid-1930s were an exciting time to be in Paris, with its vibrant social, artistic, and literary life. To its many admirers—expatriates and natives alike—it was the cultural capital of the world. Writers, painters, musicians, dancers, sculptors, and intellectuals of every stripe from all over the world continued to flock there, just as they had for decades.

The northern part of the country, which had been occupied by the Germans, was left in ruins, and the French were still struggling to restore the region’s decimated industries. Most French citizens, for all their corrosive divisions, were united in the belief that France must never fight another such war again.

As shocked as she was by Pétain’s capitulation, Fourcade was even more stunned by the joyful reaction of the people around her to the news. They laughed, kissed each other, and drank to Pétain’s health. Such happy scenes, which the novelist Arthur Koestler later described as “the apocalypse [disguised] as a family picnic,” were repeated throughout the country. As Fourcade saw it, the French, in their understandable relief that the war had ended for them, failed to recognize that in the process, they and their country had lost their souls.

France must undergo a complete transformation of its society, adhering to the conservative spirit of his government’s new motto—Travail, famille, patrie—rather than to France’s national motto since the French Revolution—Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Obedience to authority and devotion to work, he made clear, must replace the idea of freedom and equality. There must be a return to tradition, to working the land, and to so-called family values, which in his and Vichy’s eyes meant accepting men as the unquestioned authority figures of the family and viewing women solely through the prism of motherhood and caregiving.

Marie-Madeleine borrowed one of Nelly’s couture outfits and had her hair cut and styled. Like many of her female compatriots, she believed that looking fashionable was one way of thumbing her nose at the Germans. “Fashion was, for the French…anything but trivial,” noted the historian Anne Sebba. “Many French women…remained as fashion-concious as possible during the war in order to retain their pride, boost morale, and remain true to themselves, because fashion expressed their identity.”

Demobilized after the armistice, he had taken up residence at his country property in the Dordogne, where he cultivated artichokes and, according to Faye, “was thoroughly bored.”

Rollin was also noted as a staunch opponent of anti-Semitism in the French military and in 1939 had written a book that questioned the authenticity of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent document purporting to be the proceedings of an international Jewish conference plotting worldwide domination.

Fake news

That night, she decided to accept Rollin’s proposal. She would assure him that her days as a spymaster were over and that if Alliance was ever resurrected, its new master would be Vichy. Of course, she meant none of it. Because she was a woman, she knew Rollin underestimated her—a miscalculation on which she was determined to capitalize.

in order to improve security and avoid the disasters of the previous year, several steps would have to be taken immediately: decentralizing the network, increasing the autonomy of individual sectors, and creating independent services for radio transmission, air operations, and sending mail.

Decentralized.is.always safer

the French “have a hard time taking security measures seriously because they interfere with their social habits and natural garrulousness.”

If there was a paradise on earth, she decided, it was this Provençal farmhouse, with its masses of geraniums blooming everywhere.

This was not what Patton had had in mind. Determined to attack the Germans without letup, he was anxious to sweep across the border and smash into the German heartland. After liberating Verdun, he had immediately dispatched scouts to the Moselle, to prepare for its crossing by his troops. But at that crucial moment, his army ran out of gasoline, as did other Allied forces making their way east. The port of Cherbourg in Normandy was the only source of gas and other supplies for the entire Allied Expeditionary Force, and the farther away Allied forces moved from Cherbourg, the more difficult it was to keep their supply lines open.

In the south of France, meanwhile, Helen des Isnards and his agents provided vital intelligence for Operation Dragoon, the landing of Allied forces on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur in mid-August. After helping to liberate Aix on August 21, des Isnards joined American troops in their drive up the Rhône Valley toward the Alps.

He spent most of his time outdoors, walking on the ship’s bridge and savoring the chill wind in his face. “It was the antithesis of life in a prison cell, and it made me drunk with happiness,” he observed. “For me, paradise was the present.”

He continued to have, as he put it, “an intense need for loneliness” and would cross the street when he saw someone he knew coming toward him.

In what would later be called “the blood week in the Black Forest,” Gehrum, aided by his underlings, had murdered sixty-eight Alliance agents for the sole purpose of preventing their rescue by Allied troops. The killings were one more sign of the Reich’s remorseless vendetta against a spy network that had played such a major role in its looming defeat and, perhaps just as important, had not stopped actively working until the war’s end to achieve that goal. —

“The connection formed by a threat to one’s country is the strongest connection of all. People adopt one another, march together. Only capture or death can tear them apart.”