The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

I became aware of this book thanks to a friend who is also interested in historical stories about women in France. I knew at once I had to read it.

While my friend was still reading it some months ago, I happened to go on a walk, following a route I have taken many times and noticed for the first time that Madame Fourcade’s name featured on one of the street signs. You can imagine my surprise and delight! She became even more of a talking point and I looked forward to getting a copy of the book (not that easy) to read.

I will say if you are interested in reading it, that the font size of the paperback version (which I read) is quite small compared to the hardback version (a copy of which I bought for a friend).

Famous French Women, A Rare Vision

Most of the street signs in France are the names of people that have featured in their recent history. However, it is very rare to come across the name of a woman. In our town Marie Curie has a street sign, but even then, she shares it with her husband. Marie Madeleine Fourcade not only has a sign all to herself, strategically placed at the top of a hill overlooking the town, but she was also the very first woman in France’s history to be given a funeral at Les Invalides, an important complex of buildings in Paris that celebrates France’s military glory.

Marie Madeleine’s father worked for a French shipping company in Shanghai. Her mother refused to stay behind in Paris, though agreed to return to Marseille for the birth of her daughter in 1909. Marie-Madeleine and her siblings grew up in Shanghai, with freedoms unheard of for the social and family circles they hailed from. Those freedoms, an early bilingual education and their return to Paris when she was 10 years old, set her up in many ways for the future role she would play, organising and ultimately leading an important French intelligence network.

As a young woman, she again lived abroad, in Morocco. She drove a car, learned to fly a plane and had a job. She rejected French society’s (and her husband’s) restrictive ideas about how women should behave. She had trained to become a concert pianist, worked at a commercial radio station and would forge her own future.

Access to Important Connections, Two Rivals

Though never in the military herself, she was married briefly to a French military officer, as was her sister. She thus had opportunity to meet and observe some of the younger officers through her social connections, men who would later become important during the war years.

Two of the most prominent members of that younger group – Lieutenant Colonel Charles de Gaulle and Major Georges Loustaunau Lacau – took centre stage in the discussion on rue Vaneau, engaging in a debate that quickly escalated into a full-blown argument. It soon became obvious to Marie-Madeleine that the two officers viewed each other as rivals…

Both products of Saint-Cyr, France’s elite military academy Ecole Supérieure de Guerre, both fought and received multiple citations for bravery in WWI; they were brilliant, ambitious and egocentric. A rebellious streak put them at odds with Marshal Philippe Pétain (a French general who commanded the French Army in WW1 and would become head of what became known as the Régime de Vichy Vichy France). The rivalry between the pair would also keep them from being unified during the war years and likely impacted perceptions afterwards.

A Partnership, A Turning Point

After a discussion at one of the social events around March 1936, Loustaunau-Lacau contacted Marie-Madeleine and asked for her help in creating a journal that would argue the case for reform of the military and open the eyes of leaders to the imminent threat of Germany. The work would begin immediately.

“One of my Belgian friends has procured secret dossiers that expose the intentions of the German high command,” he said. “I need to get them quickly. Such documents must not travel by mail. You have a car. You must go to Brussels and collect them. I will pay all expenses.”

An Intelligence Network is Formed, Working Inside France

Caught up in this real life spy drama, Marie-Madeleine agreed – a decision that would radically change her life. From that moment, she wrote later, she and Loustaunau-Lacau began building an intelligence network against Nazi Germany.

Over the next two years, they would recruit informants in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany who passed on reports about the build up of the German armed forces. Loustaunau-Lacau adopted the codename Navarre, after Henri de Navarre, later King Henri IV of France. Given the risks they faced, that one of them might be captured or killed, Navarre insisted they share leadership of the network and when he was compromised, as promised Fourcade took the lead role.

At the same time, backbencher in the British House of Commons, Winston Churchill had created a similar private network and Charles de Gaulle decamped to London, setting up his Free French operation. Fourcade suggested they join with him.

Her mentor rejected the idea outright. In England, he said, they would be refugees, just like de Gaulle, dependent on the British for everything. At that point, almost no one in the British government, with the promising exception of Winston Churchill, took de Gaulle and his minuscule band of followers seriously.

They would resist from within.

Another Perspective of History

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is a work of history, told in a compelling narrative voice, that not only focuses on the leadership role of this one extraordinary woman, but will likely expand most reader’s knowledge of what living in France under German occupation was like for the many, who vehemently opposed the way their government had capitulated to a hostile outside force, without much initial resistance.

Personally, the history I learned in school was quite different, as it was told from a very anglo-centric perspective, so the narratives stemmed from how this threat impacted the United Kingdom and their allies.

I never really understood what exactly happened within France in the lead up to the occupation, how it impacted their government and rendered the military ineffective. So many of the protections a country might normally expect when facing a hostile enemy were lacking; to go against the orders of a government (even if under occupation) was a betrayal.

Cinema Can Create Its Own Self Serving Narrative

Though there have been books and films about the war and the French resistance, little has been shown of the importance of the Alliance network and of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s achievements. Most of the attention has gone to stories of sabotage and escape lines, of battles and blitzes.

Saboteurs and other resistance fighters in France were certainly important after D-Day, but they did little to obstruct the Germans before then. Escape networks did heroic work in smuggling shot-down Allied airmen and others out of occupied Europe and back to freedom, but their actual contribution to victory was small.

I would certainly be interested in a cinematic development of Fourcade’s story, one that traverses France and shows a very different side to those who travelling around the country, making radio transmissions and secret flights across the channel, where they are hosted by memorable characters in this real life adventure.

Noah’s Ark and the Hedgehog

In the late 1960’s Fourcade would get her story down in a gripping memoir entitled Noah’s Ark, the name the German’s referred to their network as, after they would use codenames of animals, Fourcade’s was hérrison (hedgehog), a small animal that intelligently eluded predators.

Lynne Olson provides a thoroughly researched, immensely readable account of the creation of the Alliance, one of the original and most important resistance networks in France. From its foundation by Navarre and Fourcade to the establishment of thousands of recruits, the many dangerous activities they undertook, throughout the war, all that was able to be continued by Fourcade due to her continued leadership deserves to be more widely recognised and appreciated.

They Will Not Be Forgotten, The People

The book is full of stories about the different people she recruited, the relationships and loyalties and daring escapades each of them went on, in order to bring their intelligence to the Alliance.

It is also, sadly, a homage to those who would be punished and killed for their roles, some, so close to the end of the war, it is excruciating to read. That Fourcade survived and was able to share her story and thus the courage and bravery and loyalty of others is a true gift to all humanity.

It’s the first time I have read an account that centres what was happening in France at this local level, with a more global scope, that renders the dangerous and delicate situation of those in the military, who were against the capitulation of their government. While in great danger to themselves, they were able to band together like-minded civilians and provide those on the outside with the information they needed to mount a significant and ultimately successful defence.

Highly Recommended!

Author, Lynne Olson

Lynne Olson is a New York Times bestselling author of nine books of history, most of which focus on World War II. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has called her “our era’s foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy.”

Born in Hawaii, Lynne graduated magna cum laude from the University of Arizona. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a journalist, with the Associated Press as a national feature writer in New York, a foreign correspondent in AP’s Moscow bureau, and a political reporter in Washington. She left the AP to join the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun, where she covered national politics and eventually the White House.

Lynne’s latest book is Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Woman Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples From Extinction (2023).

Three of her earlier books were immediate New York Times bestsellers; Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against the Nazis (2019), Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II (2013), and Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour (2010). 

Lynne lives in Washington, DC with her husband, Stanley Cloud, with whom she co-authored two books.