Madame Fourcade's Secret War Quotes

“A few days before, she had gone to confession and told the priest about the poison she was taking with her and her concerns about being damned in the eyes of the church if she used it to kill herself. She hoped she would have the courage to resist torture, but she worried that she might not be able to do so and might, in the end, inform on her colleagues. The priest allayed her fears, saying her death would not be a suicide but rather a necessary means of resisting the enemy. He gave her absolution in advance.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“Were the Germans able to perfect these new weapons six months earlier, it was likely that our invasion of Europe would have encountered enormous difficulties and, in certain circumstances, would not have been possible,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the invasion forces, later wrote. “I am certain that after six months of such activity, an attack on Europe would have been a washout.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“Many years after the war, an American journalist asked Jeannie Rousseau, one of Marie-Madeleine’s operatives, why she had risked her life to join Alliance. “I don’t understand the question,” replied Rousseau, who was responsible for one of the greatest Allied intelligence coups of the war. “It was a moral obligation to do what you are capable of doing. It was a must. How could you not do it?”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“When Pétain had announced the armistice terms to the French people, he told them that a “new spirit of sacrifice” was needed. In order to recover from the anguish of defeat, he declared, 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.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“For me, paradise was the present”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“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.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“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.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“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”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“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.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“How long would it take, she wondered, before she felt comfortable using her real name instead of a false one? Or to realize that a knock on the door was not the Gestapo but the postman delivering mail?”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“But the maquis with whom des Isnards cooperated were mostly Spaniards who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and had fled to France after General Franco’s fascist forces took control of the country in 1939.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“From the beginning, a gulf of understanding had divided the Gaullists and the leaders of the resistance movements, who risked their lives daily and who greatly resented their compatriots in London who, in their view, had lived out the war in comfort and safety, with none of the daily tension, terror, and privations of occupation.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“When he heard the news, Luftwaffe General Walter Dornberg, the director of the Peenemünde center, exultantly crowed to his staff, “This afternoon, the spaceship was born.” But, as Dornberg knew, this first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket—the world’s first long-range ballistic missile—had a much more immediate importance”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“Submariners considered themselves the royalty of the German navy, and when they returned from successful patrols, their reception, especially at Lorient, was regal indeed. Dönitz himself was on hand to greet them, as was a brass band and a crowd of welcomers, including a number of attractive young German women who would bestow flowers and kisses on the victorious sub commanders. Medals would be awarded, speeches made, and triumphant anthems played.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“Today, Darlan gives me Algiers and I cry ‘Vive Darlan!’ If Quisling gives me Oslo, I will cry ‘Vive Quisling!’ Let Laval give me Paris tomorrow, and I will cry ‘Vive Laval!”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“From the beginning, however, FDR had been adamant that de Gaulle and the Free French must have no involvement in either planning or carrying out the attack. Filled with disdain for both the French general and his country, the president had little understanding of the complexity of the situation in France and scant sympathy for its citizens. All he knew or cared about was that France had failed the Allied cause by capitulating to Germany. As for de Gaulle himself, Roosevelt considered him insignificant and absurd, a British puppet with grandiose ambitions.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“When the plane approached the field, three team members were to position themselves on it in the shape of an inverted L. The pilot would be flying at a low altitude—usually no more than 1,500 feet—to enable him to make out the distinguishing features of the surrounding countryside. As he came near, he would flash a prearranged Morse code signal with his craft’s signal light. If the head of the reception committee, using a flashlight, responded with a prearranged signal of his own, the pilot would prepare to land; if he didn’t see the correct signal, he was under orders to return to base.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“women accounted for some twenty percent of its agents over the five years of its existence. Like their male counterparts, they represented all classes of society, from maids and laundresses to Paris socialites.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“By the end of the war, more than 130 additional French policemen would join Philippe as Alliance operatives—proof that the much-hated French police forces, who were seen, quite rightly, as doing the Germans’ dirty work for them, had their fair share of members who passionately opposed the idea of being Nazi collaborators.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“three decades of the twentieth century, Shanghai was considered the essence of exoticism, mystery, and excitement. As an open city, it required neither a visa nor passport to enter, providing a haven for an extraordinarily eclectic array of immigrants, among them White Russians fleeing from the Bolsheviks; Chinese warlords and revolutionaries; American and European gangsters and spies; drug smugglers; and international arms dealers.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“To this day historians of the Resistance persist in the belief that no women led Resistance networks, blatantly ignoring the work of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade,” the British historian J. E. Smyth noted in 2014.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“The following year, Navarre, not surprisingly, was cashiered from his post in the German section of the Deuxième Bureau, the French army’s intelligence agency. “A man of the utmost daring and rebelliousness,” he “positively relished being in hot water—wonderful to serve under, impossible to command,” the British historian M.R.D. Foot later noted.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“This venture of Fourcade’s and Navarre’s was a rare phenomenon in France so early in the war. As the historian Julian Jackson observed, “The hackneyed phrase ‘he or she joined the Resistance’ is entirely inappropriate to 1940–41. Before it could be joined, resistance had to be invented….Resistance was a territory without maps.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“To her, Vichy was nothing but a nest of gossip, infighting, and intrigue, filled, as she put it, with the “aristocracy of defeat”—politicians, businessmen, civil servants, military officers, and others—all seeking jobs or other personal or political gain from the new government.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“In the late 1960s, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade pulled back the veil cloaking her wartime activities in her gripping memoir, Noah’s Ark, which was rightly described by MI6’s Kenneth Cohen as “a Homeric saga” of her and Alliance’s daily life under German occupation. But like Fourcade herself, the memoir is little known today.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“At the same time, however, the French capital—and the country as a whole—was enmeshed in mounting political, economic, and social turmoil. France had long been known for what one historian called its “people’s ineradicable love of political squabbles,” but by the 1930s, its traditional divisiveness had metastasized into intolerance,”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“Navarre made it clear that Marie-Madeleine Fourcade had his full confidence and that Boutron must accept her authority. She was, the chief added, “the pivot around which everything turns. She is the most valuable of us all.” He described her in glowing terms, saying she had “the memory of an elephant, the cleverness of a fox, the guile of a serpent, the perseverance of a mole, and the fierceness of a panther.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“As the historian 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.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“The connection formed by a threat to one's county is the strongest connection of all. People adopt one another, march together. Only capture or death can tear them apart.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler