"Madame Fourcade's Secret War," Lynne Olson

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, Lynne Olson

April 17, 2022

 

“Although they were from varied walks of life and political backgrounds, a moral common denominator overrode 

all their differences: a refusal to be silenced and an iron determination to fight against the destruction of freedom and human dignity. In doing so, they, along with other members of the resistance, saved the soul and honor of France.”

                                                                                                                     Lynne Olson (1949-)

                                                                                                                     Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, 2019

 

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo speaks to the wizard Gandalf: “’I wish it had not happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do we all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’” Lynne Olson’s story is of a young woman who lived in such times and the decisions she made. 

 

Using her second husband’s surname, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born into wealth and privilege to an expatriate French family in Shanghai in 1910. Seven years later, upon the death of her father, her mother moved the family back to Paris. She grew into a beautiful young woman: “Cool and elegant, with porcelain skin…” At seventeen, she married and bore two children but soon separated, as she wanted more than to be a wife and mother. Her first husband was an army captain and through him she met many young men who would serve in the war to come, including Charles de Gaulle. When France capitulated in June 1940, she fled Paris with her children to the resort town of Vichy where she became involved in espionage.

 

French resistance was divided into three groups – saboteurs who blew things up, like communication and rail lines; those who manned escape lines, helping shot-down British pilots and others escape back to Britain, and espionage – spies, messengers and radio operators who gathered intelligence on German-commandeered factories, naval bases and gun emplacements, etc. and sent it on to the Allies in London. Madame Fourcade was involved with the latter. The group she joined, and of which she became its leader, was known as Alliance and became the Allies largest and most important espionage network in occupied France. They provided schedules for departing German U-Boats from Bordeaux and La Rochelle, and they supplied a fifty-foot-long map of the beaches at Normandy prior to D-Day; they radioed to London information on Germany’s V1 and V2 rockets, which allowed the Allies to bomb launch bunkers in northern France. Three thousand individuals served Alliance, of whom 438 were captured and executed by the Nazis. (Another 150 survived captivity.) Because the code names assigned each agent was an animal or bird, the organization was known to the Germans as Noah’s Ark, the title Fourcade took for her post-War memoir. Fourcade chose the name Hedgehog for herself, a small mammal, beloved by writers from Louis Carroll to Beatrix Potter, that protects itself from the fiercest predators by rolling into a ball with its spines extruding.

 

Madame Fourcade had to overcome the chauvinism of most male members of her organization, as well as those in England who Alliance served; she had to constantly move, changing her name and her appearance; she was once smuggled over the Pyrenees in a trunk to meet her British counterpart in Madrid; she was captured and escaped from a Nazi prison; she rarely saw her two children. After the war, her exploits were initially ignored: a spy was less visible than a resistance fighter blowing up rail tracks, and in the early years of the war she had coordinated with the Vichy government, which was a no-no with Gaullists. But most important, remembrances of her war-time leadership were initially shunned because she was a woman. However, as the years went on, that changed. When she died at age 79 in 1989, she became the first woman to be given a funeral at Les Invalides where Napoleon is buried.

 

She was proud of the role Alliance played in helping save France during the almost five years of German occupation. She led the effort to return to France the remains of those members of Alliance who had died in German prisons. In her memoir, Fourcade wrote: “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.” It is a spirit alive today in Ukraine.

 

As Tolkien wrote, none of us chooses the time and place to be born. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born at an inauspicious time, yet she accepted the fate that was hers. Lynne Olson’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is the tale of a brave young woman who used intelligence, guile and persistence to help free her beloved France. It tells of how ordinary people can and will do extraordinary things.