More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lynne Olson
Read between
July 27 - August 12, 2020
Lamarque
No other Allied spy network in France had lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence over the course of the conflict. “By their work and sacrifice,” the historian and journalist David Schoenbrun later wrote, “the agents of Alliance saved thousands of Allied lives and speeded the victory over Hitler.”
Another survivor of Ravensbrück was Jeannie Rousseau, who owed her life to bureaucratic bungling by German officials.
Robert Lynen
emaciation,
muffled
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.
At the end of her grueling mission, she concluded that the Germans had executed 438 Alliance members, some of whose bodies were never found.
On a beautiful late-summer afternoon in 1977, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade took her place at the end of a wide grassy field near the town of Ussel, nestled in the verdant foothills of south central France. Standing to one side was a large crowd of onlookers, who had traveled from all over the country to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of Alliance’s first Lysander flight to Britain in August 1942.
Waggling
Jean Vinzant,
Remembering Faye and the network’s other victims had been a top priority for Fourcade since the end of the war. On November 23, 1945, a solemn requiem mass in their honor had been said at Sacré Coeur Basilica in Paris, attended by hundreds of French and British mourners.
After a color guard presented arms, Jacques Chirac, the former French prime minister, made a short speech eulogizing Alliance and its lost members. Fourcade led the crowd in singing “Chant des Partisans,” the unofficial anthem of the French resistance, which begins:
As Fourcade noted in her memoirs, “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.”
Helen des Isnards, for one, rejoined the air force, serving as a military attaché at the French embassy in Turkey in the late 1940s.
In 1990, at the age of seventy-four, Ferdinand Edward Rodriguez became a French citizen. He died nine years later.
she was required to prove that her three thousand agents had been bona fide members of the resistance, which allowed them access to a government pension, medical care, and other benefits, as well as official honors.
When Marie-Madeleine Fourcade died on July 20, 1989, at the age of seventy-nine, she became the first woman to be given a funeral at Les Invalides, a splendid complex of buildings in Paris that celebrates the military glory of France.
Among the hundreds of mourners were former prime minister Jacques Chirac and Roland Dumas, the French foreign minister and a former résistant himself, who persuaded president François Mitterrand to bestow on Marie-Madeleine this signal honor.
The vagaries of French politics played a large role in those omissions, as did Fourcade’s gender.
Even before the war ended, the Communists and de Gaulle’s supporters cast doubt on the war record of Alliance and its founder. A 1945 police report insisted that in forming Alliance, Navarre had only “solicited the cooperation of personalities on the right, members or fellow travelers of extreme parties or organizations.” It went on to charge that the network “could only be considered to have been a secret propaganda and intelligence service in favor of Pétain’s government.”
Simon Epstein noted that many of Navarre’s Communist harassers had in fact refused to stand up against the Nazis in France until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, long after Navarre had begun his resistance work.
The general’s comment to Navarre in 1940 that “everyone who is not with me is against me” indicated his feelings for Navarre’s deputy as well.
Another black mark against Alliance was the role it had played in helping de Gaulle’s foremost rival, General Henri Giraud,
Thanks in part to her support of de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, Fourcade’s political capital had improved enough by the time of her death that she was given the noteworthy funeral at Les Invalides. But she still had one major strike against her: her identity as a woman.
The omission of Fourcade and the pitifully small number of women named as Compagnons reflected the sexism that had prevailed during the war among the Free French and most resistance leaders; in their view, men fought, and women stayed home. “Discrimination, based…on a notion of inequality between the sexes was as solidly rooted in the Resistance as everywhere else in France,” noted the historian Henri Noguères, a résistant himself.
Robert Gildea has noted, “After the war, those who had done least in the resistance often spoke the most, while those who had done the most spoke the least.” Women, Gildea added, “were particularly modest.”
Soon afterward, a long profile about Rousseau and what she had done appeared in The Washington Post. It was the first time she had received public attention.
These ordinary men and women never planned to be heroes, but they were—every bit as much (and some perhaps even more) than the 1,038 enshrined in the Compagnons de la Libération.
As Jeannie Rousseau noted many years after the war, “Resistance is a state of mind. We can exercise it at any moment.”
the eight books I’ve written.
(De Mers-el-Kébir à Londres 1940–1944) and Ferdinand Rodriguez (L’Escalier Sans Retour).
