The Saboteur

by Paul Kix

  “One of the few memories I have of being with this Maquis is that there was a Jewish community there and when I saw how many of them there were, I asked them what was the reason for being part of this Maquis. The commander’s answer was very simple: . . . They had been warned by the prefecture that there would be a rounding up.”

  La Rochefoucauld continued. At that time, he said, “I did not know Mr. Papon from Adam, neither did I know anyone at the prefecture,” but he later learned about Papon’s significance when he met the man in the 1960s. “It was then that I told him about the Jews of the Maquis,” La Rochefoucauld testified. “He smiled and said: ‘We were very well organized at the Prefecture.’”

  Despite his own heroics, La Rochefoucauld felt it took “monstrous reserves of personal courage” to aid the Resistance from within Vichy. “I consider Mr. Papon one of those brave men.”

  After he testified, and after he encountered Papon’s protesters on the streets, and the young man who spit on him, La Rochefoucauld thought about an eternal France that could nonetheless look and act in a manner so very different from the one he’d known. Robert had been granted fifteen minutes on the stand, but could any amount of time have properly relayed the nuance and fear and sadness of the Occupation, or the joy of liberation, or, most important, the bond that La Rochefoucauld still felt for the people who’d fought as he had? How to tell any of this to whole generations of people who had never seen a swastika flag above the Eiffel Tower? “I realize that [mine] was another era, and even the end of another era,” La Rochefoucauld wrote.

  But people began to learn the truth. As the evidence mounted and the trial staggered on, the affair became less about one man’s actions than a country forced to reckon with its past. After the war, and for the better part of two decades, Charles de Gaulle had perpetuated the myth that every Frenchmen had resisted, that a military defeat in 1940 was not followed by a moral one. But slowly a counternarrative emerged, books and films and at last a criminal trial like Papon’s, where the secrets of the dark years reached the consciousness of the nation. The trial repeated what the books and films established: Very few Frenchmen had taken up arms against the Germans, perhaps as little as 2 percent. This complacency in the face of German rule, if not complicity with the occupier (as many as 20 percent collaborated), ashamed people now. The press accounts from the trial brimmed with Frenchmen distancing themselves from ugly wartime realities, which produced something like a burning feeling among the populace that was worse than 1940, because seen in this light almost everyone had failed his country, or loved someone who had.

  Papon’s trial, then, as it neared its conclusion, attempted not only a collective condemnation but a public absolution. If Papon were found guilty, France could cleanse itself of the Occupation’s disgrace. His trial sparked “an orgy of collective repentance for France’s guilt,” one historian noted. Among others, the Catholic Church and President Jacques Chirac issued apologies to the Resistance fighters and Jews who had died at the hands of their countrymen.

  But Papon was not the monster France needed. Vichy’s national police chief René Bousquet had issued the deportation papers, and Bousquet was dead. So too was Jean Leguay, Bousquet’s second in command. “In fact,” wrote the University of London historian Julian Jackson, “Papon would possibly never have been tried at all if either Bousquet or Leguay had still been alive; his trial acted as a kind of proxy for theirs.” It seemed that not even the longest criminal proceeding in history could give weight to all the evidence.

  In the end, the verdict reflected this. Papon was found guilty of “crimes against humanity,” in the arrest of thirty-seven people and the illegal confinement of fifty-three more. But, parsing the judgment, the court acquitted Papon of the more serious charges of premeditated murder. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

  The resolution displeased La Rochefoucauld, who sensed that factors other than the ones pertinent to the case had influenced its outcome. So, unbeknownst to his family, Robert secretly gave Papon his passport as the old man’s appeal was to be heard. Robert’s loyalty to old résistants was greater, it seemed, than any verdict.

  Papon fled the country. The police tracked him to a hotel in Gstaad, Switzerland, and television crews found the room registered under the name Robert Rochefoucauld. The case was now an international sensation. La Rochefoucauld himself agreed to two television interviews, where he freely admitted his role in the escape, and explained his rationale. “I lent him my passport . . . because I used to see him very often and he used to tell me: ‘It’s a real pain. Every time I go to a hotel to see my children, people are cross with me because of my name.’ So I told him, ‘Here’s my passport so that you’ll feel more at ease.’ He used it maybe once or twice and then he must have used it to go to Switzerland.” In the second interview, La Rochefoucauld said, “One of the reasons I helped him is that I was terribly scared. He might commit suicide.”

  Many members of La Rochefoucauld’s family were furious with him, but they couldn’t convince Robert of his gaffe. As he said in one of the TV interviews: “Whatever they say, [Papon] has been a great servant of the State.” It was the old codes talking, of stoicism in battle and brotherhood for life.

  Swiss authorities extradited Papon on October 21, 1999, and he served his sentence in Fresnes, outside Paris, the same prison where, during the war, German authorities had tortured and killed Jewish résistants. Papon’s lawyers appealed his term to the European Court of Human Rights, in Switzerland. In 2002 that court overturned the French court’s ruling. Papon, now ninety-two years old, was free.

  La Rochefoucauld’s own name had never been far from the old prefect’s in the intervening years, and it had become just as sullied. Even Papon’s freedom couldn’t wash the dirt away. For the second time in his life, La Rochefoucauld felt he had to defend his honor, and the only way to do that was to discuss all he had done. With the help of a ghostwriter, and the support of his family, who had made a begrudging peace with his bullheaded act, he set about penning his memoir: La Liberté, C’est Mon Plaisir, a play on the family motto. It was published in late 2002, a slim book that relegated the Papon affair to a couple of pages and recounted in simple prose La Rochefoucauld’s upbringing and the secret war that duty called him to fight.

  It was an amazing tale. It was also ignored by the press and sold poorly.

  C’est la vie. La Rochefoucauld turned eighty and had to deal with larger disappointments than a world that no longer understood him. His step slowed and his breath grew shallower; boyhood tuberculosis and a lifelong smoking habit had left him with lungs that functioned at one-fourth of their capacity. Then there was Bernadette’s deteriorating state. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she struggled a bit more each day to remain with him in the present. In June 2011, Robert suffered a small stroke and Bernadette grew more confused visiting him at the hospital. A respiratory condition prolonged his stay, and by the time he was discharged Bernadette didn’t know him. The family placed her in a retirement facility in November, and Robert roamed the chateau of Pont Chevron, hospice staff tending to his own fragile health.

  His daughter Constance lived a couple miles away, and checked in often. Of his four children, she had been the most interested in his valiant young life, and now La Rochefoucauld began to share the secrets that even his memoir didn’t recount. He’d worn dentures for years to replace the teeth the Germans in Auxerre had knocked out, he said. And he still thought about the war, almost every day.

  By the spring of 2012, La Rochefoucauld had little energy and often didn’t want to leave his bed. Constance asked him if he would make a final confession, and he said he would. There was something, in fact, he had never been able to say.

  The daring that had brought him numerous medals, the highest honors in France—it all pained him, he told his daughter. “I have killed people,” he said. He had killed them at close range, and sometimes with his own hands, and he had watched these soldiers die, soldiers who were in t
he end much like him, fighting for a cause. Their deaths may have been necessary, but he told Constance he had never quieted the daily, beastly whispers of culpability.

  Constance tried to console him, but she also understood: Robert hadn’t discussed his war because his own father had never discussed his. The old codes again. And the tradition that gave Robert de La Rochefoucauld courage and made him great and years later even bound him to men of ill repute had also shackled him to a ball of guilt that rolled behind him—one he dragged, painfully, quietly, his whole life. He had lived honorably, which is all he’d wanted as a boy, but he had never sought the guidance that would help him look past his deep valleys of regret. And if people were going to remember his bravery, he had finally told his daughter about its cost.

  It was a small act, but in its way the most courageous of his life, to transcend those old mores demanding silence in the wake of suffering, and at long last to show a vulnerability as much a part of him as his valor.

  He died a few days later, on May 8, V-E Day.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book couldn’t have happened without my beautiful and endlessly patient wife, Sonya. She not only tolerated the long hours I kept, but offered expert advice on the manuscript. I love you, sweetie.

  I’d like to thank my agent, Larry Weissman, for believing in me and this undertaking. Larry and his wife, Sascha Alper, gave thoughtful notes on early drafts of the manuscript, long before it reached my editors at HarperCollins. They saved me from my worst tendencies. I’d like to thank Josie Freedman at ICM Partners. I’d also like to thank Claire Wachtel, Jonathan Jao, and Sofia Groopman at HarperCollins, for helping me shape the manuscript into its finished form. Every cut was a good one.

  A very special thanks to Gabriella Kessler and Lilyana Yankova, my translators in Paris. One or the other accompanied me on interviews—my French remains far from fluent—and sat next to me amid high stacks of musty military reports, trying to parse almost illegible French handwriting. I literally couldn’t have written this book without their help. There were other translators, too, who helped me when Gabriella or Lilyana couldn’t. I’d like to thank Petra Krischok, who pulled files for me in Berlin and was a consummate pro; Almut Schoenfeld, who filled in when Petra was busy; Katia Martinez Garbaye, who found key information for me in Spain; Antoine Dain, who did the same in France; Jacques Clement, who dug up and then translated crucial testimony from the Maurice Papon trial; Sophie Detraz, who pulled some of La Rochefoucauld’s military records; Allison Schein, who translated La Rochefoucauld’s memoir at a time when my French wasn’t as strong as I wanted; Yannick Demoustier, who accompanied me on my first trip to France; the various scholars of the French Resistance and SOE I contacted, in London, France, and Berlin; Claude Delasselle, the scholar who showed me around the Yonne department for two days and answered my (many) questions for the two years following that; my old professor, Tom Emmerson, who keeps a flat in London and kept asking me what other documents he could pick up for me long after I’d left London’s beautiful National Archives; and his daughter Hilary and her husband, Marcus Thompson, who allowed me to stay at the aforementioned flat for a week.

  I’d like to thank Jason Schwartz, Wright Thompson, and Eli Saslow, for their reads of the manuscript and the guidance they offered when I phoned or harassed them afterward.

  I’d like to thank Chad Millman, at ESPN, who told me to “go for it” when I said I’d like to write this book.

  Lastly, I’d like to thank the immediate and extended La Rochefoucauld family, for all the photos, letters, and multimedia sources they provided me, and the (I’m sure) seemingly endless follow-up questions they answered. I hope I’ve shown Robert for the man he was and the courage he embodied.

  NOTES

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your eBook reader.

  Before we get to the notes themselves, there are a few things to point out. Though I talked with many of Robert’s living brothers and sisters, his cousins and nieces and nephews, two in particular deserve special attention, as their names will appear throughout the source material on the following pages. The first is Nicolas de Schonen, the family’s unofficial historian and Robert’s nephew, who during the course of my research lived in Robert’s childhood estate, Villeneuve, and let me stay there for a few days. The second is Nicolas’s mother, Robert’s younger sister Yolaine, who recalled the privation’s and milieu of the Occupation, and shared with me the attitudes of a teenaged Robert.

  From France’s Ministry of Defense I received La Rochefoucauld’s military records, some three-hundred-plus pages in all, the majority of which were found in the Ministry’s satellite campus in Pau. Unless he wanted to be killed by the Nazis, a résistant couldn’t keep a paper trail of his handiwork during the Occupation, and these military records, compiled just after the war’s end, from soldiers’ memories, were invaluable. They offered me a close account of when Robert was where; and for that reason, I sometimes departed from the chronology of La Rochefoucauld’s memoir in my narrative. It seems Robert—not exactly a fastidious student—didn’t rely on all of his military files when he and a ghostwriter penned his memoir. At certain points, concerning certain dates and happenings, I went with what the military records stated, because they were written closer to the events themselves. The military files, however, sometimes offered conflicting views of specific details—memory is never perfect, after all—and so, on occasion, I interpreted what the facts in La Rochefoucauld’s file suggested. This interpretation was nothing more than a triangulation of facts from multiple sources—Robert’s military records with those of a Resistance group’s, say—until a narrative emerged that I felt comfortable committing to the page.

  When I was in London researching the book, I spoke with a few scholars of World War II and of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, and some doubted whether Robert trained in England and became an SOE agent. After all, there is no case file for La Rochefoucauld in SOE’s archives. While it’s true that there is no conclusive evidence tying La Rochefoucauld to SOE, I believe he was an agent for the following reasons: 1) A bad fire after the war destroyed perhaps seven-eighths of SOE’s records, according to its official historian, M. R. D. Foot. Furthermore, in the prologue to The Secret History of SOE, Foot writes that the British government itself destroyed still more records. “The weeding has been random; many important papers are gone.” 2) Robert’s French military records make note of his secret handlers in London, including one with the code-name “Henri.” 3) In the fall of 1944, Robert’s military records state how he taught other résistants to parachute. Now, if Robert were simply a French Resistance fighter, who never left French soil, he wouldn’t have needed to learn to jump from a plane to reach a new Resistance cell. He could have simply biked or driven there. The fact that he not only learned to parachute but was asked to instruct French soldiers in their jumps strongly suggests he was first trained by an overseas band of fighters. 4) The SOE training Robert describes in his memoir, and in his recording and the family’s DVD, is consistent with SOE training manuals and books about same. 5) In his memoir, Robert remembered the name of one British agent, Eric Piquet-Wicks. La Rochefoucauld said he was brought to the special operations world by Piquet-Wicks, who was the leader of the R/F Section, one of six French sections within SOE—another consistency between Robert’s account and that of SOE. (The notes below carry a full accounting of source material.)

  I wanted to be thorough with these endnotes, but also not overwhelm my publisher or readers; the sourcing, and the story of the sourcing, could take up as many pages as the book itself. Among many others, I’m indebted to the scholarship of Julian Jackson, Robert Paxton, Matthew Cobb, William Shirer, Jacques Delarue, M. R. D. Foot, the almost absurdly fun commando instructors of SOE, and Howard Zinn. I have made every effort to be as accurate as possible. Should a reader find an inconsistency, tho
ugh, please blame me, and not any of the writers listed above or below.

  PROLOGUE

  1asking him why: This line, and paragraph, are informed by conversations with La Rochefoucauld’s daughter Astrid Gaignault and his nephew, Nicolas de Schonen.

  1afternoon in 1998: A multivolume edition of the trial transcripts was later published. Le Procès de Maurice Papon, Compte rendu sténographique, Vol. 2 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998).

  1longest in French history: Robert O. Paxton, “The Trial of Maurice Papon,” New York Review of Books, December 16, 1999, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/12/16/the-trial-of-maurice-papon/.

  1debonair: What Robert wore to the courtroom is based on a photo taken outside it. His daughter Constance Guillaumin said that the photo that appeared in his obituary in the New York Times was taken the day he testified in the Papon trial. Richard Goldstein, “Robert de La Rochefoucauld, Wartime Hero and Spy, Dies at 88,” New York Times, July 9, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/world/europe/robert-de-la-rochefoucauld-noted-for-war-exploits-dies-at-88.html.

  1moved from one girl to the next: Guillaumin told me this while we looked at old photo albums of her father, which included many shots of his former girlfriends. Robert had placed captions beneath the photos with the young women’s names. There were pages upon pages of these photos, and sometimes he just placed a question mark in the caption.

  2Pont Chevron, his thirty-room chateau: Conversations with Jean de La Rochefoucauld.

  2nodded at the defendant: Le Procès de Maurice Papon.