The Saboteur
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2bulletproof glass: John-Thor Dahlburg, “Ex-Official Accused of Aiding Nazis Begins Trial in France,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1997, http://articles.latimes.com/1997/oct/09/news/mn-40871.
2“and in North Africa”: Le Procès de Maurice Papon.
2He was sixteen then: Robert de La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté, C’est Mon Plaisir: 1939–1946 (Paris: Perrin, 2002). La Rochefoucauld was born in September 1923.
2re-enlisted in 1939: Olivier de La Rochefoucauld military records, Ministry of Defense, Paris.
2five days after the Armistice: Ibid.
2local chapter of the Red Cross: Conversations with Robert’s nephew, Nicolas de Schonen, the La Rochefoucauld family’s unofficial historian.
2the Terrible Countess: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen, Robert’s sister, and the DVD the family produced, which was never meant for a distribution greater than successive generations of the clan but of which the family was kind enough to give me a copy.
2four war medals and a knighthood: The medals were shown to me by his daughter Constance.
2general secretary of the Gironde prefecture: Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012).
3223 of them children: Elaine Gainley, “Maurice Papon, 96; French Nazi Collaborator,” The Washington Post, February 18, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/17/AR2007021701355.html.
3the final destination of the cattle cars: Le Procès de Maurice Papon.
3René Bousquet: See Julian Jackson’s magnificent account of the Occupation, France: The Dark Years: 1940–1944 (London: Oxford University Press, 2003).
3he no longer believed the documents proved Papon’s guilt: Douglas Johnson, “Maurice Papon,” The Guardian, February 18, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/feb/19/guardianobituaries.france.
3“queasiness” about prosecuting the man: Paxton, “The Trial of Maurice Papon.”
3As he told the court: trial transcripts: Ibid.
4Roger-Samuel Bloch: Le Procès de Maurice Papon. Also Richard Golsan, ed., The Papon Affair: Memory and Justice on Trial (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).
4gated entryway of the courthouse: I found old CNN B-roll footage of the trial and what the courthouse looked like.
4spit on him: Conversations with Constance Guillaumin.
4shared loyalty: This paragraph is informed by the trial transcripts, multiple conversations with Constance Guillaumin, Nicolas de Schonen, and Astrid Gaignault, as well as the sentiments that emerge from La Liberté, and the recording Robert made of thoughts about the war and the subsequent peace.
5they’d discussed them throughout their childhood: All four of Robert’s children told me about his silence concerning the war and the snippets they pieced together.
5Citroën: Conversations with Constance Guillaumin.
5he told himself: His family told me how resistant he was to writing his story.
CHAPTER 1
7On May 16, 1940: For this, I relied on police and governmental reports from the Aisne department archives, which I accessed online at http://archives.aisne.fr/archive/salle-l-exode-8/n:103 and http://archives.aisne.fr/archive/panneau-l-exode-6/n:103.
7menacing drone: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen; I also relied on the files in the departmental archives to give me a sense of what Soissoinais said the blitzkrieg felt and sounded like.
7German Stukas: Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London, Simon & Schuster, 2013). You can watch old clips on YouTube to get a sense of what the Stukas sounded and looked like.
7ever closer to the chateau: Yolaine de Schonen described for me the bombing campaign, as did the diary Robert’s mother Consuelo kept, which the La Rochefoucauld family was kind enough to give me. See also the Aisne department archives.
7“we must go!”: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
8The Allies had thought that terrain too treacherous: Brian Bond, France and Belgium: 1939–1940 (London: Davis-Poynter, 1975).
8stretching back for more than one hundred miles: William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
8many of them reservists: Lt. Col. Thomas D. Morgan, United States Army (Ret.), “The Fall of France and the Summer of 1940,” The Institute of Land Warfare (April 2006).
8Britain’s Royal Air Force had sent out seventy-one bombers: See the Battle for France timeline on the RAF’s website: http://www.raf.mod.uk/history/rafhistorytimeline1940.cfm.
8the greatest rate of loss: Ibid.
8thirty miles wide and fifteen miles deep: Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
8Soissons’ factories: Consuelo de La Rochefoucauld diary and the Aisne department archives.
8Consuelo told her eldest, Henri: Robert de La Rochefoucauld recording, and conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
8the Duchess of Maillé: La Rouchefoucauld, La Liberté.
8Consuelo would stay behind: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
9serving as a liaison officer: Olivier de La Rochefoucauld’s military files.
9with only 25 percent stationed in country: Lt. Col. Faris R. Kirkland, United States Air Force (Ret.), “The French Air Force in 1940: Was It Defeated by the Luftwaffe or Politics?” Air University Review (October 1985).
9The Germans bombed the train stations and many of the bridges: Consuelo de La Rochefoucauld diary.
9screamed with each report: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
9“that interminable syrup”: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969).
10Local officials had sometimes been the first to flee: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
10Henri was serious and studious: La Rochefoucauld family DVD.
10countenance that rounded itself into a slight pout: Constance Guillaumin sent me many photos of her father as a boy.
10different boarding school nearly every year: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté, and La Rochefoucauld family DVD.
10to dangle from the parapet: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
10Grandmother La Rochefoucauld: Ibid.
10Yolaine, twelve: I figured out the ages of the children at this time using the La Rochefoucauld family DVD. I also consulted the following website, which tracks the lineage of French nobility: http://gw.geneanet.org/frebault?lang=fr&pz=henri&nz=frebault&ocz=0&p=robert+guy+jean+marie&n=de+la+rochefoucauld. Yolaine de Schonen was also helpful in telling me who played with whom in the family, which cliques developed, and who protected whom.
11he felt a sense of fraternity: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
11one thousand years of French history: The family’s chateau, Chateau de La Rochefoucauld, traces its existence back one thousand years. http://www.reve-de-chateaux.com/en/residence/105-chateau-de-la-rochefoucauld. Also, Yolaine’s son Nicolas de Schonen and I discussed the family’s long history.
11Grandmother La Rochefoucauld’s private rail car: La Rochefoucauld recording.
11become, he said, a committed Republican: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen.
11defend it, even if the military couldn’t: La Rochefoucauld recording.
11on the road for four days: Ibid.
11As many as eight million people: Cobb, The Resistance.
11bicycles were the best mode: Ibid.
12Thousands of parents lost track: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
12taking hours just to cross the Loire River: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
121.7 million Frenchmen: John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage, 2000).
12captured and recaptured seventeen times: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen.
12smoldered for seven years: Ibid.
12hand grenade: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen. He was in fact still digging hand grenades out when I visited him.
12carried the indentations: The church still shows these scars.
13an ankle wound incurred in
1915: Olivier’s military records.
13Consuelo carried the gun: Conversations with Yolaine and Nicolas de Schonen.
13they didn’t appear in public: Gabriel Chevallier, Fear, trans. Malcolm Imrie (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2014).
13“Throughout my childhood”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
13an officer whose job: Olivier de La Rochefoucauld military records.
13the “meat” of dead comrades: Chevallier, Fear.
13He was a distant father: La Rochefoucauld family DVD.
13“must not cry—ever”: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
13the dahlias he planted: La Rochefoucauld family DVD.
13Consuelo, who’d lost two brothers to the trenches: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen.
13indelicate tongue: La Rouchfoucauld recording and conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
13upended by the war: Consuelo de La Rochefoucauld’s diaries give a sense of her commitment to the Red Cross. Also conversations with Nicolas de Schonen.
14France had one hundred divisions: This paragraph is informed by Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
14French Parliament voted 537 to 75: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
14“There is no glory in being French”: Ibid.
14“Rather servitude than war”: Ibid.
14“Queer kind of war”: William Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent: 1934–1941 (New York: Rosetta Books, 2011).
15“We were lucky”: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
15a three-winged castle: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen. With the help of a translator, I exchanged emails of documents, photos, and architectural blueprints of the castle with its current owner, Claude Charrier.
15never tired of coming here: The La Rochefoucauld family DVD and La Rochefoucauld recording.
15a hollowed-out exhaustion: La Rochefoucauld recording.
15That very night: Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
15Consuelo rejoined the family a few nights later: Conversations with Yolaine and Nicolas de Schonen.
15“No more windows, almost no more doors”: Consuelo de La Rochefoucauld diary.
16killing 254, 195 of them civilians: Cobb, The Resistance.
16cows wandered some of its richest streets, mooing: Ibid.
16departed without destination: Ibid.
16bunched round the radio in their grandmother’s salon that day: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
16two million people had fled and the city was silent: Cobb, The Resistance. The rest of the paragraph is informed by The Resistance. Twelve Parisians, that book noted, committed suicide that day.
16rolled her own cigarettes from corn husks: Conversations with Yolaine and Nicolas de Schonen.
16appeared anxious now before her children: La Rochefoucauld recording.
16“It is with a heavy heart”: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
16Robert drew back when he heard the words: La Rochefoucauld recording.
17Hitler wanted this armistice signed on the same spot as the last: Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The rest of this paragraph is informed by that book.
17“I look for the expression in Hitler’s face”: Ibid.
17humiliated the Frenchmen: Ibid.
17The terms of the armistice were numerous and harsh: The Yale Law School’s Avalon Project—a tremendous resource. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/frgearm.asp.
18Hitler’s brilliant political moves: Jackson, France: The Dark Years, and Cobb, The Resistance, offer good analyses of the political realities of the demarcation line.
18“It was the first time I saw my mother cry”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
18“I was against it, absolutely against it”: Ibid.
18“Monstrous”: Ibid.
19even ghostwritten one of his books: Julian Jackson, De Gaulle (London: Haus Publishers Limited, 2005).
19a pair of trousers, four clean shirts, and a family photo in his personal luggage: Cobb, The Resistance.
19“I, General de Gaulle . . . call upon”: Ibid.
19listened to de Gaulle: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
CHAPTER 2
21German soldiers had pillaged: Aisne department archives.
21At last they saw the clearing: This paragraph is informed by the time I spent at Villeneuve.
21the daughter of one of Napoléon’s generals: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen.
21forty-seven rooms: Ibid.
21German military vehicles: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
21armored cars and trucks: Ibid.
22the same stone staircase: Descriptions of Villeneuve are based on my observations.
22“There was absolutely nothing”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
22Consuelo told her children: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
22They soon redistributed themselves: Conversations with Nicolas and Yolaine de Schonen.
22which seated twenty: Conversations with Nicolas and Yolaine de Schonen.
22depicted a beautiful woman: A fable involves a La Rochefoucauld who married a woman who was actually a witch, and who bathed in a nearby castle once a week. One day, her husband spied on her as she bathed, and she kept saying, “It’s my pleasure.” The story, interpreted by successive generations, is an almost libertine allowance to enjoy what life gives you.
23the staff of twelve: Conversations with Nicolas and Yolaine de Schonen. Yolaine told me the house was at times more like an embassy than a home.
23But he couldn’t stand: La Rochefoucauld recording. Robert makes plain how much he hated German intrusion.
23a new dining room: Conversations with Yolaine and Nicolas de Schonen.
23and the Germans only spoke: Ibid.
23the Terrible Countess: La Rochefoucauld family DVD.
23north-south: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen.
23parking up to seven bulky tanks: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
23write on her walls: Conversations with Nicolas and Yolaine de Schonen.
23learned that a British bomb: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen.
24The Villeneuve staff: Ibid.
24water still flowed down: Conversations with Yolaine and Nicolas de Schonen.
24warm a brick over a wood-fired oven: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen.
24he had been arrested by German forces: Olivier de La Rochefoucauld military records.
24Oflag XVII-A: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
24“little Siberia”: Two French documentaries about the camp proved very helpful. Oflag 17A: Sous le manteaux, directed by Marcel Corre (1999), and Oflag 17A: Tournage clandestin derrière les barbelés, produced by Eclectic Presse and La France Télévision (2013).
24two letters home every month: Ibid.
24she slapped him across the face: Conversations with Nicolas de Schonen.
25those Boche: La Rochefoucauld recording.
25daily message: La Rochefoucauld, recording and La Liberté, also discusses how much Robert loved to listen to General de Gaulle.
25Guy de Pennart: Conversations with Guy’s son, Emmanuel de Pennart.
25“I was convinced”: Ibid.
25graduated from high school: Ibid.
25agricultural college in Paris: Robert de La Rochefoucauld military records, Ministry of Defense, Paris.
25The Germans had disbanded: Avalon Project, Yale University.
25snuffed out: Cobb, The Resistance, shows how early Resistance groups were brave but ill-equipped and naive.
25despised the Germans: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
25a spa town: Jackson, France: The Dark Years, demonstrates the limitations of the Vichy regime.
26“but honor—that’s all”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
26replete with portraits and busts: I saw some of these myself when I stayed there.
26dated back to
900 AD: Rebecca Lawn, “Chateau de La Rochefoucauld,” Living Poitou-Charentes (February 2011), http://www.livingmagazine.fr/feature/entry/feature/categories/charente-attractions.html/visit-what-to-do-chateau-rochefoucauld-charente.html.
26“It is a revolution”: I first heard about this member of the family from Nicolas de Schonen. But this quote is ubiquitous in texts discussing the French Revolution.
26Bernard Mandeville, Nietzsche, and Voltaire: Duc de La Rouchefoucauld, Preface, Maxims (1871).
26the Society of the Friends of the Blacks: Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (New York: Broadway Books, 2012).
26martyred during the Reign of Terror: James Andrew Corcoran et al., eds., “The French Clergy During the Reign of Terror,” American Catholic Quarterly Review (January–October, 1907).
26directeur des Beaux Arts: Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
26Others appeared in the pages: Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (New York: Proust Complete, 2003). The website Proust Personnages lists ten references to the family in the masterpiece: http://proust-personnages.fr/?page_id=892. Proust drew on real-world encounters; there are many mentions of family members in Proust’s letters. Also see William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), especially the index.
26He was baptized: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
26father who’d received the Legion of Honor: Olivier de La Rochefoucauld military records.
27“honor commanded us to continue the fight”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
27He felt cheated: Ibid., and La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
27What galled him: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
27“intellectual and moral anesthesia”: Michael Robert Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
27passé scenery: La Rochefoucauld recording.
27“assumed a rather abstract air”: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Aftermath of War, trans. Chris Turner (Salt Lake City, UT: Seagull Books, 2008).
27“wall of fire”: Ibid.
28German officer play the piano: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
28“He was playing very, very well”: Ibid.
28another Poland: Jacques Delarue, The Gestapo: A History of Horror, trans. Mervin Savill (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008).