Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born into a wealthy and prominent French family with an illustrious history and all the right social connections. For her first thirty years she led an unremarkable life treading the path expected of her: early marriage, children, and not much else. But then history caught up with her. In 1940 Germany invaded France and much of Western Europe. With Marie-Madeleine's connections she could have easily made her way to safety and spent the war living comfortably. She was made of sterner stuff. She became first the deputy and then the prime leader of the most successful French underground intelligence network, Alliance, and spent the war years in frequent peril of her life, providing vital information to the British, American, and Free French forces. Lynne Olson has written a series of excellent histories illuminating lesser known aspects of the World War II era, and Madame Fourcade's Secret War is one of her best.
Marie-Madeleine's sex, social position, and beauty were both assets and liabilities. Very few men outside of her intelligence network took her seriously or believed her to be capable of anything underhanded or devious. As a result she was often able to pull off diabolically cunning intelligence coups right under the noses of the German military. When she was captured and held prisoner she escaped in a series of hair-raising adventures that rival anything Ian Fleming or Frederick Forsyth ever wrote. Other women in her network had similar successes, including Jeannie Rousseau, whose apparent wide-eyed innocence led German officers to discuss secret military plans in her presence, and who was thus able to alert the British to the dangers of Hitler's missile research at Peenemunde. Unfortunately, after the war the roles played by Marie-Madeleine, Jeannie Rousseau, and many other brave women were discounted by the male officers and historians who established the official record, and it was not until many years had passed that they began to receive the recognition they were due.
This was one of those books I could not put down. Marie-Madeleine managed to get herself into so many alarming scrapes and adventures that I had to keep reading to learn how she would finally turn disaster into triumph. I came away from the book with a renewed appreciation for the bravery and dedication of the many women and men of the French Resistance who fed vital information to the Allies during some of the darkest moments of World War II. And in future, if I am ever tempted to believe that the exploits of fictional spies are too sensational to believe, I'll remember Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and recognize that the truth is stranger yet.
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The truth about the French Resistance
Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2019
She led the largest French Resistance network against the Nazis for nearly five years. Three thousand agents answered to her, and they delivered intelligence to the British that helped the Allies win the war. Yet she has been virtually forgotten for decades, her courage and resourcefulness ignored by Charles De Gaulle and the French Communist Party, the dominant political forces in France for decades. Because she wasn’t politically allied with either. And because she was a woman. Now a new biography belatedly restores her to the spotlight, and it reads like a thriller.Her network helped the Allies win the warHer name was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. She began working in espionage in 1936 following Hitler’s march into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty. She was 26 years old. In 1941, following her boss’s capture by the Nazis, she became chef de resistance of Alliance, a network created to funnel intelligence to MI6. And, in the course of the next five years, Fourcade’s agents achieved three critical intelligence breakthroughs:** A young woman named Jeannie Rousseau delivered detailed information about Hitler’s terrifying V-2 program that allowed Allied bombers to destroy its base at Peenemünde and set back the program for many months. She saved many thousands of lives in the process.** An extensive network of Alliance spies working on France’s northern and western coasts played two equally important roles. First, they delivered detailed information about Germany’s U-Boat comings and goings that eventually helped the British prevent them from sinking more vital Allied shipping.** And they supplied extremely detailed information about the fortifications and Nazi troop deployments in Normandy that helped the Allies successfully gain a foothold there in June 1944.The myth of the French ResistanceMost of what we’ve read about the French Resistance dwells on the maquis, saboteurs and guerrilla fighters who bedeviled the Nazis in the closing years of the war. They make good copy, and cameras love the action. And from the fictional accounts, which dominate our understanding of the era, we get the impression that both the maquis and lesser-known Resistance groups involved in intelligence-gathering were associated with one of three forces:** Charles De Gaulle‘s Free French;** the French Communist Party; or** Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE).The myth also holds that everyone involved in France’s Vichy government actively supported the Nazis. This falsehood, too, was promoted by De Gaulle and the Communists, who were eager to take full credit for the Resistance.The reality is different.The truth about the French Resistance1. The maquis accomplished littleFirst, latter-day scholarship has established that sabotage and guerrilla operations had little if any effect on the outcome of the war. The maquis provided fodder for breathless press accounts and later books, films, and television shows. But they accomplished little other than to boost French morale. And Churchill’s SOE disbanded following the Allied victory.2. DeGaulle and the Communists did not run the ResistanceSecond, the Resistance was anything but united under De Gaulle and the Communists until the closing days of the war. Until then, hundreds of groups were scattered about the country, some working for De Gaulle or the Communists, others for De Gaulle’s rival, General Henri Giraud, still others completely on their own. In fact, these groups frequently fought one another, occasionally even with guns. And the biggest and most effective Resistance network of all was Alliance, commanded by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, working directly with Britain’s MI6.3. There were many anti-Nazi French in the Vichy GovernmentThird, a substantial number of the military, police, and officials working for Vichy were, in fact, anti-Nazi. “Vichy was far from being a monolithic regime. It was made up of competing factions, drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and with different objectives.” A number of the key operatives in Alliance emerged from Vichy. And when Fourcade was captured by French police in the “free” zone governed by Vichy, the officers helped her escape under the noses of the Gestapo.One extraordinary young womanIn Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, Lynne Olson writes of the Resistance commander’s “decisiveness, single-mindedness, and legendary organizational skills.” And she quotes “Navarre,” the founder of Alliance, saying that Fourcade had “the memory of an elephant, the cleverness of a fox, the guile of a serpent, the perseverance or a mole, and the fierceness of a panther.” Clearly, Fourcade was all that. But she was also young, a woman, a mother of two young children, well-to-do, stylish as only the French can be, and by all accounts beautiful.Again and again throughout the war, she was forced to prove herself in an environment in which extremely few women held leadership positions. Olson’s book abounds with examples of the sexism Fourcade repeatedly encountered. Yet every one of the men who were recruited to Alliance and fancied themselves leading the network quickly yielded to her lead. She was, in a word, extraordinary. For months on end, she successfully coordinated Alliance while on the run from the Gestapo and the French police.One in five of her agents was captured by the GermansThere is no disputing the danger Fourcade encountered on a daily basis for nearly five years. “Of Fourcade’s three thousand agents, about six hundred had been imprisoned by the Germans during the war. So far [late in 1944], she knew of only about 150 who had survived that ghastly experience. Of the remaining 450, dozens were already known to be dead, among them some of her top lieutenants and agents.” And later evidence came to light that most of those 450 had, indeed, been executed by the Nazis or died of starvation or overwork in forced-labor camps.
Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2019
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