Madame Fourcade's Secret War
The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler
1 of 1 copy available
“Brava to Lynne Olson for a biography that should challenge any outdated assumptions about who deserves to be called a hero.”—The Washington Post
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE WASHINGTON POST
In 1941 a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman, a young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, became the leader of a vast intelligence organization—the only woman to serve as a chef de résistance during the war. Strong-willed, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country’s conservative, patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. Her group’s name was Alliance, but the Gestapo dubbed it Noah’s Ark because its agents used the names of animals as their aliases. The name Marie-Madeleine chose for herself was Hedgehog: a tough little animal, unthreatening in appearance, that, as a colleague of hers put it, “even a lion would hesitate to bite.”
No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence—including providing American and British military commanders with a 55-foot-long map of the beaches and roads on which the Allies would land on D-Day—as Alliance. The Gestapo pursued them relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of its three thousand agents, including Fourcade’s own lover and many of her key spies. Although Fourcade, the mother of two young children, moved her headquarters every few weeks, constantly changing her hair color, clothing, and identity, she was captured twice by the Nazis. Both times she managed to escape—once by slipping naked through the bars of her jail cell—and continued to hold her network together even as it repeatedly threatened to crumble around her.
Now, in this dramatic account of the war that split France in two and forced its people to live side by side with their hated German occupiers, Lynne Olson tells the fascinating story of a woman who stood up for her nation, her fellow citizens, and herself.
“Fast-paced and impressively researched . . . Olson writes with verve and a historian’s authority. . . . With this gripping tale, Lynne Olson pays [Marie-Madeleine Fourcade] what history has so far denied her. France, slow to confront the stain of Vichy, would do well to finally honor a fighter most of us would want in our foxhole.”—The New York Times Book Review
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
March 5, 2019 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781984885180
- File size: 465290 KB
- Duration: 16:09:21
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
This well-researched audiobook resembles a thriller with its fast-paced action and multiple cliff-hangers, but it's the biography of a real-life French spy in WWII. The subject of the title, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, led the Alliance, a network of three thousand agents who repeatedly risked their lives gathering intelligence in an effort to rout the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators from France. Narrator Kimberly Farr has clear diction and a grasp of French and German pronunciation, but her peppy tone doesn't always match the gravity of the story, and her attempts at men's voices seem half-hearted. Nevertheless, the story is a riveting one, as Fourcade's group was able to supply the British and American military with, among other intelligence, materials from submarines and a detailed map of the beaches where the Allies would land on D-Day. L.W.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from March 4, 2019
Historian and journalist Olson (Last Hope Island) vivifies the history of the French Resistance during WWII with a brilliant, cinematic biography of resistance leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. As Olson recounts, Fourcade was 31 in 1941, a mother of two by her long-estranged husband, wealthy, beautiful, and temperamentally born to lead. She was recruited to the Resistance by Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, who founded the Alliance intelligence network in 1940 and passed leadership to Fourcade in 1941. She organized, recruited, trained, raised funds (principally from England’s MI6), hid, changed identities as often as she dyed her hair, and suffered arrest and torture by Nazis. She loved fellow agent Léon Faye and bore his son in the middle of WWII, and recorded her experiences, including bonds with fellow spies, in her diary: “The connection formed by a threat to one’s country is the strongest connection of all.” Olson’s weaving of Fourcade’s diary artfully and liberally into her own writing and her heart-stopping descriptions of Paris, escapes, and internecine warring create a narrative that’s as dramatic as a novel or a film. Olson honors Fourcade’s fight for freedom and her “refusal to be silenced” with a gripping narrative that will thrill WWII history buffs. Illus.
-