by Paul Kix
28stiff disciplined courteousness: Richard Vinen, The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
28PUT YOUR TRUST: Timothy Parsons, The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
28The Nazis gave French communities: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
28French police: Ibid.
28“exemplary, amiable and helpful”: Ibid.
28“aroused little sympathy”: Ibid.
29“to sting the Germans”: Vinen, The Unfree French.
29“the path of collaboration”: Cobb, The Resistance.
29“The Armistice . . . is not peace”: A complete transcript of the broadcast may be found here: http://desinroc.free.fr/anglais/chrono3/message.html.
29“the war’s biggest catastrophe”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
29“There could be consequences”: Ibid.
CHAPTER 3
31a collaborationist viewpoint: Jackson, France: The Dark Years. The rest of the paragraph is informed by Jackson’s book, which is truly remarkable.
32It was in the Bavarian Alps: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
32“Franzose”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
33couldn’t help but feel giddy: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
33invaded the city of Graz: Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Also: Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
33“Long live Hitler!”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
33simply for peering inside: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
33One exhibition defaming Freemasonry: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
33drew 635,000: Ibid.
33flourished to the point: Ibid.
34second coming of Joan of Arc: La Rochefoucauld recording.
34were never actually a majority: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
34L’Oréal: Ibid., and Michael Bar-Zohar, Bitter Scent: The Case of L’Oreal, Nazis and the Arab Boycott (New York: Dutton, 1996).
34“Heil Hitler”: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
34One day he met in secret: Conversations with Emmanuel de Pennart.
34The man stared hard: Ibid.
35A resistance group in Soissons: For Vérité Française, see Soissons town archives and its digital extension: http://www.vallee-de-l-aisne.com/site/428/rueduquotreacuteseauveacuteriteacutefrancaisequot.html. On the Musée de l’Homme and its naiveté, see Cobb, The Resistance.
35seven to death: Cobb, The Resistance.
35six more died in concentration camps: See http://www.vallee-de-l-aisne.com/site/428/rueduquotreacuteseauveacuteriteacutefrancaisequot.html.
35The Nazi agents who organized the Soissons raid: I saw this myself near the Soissons cathedral.
35So their plan was foolish: Conversations with Emmanuel de Pennart.
35400 million francs a day: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
35Soon, it was enough money to actually buy: Kim Oosternlinck and Eugene N. White, “How Occupied France Financed Its Own Exploitation in World War II, or Squeezing the Capital Markets for the Nazis,” National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2006).
35Oil grew scarce: Cobb, The Resistance.
35biking everywhere: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Rochefoucauld family DVD.
35imposed rations: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
35every bakery and grocery store: La Rochefoucauld recording.
35a shifting curfew: Ronald C. Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944 (New York: Little Brown, 2014).
35as early as 9 p.m.: Nicholas Foulkes, Bernard Buffet: The Invention of the Modern Mega-Artist (New York: Random House, 2016).
35the patrolling secret police’s boots: Sartre, The Aftermath of War.
36assassinated two high-ranking Nazi officers: Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation (New York: Picador, 2004).
36“sown consternation everywhere”: Ibid.
36“Do not allow any more harm to be done”: Ibid.
36thirteen thousand Jews: The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup. See Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
36overripened vegetables: Ibid., and Gildea, Marianne in Chains.
36“bandits” or even “terrorists”: Gildea, Marianne in Chains.
36a show, Répétez-le: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds., Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
36three million denunciatory letters: Ibid.
37“No more ingenious device”: Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain, Vol. II (New York: Macmillan, 1922).
37“I remember silence, silence, silence”: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
37“Every time I met with friends”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
37for another destination: Conversations with Yolaine de Schonen.
37“that Germans should be killed”: Cobb, The Resistance.
37Soissons postman: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté, as well as the La Rochefoucauld family DVD.
CHAPTER 4
39He went first to Paris: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
39“Come back in fifteen days”: Ibid.
39head south, to Spain: Ibid.
39But this in turn only raised more questions: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Rochefoucauld family DVD.
39secretly worked for the Resistance: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
40needed two aliases: Robert de La Rochefoucauld military records.
40“a nom de guerre I’d found who knows where”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
40The photo in his false identity card: Robert de La Rochefoucauld military records.
40“the gray mice”: Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Noah’s Ark: A Memoir of Struggle and Resistance, trans. Kenneth Morgan (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974).
40epicenter of German collaboration: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
40“hostile”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
40“to be seen as little as possible”: Ibid.
41“I was wary of everything and everyone”: Ibid.
41“extremely nice”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
41“soak up this code of conduct”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
41“very pleasant”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
42stayed that night: Ibid. and La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
42Germany produced annually: Cobb, The Resistance.
42“of man or horse”: Ibid.
42That was what the man from Perpignan had: La Rochefoucauld recording, La Liberté.
42They set off through the woods: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
42not particularly clean: Ibid.
43called the VIC line: M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940–1944, Government Official History Series (London, Routledge, Second Edition, 2004).
43wasn’t as demanding as in the high mountains: Ibid.
43“honeycombed with German agents”: Ibid.
43childhood with English nannies suddenly came in handy: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
43seven left for Spain: Ibid.
43“The hike was particularly difficult”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
43often misjudged distances: Hugh Dormer, Hugh Dormer’s Diaries (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010).
44Germans posted observation decks: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
44“Every two hours, we took a quarter of an hour’s rest”: Ibid.
44“just as hard, and increasingly dangerous”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
44they redirected themselves: Ibid. and La Liberté.
44Perthus Pass: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
44“The road is clear!”: La
Rochefoucauld recording.
44Robert and the airmen laughed: Ibid. and La Liberté.
44smugglers out after dawn risked imprisonment: La Rochefoucauld recording.
44“This will take you to a town”: Ibid.
45a plan to get to the village: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
45“We looked more like highway robbers”: Ibid.
45two Spanish agents approached them: Ibid.
45one of them spoke French: La Rochefoucauld recording, La Liberté, and La Rochefoucauld family DVD.
45December 17, 1942: Archivo General Militar de Guadalajara, in Guadalajara, Spain. This is an important file because Robert’s military records list Renaud as one of the pseudonyms he used during the war, and Robert himself said he often used portions of his real name with a pseudonym. Robert’s middle name is Guy Jean. This doesn’t prove conclusively that Robert de la Rochefoucauld was the Robert Jean Renaud booked in 1942, but La Rochefoucauld’s telling of the episode coincides with the Spanish records. Furthermore, Spanish scholars contend that many Frenchmen who fled their country and ended up at Miranda de Ebro used aliases—and Canadian aliases at that. (For instance, Matilde Eiroa, a lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication at the University Carlos III de Madrid, stated in her 2014 academic paper, “Uncertain Fates: Allied Soldiers at the Miranda de Ebro Concentration Camp,” published in The Historian, that getting a French exit visa was “extremely difficult” in the Vichy regime, and that between thirty and forty thousand people hiked through the Pyrenees to get to Spain, and arrived under false names more times than not.)
46Built in 1937: Matilde Eiroa, “Uncertain Fates: Allied Soldiers at the Miranda de Ebro Concentration Camp,” The Historian (March 2014), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hisn.12026/abstract.
46Its watchtowers, barbed-wired fences: Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal, The Archaeology of Internment, Adrian Meyers and Gabriel Moshenka, editors. (New York, Springer Publishing, 2011).
46Paul Winzer: Eiroa, “Uncertain Fates.”
46overly populated spaces: Gonzalez-Ruibal, The Archaeology of Internment.
46held 18,406 prisoners: Ibid.
46an estimated ten thousand people: David D. Nicolson, Aristide: Warlord of the Resistance (London: Leo Cooper, 1994).
46baffled both the Allied and Axis powers: Eiroa, “Uncertain Fates.”
46“subjects”: Ibid.
47in the same cell: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
47“windowless huts”: Paloma Diaz-Mas, Sephardim: The Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
47holding 3,500 by the end of 1942: Eiroa, “Uncertain Fates.”
47began a hunger strike: Ibid.
47begging for release: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
47food was scarce: Ibid.
47airy barracks: Gonzalez-Ruibal, Archaeology of Internment.
47to kill off the lice: E. Martinez Alonzo, Adventures of a Doctor (London: Robert Hale, 1962).
47“mirandite”: L. A. Héraut, “Miranda de Ebro: Medical Condition of the Concentration Camp in 1943, Histoire des Sciences Médicales (April–June 2008).
47“necessitated a good deal of courage”: George Langelaan, Knights of the Floating Silk (London: Anchor Press, 1959).
47Alerta!: Nicolson, Aristide.
47miniature grandstand: Langelaan, Knights. The rest of the paragraph is informed by this book.
48trucks from the British embassy: Ibid.
48Ambassador Hoare had a keen interest: Samuel Hoare, Ambassador on a Special Mission (London: Collins, 1946). Also: National Archives, London, in my research surrounding Hoare.
48Allies increased their air missions: Nicolson, The Resistance, and William Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE (London: St. Ermin’s Press, 2000).
48a man from His Majesty’s Government: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
48Major Haslam: Madeleine Duke, No Passport: The Story of Jan Felix (London: Evan Brothers, 1957).
48“for all you’ve done”: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
48“grossly embellished”: Ibid.
49Hoare was aging and short: Ralph James Adams, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–16).
49ambitious and competitive: Ibid.
49Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet: Hoare, Ambassador.
49seemed to wear this rejection: J. A. Cross, Sir Samuel Hoare: A Political Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977).
49had done his job with aplomb: Eiroa, “Uncertain Fates.”
49his ease with the French language: Michael Alpert, A New International History of the Spanish Civil War (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994).
50“perfect French”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
50originated a plot to kill Rasputin: See http://spartacus-educational.com/PRhoareS.htm, a great, fully sourced online biography of Hoare.
50“that are beyond reproach”: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
CHAPTER 5
53London Reception Center: The website of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building has a great page on its history: http://www.rvpb.com/history.htm.
53to flush out German spies: Douglas Porch, The French Secret Services: A History of French Intelligence from the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War (London: Macmillan, 2003).
53March 1943: National Archives, London.
53stretched from one day to two: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
54good cop, bad cop: There are many sources on British interrogation techniques, but I found the fullest and most riveting account to be Andrew Miller’s. He’s a British historical novelist who keeps a website that brims with real-world primary sources on British interrogation during World War II: http://www.andrewwilliams.tv/books/the-interrogator/interrogation-tips/.
54washing ashore in England: See Porch, The French Secret Services.
54a school for orphans: Royal Patriotic Building website.
54La Rochefoucauld was there for eight days: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
54like old friends: Ibid.
54He had a boy’s way: Photos from Eric Piquet-Wicks’s SOE file in the National Archives, London.
54all seafaring wanderlust: Piquet-Wicks’s personality comes out in the book he wrote after the war. Eric Piquet-Wicks, Four in the Shadows: A True Story of Espionage in Occupied France (Peterborough, UK: Jarrold, 1957).
54He wore a suit well: Photos in Piquet-Wicks’s file, National Archives, London.
54free of the paranoid thoughts: La Rochefoucauld recording.
55Piquet-Wicks’s mother: Picquet-Wicks, Four in the Shadows.
55Borax: Ibid.
55it had a report: Picket-Wicks’s SOE file.
55“in view of his indiscreet behavior”: Ibid.
56didn’t have “enough guts to be an adventurer”: Ibid.
56“in a war of . . . consequence”: Piquet-Wicks, Four in the Shadows. The following discussion is also informed by this book.
57he would like Robert to work: La Richefoucauld recording.
57“surprisingly close to each”: Piquet-Wicks, Four in the Shadows.
57liked the man with the goofy smile: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté. (Though, in the memoir, Robert misremembers first meeting Piquet-Wicks in Spain.)
57“If you get to meet him”: La Rochefoucauld recording.
58No. 4 Carlton Gardens: I saw this myself on my trip to London.
58designed by architect John Nash: The history of the property and surrounding area can be found in London City Council, Survey of London, Volume 20, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Part III, Trafalgar Square and Neighborhood (London: London City Council, 1940), 77–87, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol20/pt3/pp77–87.
58many a proper Londoner: “Historical Notes,” Ibid.; also Charles Hibbert et al., The London Encyclopedia (London: Pan Macmillan, 2011).
58The German embassy occupied 7–9 Carlton Gar
dens: Rob Humphreys and Judith Bamber, The Rough Guide to London (London: Rough Guides, 2003).
58a bomb fell on No. 2 Carlton House Terrace: The Royal College of Pathologists is nearby, and its online official history notes what happened during the war: https://www.rcpath.org/Resources/RCPath/Migrated%20Resources/Documents/Other/2chtleafletweb.pdf.
58A French soldier: Photos courtesy of Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense.
58“which may have possibly facilitated things”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
58all dark wood and high Gothic ceilings: François Charles-Roux, “The Free French in London: Memories of Wartime London: 1942–1943,” http://www.christopherlong.co.uk/pub/charles-roux.html. Charles-Roux was de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp.
58heart thrummed in his chest: La Rochefoucauld recording and La Liberté.
59His presence filled the room: Ibid.
59map of the world: For photos of de Gaulle’s office see http://www.christopherlong.co.uk/pub/charles-roux.html.
59“a head like a pineapple”: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
59“never quite at ease”: Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War That Never Ended (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
59from 9 a.m. until evening: Charles-Roux’s recollections, http://www.christopherlong.co.uk/pub/charles-roux.html.
59a kind of moral absolutism: Dallas, 1945.
60“You are not France”: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
60bully pulpit of the BBC: Ibid.
60his initial Council of Defense: P. M. H. Bell, A Certain Eventuality: Britain and the Fall of France (London: Saxon House, 1974).
60“authoritarian prelate”: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
60“never on this scale”: Ibid.
60“simple” but also “cordial”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
60“To each his own de Gaulle”: Dallas, 1945.
60“de Gaulle first complimented me”: La Rochefoucauld, La Liberté.
61“to prove to French eyes”: Foot, SOE in France.
61“the man of destiny”: Ibid.
61“gone off his head”: Jackson, De Gaulle.
61“monster”: Jackson, France: The Dark Years.
61kept “in chains”: Ibid.
61all of three hours’ notice: Ibid.
61“rival organization”: Piquet-Wicks, Four in the Shadows.