{"id":7951,"date":"2019-05-15T10:11:32","date_gmt":"2019-05-15T14:11:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7951"},"modified":"2019-06-20T07:24:24","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T11:24:24","slug":"madame-fourcades-secret-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7951","title":{"rendered":"Madame Fourcade’s Secret War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Author Lynne Olson drew a standing-room-only crowd at the\nPrinceton Public Library this week to hear her discuss her latest book, a\nbiography of a mostly unheralded Frenchwoman, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade.\nFourcade ran a loose network of 3,000 spies within Vichy France during the Nazi\noccupation, and Olson calls it the most influential organization spying on the Nazis\nin the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in 1909 to wealthy parents and raised in Shanghai, she\nmarried a military intelligence officer at age twenty, and ultimately had three\nchildren. During the war, she sent the children to Switzerland for safety and\ndid not see them for years at a time. Sometime in there, Olson says, she had an\naffair with pilot hero and author Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry (Le Petit Prince<\/em>, et al.) She survived\nthe war and many harrowing experiences and died in Paris in 1989. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The French Resistance movement, uncoordinated and spotty though it was, came in three flavors. Two have received considerable attention in films. First, sabotage\u2014blowing up train tracks and the like (the Sebastian Faulks novel and film Charlotte Gray<\/a> <\/em>depict this nicely).<\/em> Then there were the heroic efforts to help downed British and American pilots escape. The third, less cinematic job of the Resistance was intelligence gathering. Where are the troops headed, the armaments stored, the ships docked? This is the kind of information the Allies badly needed and Fourcade\u2019s huge network collected and passed on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ll recall that de Gaulle was in London during the war,\nbut when Fourcade\u2019s brother traveled there to offer the network\u2019s services,\ncharacteristically, he would not cooperate. But MI6 would, not realizing for\nquite a while that the group\u2019s leader, code name \u201cHedgehog,\u201d was a woman. She\nwas arrested several times and escaped twice. After D-Day, she was again\ncaptured, but that night she stripped down, held her dress between her teeth\nand wriggled through the bars of her cell, put her dress back on, and walked\naway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She and one notable young woman who worked for her were able\nto get the information they did from unsuspecting Germans because, for the most\npart, no one took her seriously because she was a woman. She\u2019s nearly forgotten\ntoday, Olson believes, for the same reason. After the war, de Gaulle created an\norganization to honor the war\u2019s heroes\u20141032 of its 1038 members were men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olson\u2019s conclusion is reinforced by the experience of another unheralded WWII spy, American Virginia Hall. One of the several new books (movies in the making!) about her is titled A Woman of No Importance<\/a><\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Author Lynne Olson drew a standing-room-only crowd at the Princeton Public Library this week to hear her discuss her latest book, a biography of a mostly unheralded Frenchwoman, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. Fourcade ran a loose network of 3,000 spies within Vichy … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Madame Fourcade's Secret War - for 75 years, their WWII contributions have been ignored. Being ignored is why they made good spies!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,265,193,266,267,104],"tags":[363,446],"class_list":["post-7951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adventure","category-biography","category-espionage","category-history","category-non-fiction","category-the-morgue","tag-france","tag-world-war-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/marie-madeleine-fourcade.gif?fit=260%2C378&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-24f","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7953,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7951\/revisions\/7953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}