by Lynne Olson
An accountant by training, Rodriguez became TAI’s chief financial officer. Later he would also assume the same role at Air Afrique, a regional airline operating within Africa. Four years after the Ussel reunion, he would retire as an executive at Air France.
In 1990, at the age of seventy-four, Ferdinand Edward Rodriguez became a French citizen. He died nine years later.
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SOON AFTER THE WAR ENDED, the three surviving leaders of Alliance—Paul Bernard, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and Georges Loustaunau-Lacau—met in Paris. When Marie-Madeleine asked the other two about their plans for the future, Navarre said he’d like to go into electoral politics, and Bernard mentioned his dream of starting an airline. When they posed the same question to her, she responded that her mission as head of Alliance was still uppermost in her mind. The two of them, she said, had done their full share for the resistance. It was time for them and the network’s other survivors to move on with their lives. She, on the other hand, felt that her work for Alliance was not yet done.
Like Bernard, Loustaunau-Lacau fulfilled his dream. Although he never fully recovered from the wounds he had suffered in 1940 and the savage treatment he had endured at Mauthausen, the indomitable Navarre, who’d always been drawn to political controversy, threw himself into the bear pit of French politics. In June 1951, he was elected to France’s Chamber of Deputies as an independent. In February 1955, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the French army and died in Paris eight days later, at the age of sixty.
MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE, FERDINAND RODRIGUEZ, AND PAUL BERNARD AFTER THE WAR
Marie-Madeleine, for her part, managed to keep Alliance’s flame alive while carving out a new life for herself. In 1946, she was divorced from Édouard-Jean Méric, her long-estranged husband, and the following year married Hubert Fourcade, a well-connected young Paris businessman whom she had first met during the war and had tried to recruit for Alliance. Instead he escaped to London, where he joined de Gaulle’s Free French forces. According to Michèle Cointet, Marie-Madeleine’s biographer, Hubert Fourcade made no effort to curb her freedom as her first husband had done. “Devoid of selfishness and personal ambition, he thought only of her,” Cointet wrote. “[H]e would never be a master or a rival.”
In 1949, Marie-Madeleine gave birth to her last child, Pénélope. “My mother deeply loved her children, but she was not very demonstrative or affectionate,” Pénélope Fourcade-Fraissinet recalled. “She was not what you would call maternal….She was very busy, and we didn’t see her much.” Her father, Fourcade-Fraissinet added, was the main source of parental affection.
In the late 1950s, Marie-Madeleine became heavily involved in French politics, which she had resolutely avoided during the war. Her husband had been a staunch supporter of General de Gaulle from the early days of the war and remained so even after de Gaulle abruptly resigned as leader of the French provisional government in early 1946 because of his intense frustration with those who opposed his policies. Marie-Madeleine backed the general, too, and in 1958, the Fourcades were two of the leaders of a successful campaign to bring de Gaulle back to power. In later years, Marie-Madeleine would become a member of the European Parliament, dividing her time between Brussels, Strasbourg, her family’s elegant apartment on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, and their country house in the Camargue, a starkly beautiful region of salt marshes and beaches in Provence.
At the same time, her wartime activities remained central to her life. As she saw it, those with whom she had worked during the conflict were as much a part of her family as her husband and children. In May 1945, she became the Alliance network’s liquidating officer, a quasiofficial position in which 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. She also worked to obtain aid for families of operatives who had been executed by the Germans. Having no jobs of their own, many of the women who had lost their husbands were in dire financial straits, with no money to feed, clothe, or educate their children. Getting sufficient help for them became an increasingly arduous task in a country that was anxious to forget the war, with all its misery and internal strife, and move on. Nonetheless, Fourcade relentlessly pressured the government to do so. “Once the bête noire of the Nazis, Marie-Madeleine has been for more than thirty years the terror of French bureaucrats,” David Schoenbrun wrote in the late 1970s. “She storms the corridors and offices of the ministries of Paris seeking every advantage that she can get” for the people of her network. She also raised money from private individuals, among them the parents of Philippe Koenigswerther, who gave a substantial donation to help the widows and orphans of Alliance agents who, like their son, had been killed by the Nazis. In addition, she provided considerable money from her own funds for various projects—setting up a summer camp for her lost agents’ children; providing winter clothes for one family; finding a room and paying the rent for the son of a dead operative who had come to Paris to study.
At the same time, Fourcade kept in close touch with her network’s survivors. Virtually every month, as Pénélope Fourcade-Fraissinet remembered, her mother would host a gathering of former Alliance agents. “Even if they didn’t live in Paris, they came back for those meetings,” Fourcade-Fraissinet said. “Everybody stayed in touch. They remained friends for the rest of their lives.”
Of this group, Fourcade’s closest friends were Ferdinand Rodriguez and his wife, Monique, and Helen and Marie-Solange des Isnards. She became the godmother of Patrick Rodriguez-Redington, the first of Ferdinand and Monique’s three children, and Charles-Helen des Isnards, who was the baby Marie-Solange was carrying at the time of Fourcade’s escape from the jail in Aix-en-Provence. Fourcade also served as godmother to Colin Cohen, the son of Kenneth and Mary Cohen, born in the summer of 1945.
Fourcade’s children remained exceptionally close to Colin Cohen and to the Rodriguez and des Isnards offspring. In their younger years, they spent weekends and vacations together and to this day, as Charles-Helen des Isnards put it, they have maintained “an extraordinary esprit de corps.”
Yet, while Fourcade clearly cherished these friendships—and the satisfying life she made for herself after the war—part of her heart remained in the past. Although she rarely talked about her wartime experiences, she occasionally mentioned Léon Faye to Pénélope, who later observed, “He was clearly very important to her.” When Fourcade was writing her wartime memoirs, her daughter would sometimes find her in tears.
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. Napoleon Bonaparte is buried at Les Invalides, as are dozens of other celebrated French military heroes.
LES INVALIDES
On the morning of the funeral, Fourcade’s body was greeted by the Republican Guard, the ceremonial regiment that acts as guard of honor at significant state occasions, before being carried by soldiers into the Cathedral of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides. 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.
It was a fitting farewell to the grande dame of the French resistance. Yet in the years that followed, Fourcade and her achievements began to fade into the past. For all the panoply of her funeral, she was never given her full due as one of the most significant leaders in the wartime resistance, nor was Alliance given the credit it deserved as the largest and most important Allied intelligence network in France. The vagaries of French politics played a large role in those omissions, as did Fourcade’s gender.
The way in which a
n individual résistant or group was—and is—remembered in France depended to a significant degree on their relationships with other resisters before and during the war. A good relationship with de Gaulle and his supporters was particularly important since, at least in the first few postwar decades, they were the ones who created the dominant narrative of the war and the French response to it. Also playing a key role in shaping the narrative was the French Communist Party, which was a major force of the resistance and emerged from the war as the country’s dominant political party.
The Gaullists and Communists didn’t agree on much, but on one thing they were in consensus: No one with ties to Pétain or the Vichy government could ever be given credit for defying the Nazis. “For many years it was inconceivable, both to scholars and the public, that a person on the right…of the political spectrum could have legitimately been a resister,” the historian Valerie Deacon has written. As a result, a large number of early resisters with connections to Vichy were simply airbrushed out of the picture.
Georges Loustaunau-Lacau—and, to a lesser extent, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade—were among them. Navarre, of course, was on the political right, was a former associate of Pétain’s, and had launched his fledgling intelligence network in Vichy. He also had made a number of bitter enemies, the most notable of whom was de Gaulle. The two men’s ill-natured rivalry went back several decades, to their days at Saint-Cyr. From the first days of their acquaintance, they couldn’t abide each other.
The Communist Party, which had not forgotten Navarre’s anticommunist crusade in the 1930s, was another old foe. When elections were held in October 1945 to elect a new national assembly, the Communists emerged with the largest share of the vote—26 percent. They used their new political power to wreak vengeance on enemies like Navarre.
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.” Obviously, neither accusation was true. Alliance agents, as Fourcade pointed out, represented all sectors of society and the entire political spectrum, including Communists.
At the instigation of French Communists, Navarre was indicted in 1947 for prewar rightist political activities and spent six months in jail before he was released. When he was elected to the National Assembly in 1951, he was frequently harassed by Communist deputies, who accused him of having worked with the Nazis. In his book, A French Paradox, the Israeli historian 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.
Although Fourcade did not suffer the retaliation visited on Navarre, her refusal to get involved in the internecine rivalries of de Gaulle and his critics during the war was unquestionably held against her and Alliance. 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. De Gaulle and his men particularly resented the fact that Fourcade and her network insisted on maintaining their ties with the British and would not consent to work directly for the Free French until near the end of the war. Another black mark against Alliance was the role it had played in helping de Gaulle’s foremost rival, General Henri Giraud, escape from France, despite the fact that Fourcade was initially unaware of the reason behind the escape.
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.
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IN NOVEMBER 1940, DE GAULLE had created the Compagnons de la Libération, an elite group of those deemed heroes in the struggle for French liberation during World War II. By the end of the war, only 1,038 persons were considered worthy of the honor. Of that number, 1,032 were men.
Included in the exclusive fraternity were three members of Alliance: Henri Schaerrer, Jean Sainteny, and Georges Lamarque. Also chosen was Édouard-Jean Méric, Marie-Madeleine’s former husband, a Free French officer who had commanded a regiment during the Allied landing in southern France in August 1944 that had ended up capturing more than twelve hundred German prisoners near Marseille.
Among others named to the group were leaders of various resistance movements and networks. Henri Frenay, the founder of the Combat movement, was one. Another was Gilbert Renault, the chief of the Confrérie de Notre Dame, the Free French intelligence network that was second only to Alliance in size, breadth, and importance to the Allies.
Renault’s counterpart at Alliance, however, was not one of the six women awarded the honor, most of whom had been associates of male movement leaders allied with de Gaulle. Only one—Bertie Albrecht—had played a leadership role in the war, serving as deputy and adviser to Henri Frenay at Combat. The lone woman who had actually been a chef de résistance and whose network’s intelligence achievements were unparalleled was not judged worthy of the honor.
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.
Notwithstanding men’s hesitation to include them in resistance work, tens of thousands of French women had risked and, in many cases, lost their lives by defying the Germans, although virtually none were given leadership positions in resistance organizations. “Just as businesses recruited female personnel only for positions like switchboard operator or receptionist, women and girls were brought into the resistance primarily to be couriers and liaison agents,” Noguères recalled. Yet, while these posts may have been regarded as subordinate, they were in fact highly important and extremely dangerous jobs.
Keenly aware of society’s norms of acceptable behavior for women, many female resisters during and after the war minimized the importance of their wartime achievements. Unlike a number of their male counterparts, they neither demanded credit for their contributions nor asked for recompense. 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.” Women, Gildea added, “were particularly modest.”
Even Fourcade felt constrained to downplay what she had done, describing herself to an interviewer after the war as “the wife of an officer, the mother of a family, a member of no political party, and a Catholic.” As her biographer, Michèle Cointet, aptly noted, it was a “rather humble (and misleading) self-description by the only woman to have led a large and important Resistance network in France. Her words fail to capture her uniqueness before, during, and after the war as a woman who…transgressed contemporary gender norms on a regular basis. But they…capture the tension between her actions and societal expectations.”
Displaying a similar reticence was Jeannie Rousseau, whose reports on the development of the V-1 bombs and V-2 rockets represented one of the greatest intelligence coups of the war. She, too, was excluded from the Compagnons de la Libération, although like Fourcade, she received the Médaille de la Résistance, a lesser honor, along with the Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honor.
After the war, Rousseau remained quiet about her exploits and slipped into the shadows of history. In 1993, almost fifty years after the
end of the conflict, the CIA honored her for her “heroic and momentous contribution to Allied efforts during World War II.” At a ceremony at CIA headquarters, the agency’s director, James Woolsey, noted that her reports about the terror weapons had disrupted their manufacture and testing and as a result had “saved thousands of lives in the West.” 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.
For several decades following the war, histories of the French resistance, which were written almost exclusively by men, largely ignored the contributions of women. Although that is no longer true, most current overviews of the subject, while certainly mentioning women, have continued to underplay the extent and importance of their participation, treating the subject, in the words of one historian, as “an anonymous background element in an essentially male story.”
And although there has been a flurry of books in recent decades that have examined various aspects of French women’s experiences during the war, even they tend to shy away from highlighting “atypical” women like Fourcade, whose work as the leader of a military intelligence network was so different from the norm of most female résistants.
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IF THE LACK OF attention bothered Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, she never showed it. In her view, the thousands of agents in her network were the ones who should be remembered, and she worked hard to keep their memory fresh. “The years have passed, my friends have died, but their spirit is still alive,” she wrote in her memoirs. “I should like to know that they will not be forgotten, that the divine flame that burned in their hearts will be understood.”
