by Lynne Olson
At the age of seventeen, however, she abandoned her dreams of a music career when she met, fell in love with, and swiftly married a handsome, dark-haired Army captain named Édouard-Jean Méric, a graduate of Saint-Cyr and the son of a general. She was attracted to him personally but also to the fact that his next posting would be in Morocco, an exotic milieu that promised a return to the excitement and adventure that she had relished during her childhood.
In the late 1920s, France boasted the second-largest colonial empire in the world, with a population of 100 million people and territory of 4.5 million square miles spread over Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. As one of the most valuable jewels in the French colonial crown, Morocco was a training ground for France’s military and civil service elite, and as such it was a plum assignment for an up-and-coming intelligence officer like Édouard-Jean Méric.
His assignment was to monitor various restive Arab tribes in the country and to act swiftly to quash any signs of potential uprisings against the French. In the early months of their marriage, Marie-Madeleine, who learned Arabic, would often accompany him on horseback to his meetings with tribal chiefs. She particularly enjoyed the sumptuous fourteen-course feasts—“tagines of every kind, roast lamb, couscous, and so much else”—that the chiefs staged for their French visitors. She also was a frequent volunteer at a makeshift French clinic for local residents, where her duties included helping to deliver babies.
Although Méric was impressed by her keen interest in his work, he was less pleased by the delight Marie-Madeleine took in the lively social life in Rabat, Morocco’s capital. Eight years older than she, he had no time for what he viewed as the frivolity of such activities as cocktail parties, dinners, and picnics in the desert, at which other young officers paid considerable attention to his beautiful young wife.
A year after their wedding, Marie-Madeleine gave birth to a son, named Christian. Two years later, her daughter, Béatrice, was born. Although she adored her children, she was growing increasingly unhappy with her husband and his conservative views, especially those about how she should behave. He wanted her to be what he called a proper wife, focused only on him and their family—a view that clashed with her freewheeling, independent ways. In 1933, the couple separated.
From then on, Marie-Madeleine had virtually nothing to do with Méric; in her memoirs, written more than thirty years later, there is no mention of him. As her French biographer, Michèle Cointet, put it, she would never again “allow a husband to decide her wishes, govern her acts, or judge for her what she will do with her life.”
After their separation, Marie-Madeleine moved with her children to Paris, to be near Yvonne, Georges, and their family on rue Vaneau. Soon after she arrived, she became part of a small circle of young women in the upper reaches of Paris society, many of whom were married but who, like her, were unwilling to confine themselves to domestic duties. Her closest friend was Hélène (“Nelly”) de Vogüé, a twenty-eight-year-old blonde noted as much for her intellect as for her beauty. The daughter of a wealthy industrialist in eastern France, Nelly had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was both an accomplished painter and a gifted writer. In 1927, she had married Comte Jean de Vogüé, a scion of one of France’s most illustrious aristocratic families. But the great love of her life was the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whom she met two years after her marriage and whom she served as both mistress and muse. She would be named his literary executor after Saint-Exupéry’s death late in World War II.
Like Nelly and her other friends, Marie-Madeleine was anxious to do more with her life than abide by French society’s restrictive ideas about how women should behave. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, she and other affluent young Frenchwomen were caught up in the car rally craze that swept the country. Owning a car was still a rarity in France, and women who could afford one were now handed the freedom to come and go as they pleased, without having to depend on anyone else.
Marie-Madeleine also took flying lessons and acquired a pilot’s license. And in 1935, she did something equally daring for a woman of her social class—she got a job. She worked at Radio-Cité, the country’s first commercial radio station, initially in its advertising department and then as a producer of entertainment programs, partnering with the writer Colette on a half-hour series for women. Extraordinarily successful from the beginning, Radio-Cité was responsible for, among other things, launching the broadcast careers of singers like Édith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier and offering France’s first radio news programs.
For a young woman who possessed both money and ambition, the early and mid-1930s were an exciting time to be in Paris, with its vibrant social, artistic, and literary life. To its many admirers—expatriates and natives alike—it was the cultural capital of the world. Writers, painters, musicians, dancers, sculptors, and intellectuals of every stripe from all over the world continued to flock there, just as they had for decades.
At the same time, however, the French capital—and the country as a whole—was enmeshed in mounting political, economic, and social turmoil. France had long been known for what one historian called its “people’s ineradicable love of political squabbles,” but by the 1930s, its traditional divisiveness had metastasized into intolerance, bitterness, and outright strife.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French governments had been noted for their short tenures, but since the end of World War I, such instability had grown considerably worse. During that period, more than forty governments had come and gone—an average of one every six months. None lasted long enough to come to grips with the country’s severe economic and social problems. With France in a state of permanent political crisis, cabinet ministers focused their efforts on staying in office, which usually meant spending little time on substantive issues. The already deep cynicism of the French people toward government officials was further exacerbated by a string of financial scandals in the 1930s involving bribes paid to ministers and parliamentary deputies by businessmen and bankers seeking favorable government treatment.
All this was happening during a decade of intense crisis throughout the world, marked by the global ravages of the Great Depression and the rapid rise of Hitler and other totalitarian leaders. Like much of the rest of Europe, France was hit hard by the Depression, with tens of thousands of businesses collapsing and the unemployment rate skyrocketing to more than twenty percent. Racked by infighting and claims of corruption, the various governments in power during the 1930s failed to cope with these challenges, leaving a vacuum that was filled by direct action by extremist groups from both the left and the right.
The French Communist Party, which dominated much of the country’s labor movement, was responsible for fomenting a massive wave of wildcat strikes across the country that caused significant disruption to factory production. On the right, a host of nationalist groups, some of them fascist, sprang up like mushrooms after a rain, with several seeking the violent overthrow of France’s parliamentary system.
As the country teetered on the brink of anarchy, the last thing its people and government wanted was to confront the looming threat of another war with Germany. The last one had devastated France, and its citizens had never fully recovered. More than 1.4 million Frenchmen had been killed in World War I, the highest proportion of deaths per capita of any of the great power combatants. Another 4.2 million men were wounded. The northern part of the country, which had been occupied by the Germans, was left in ruins, and the French were still struggling to restore the region’s decimated industries.
Most French citizens, for all their corrosive divisions, were united in the belief that France must never fight another such war again. Such pacifism came as a profound shock to Marie-Madeleine, who, having spent most of her life as an expatriate, had an idealized view of her homeland, with its traditions of patriotism, service, and honor. She had grown up hearing about the glories of France’s victory in
the 1914–18 war, without being exposed to the grief and despair it had caused.
Deeply affected by the discussion at Georges and Yvonne’s apartment, Marie-Madeleine thought about getting involved herself in the debate over France’s failure to confront German aggression. But what could she possibly do? The day after the gathering, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau gave her the answer.
* * *
—
LATE THE FOLLOWING MORNING, she received a phone call from the major. He had enjoyed meeting her, he said, and would like to see her again. He added that he had something confidential to tell her. Could they meet soon, preferably someplace discreet?
For a moment, she hesitated. What did he have in mind? A romantic assignation, perhaps? He was, she acknowledged, an attractive older man, but she was still a married woman. Yet she could not help being intrigued by him. Although relatively short, especially when compared with Charles de Gaulle, he had broad shoulders, piercing eyes, palpable energy, and a powerful, charismatic presence that, in her opinion, his tall, icy debating partner did not share.
She told him yes, then suggested he come to her apartment. After hanging up, she had immediate second thoughts. Lighting a cigarette, she went to her closet and took out her outfit for the day—a plain gray suit, white blouse, and flat shoes—meant as a signal that she was not in the mood for seduction.
But, as it happened, neither was he. As soon as he arrived, Loustaunau-Lacau apologized for being so forward on the phone. But, he added, time was of the essence: “You seemed interested in what I said yesterday at your brother-in-law’s. I want to tell you more and to ask you to help me in a task that I cannot do alone.”
GEORGES LOUSTAUNAU-LACAU
Specifically, he said, he wanted her to join him in a new venture he had begun: the creation of a confidential journal for Frenchmen of influence that would argue the case for the need of immediate reform of the French military. The situation, he added, was even worse than she could imagine. It was essential to open the eyes of the country’s leaders as quickly as possible to the intentions of the German general staff.
Their work would start immediately. “One of my Belgian friends has procured secret dossiers that expose the intentions of the German high command,” he said. “I need to get them quickly. Such documents must not travel by mail. You have a car. You must go to Brussels and collect them. I will pay all expenses.”
Caught up in this real-life spy drama, Marie-Madeleine agreed—a decision that would radically change her life. From that moment, she wrote later, she and Loustaunau-Lacau began building an intelligence network against Nazi Germany.
Over the next two years, Major Loustaunau-Lacau, aided by Fourcade, recruited a stable of informants in France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany who passed on reports about the buildup of the German armed forces. Although neither of the two was aware of it, Winston Churchill, then an antiappeasement backbencher in the British House of Commons, had created a similar private network, seeking out authoritative sources in Germany and elsewhere who could provide evidence of the growing Nazi military menace.
A natural conspirator, Loustaunau-Lacau adopted the code name Navarre, after Henri de Navarre, a hot-blooded prince and master intriguer who became King Henry IV of France in the late sixteenth century. Like many of his friends and acquaintances, Fourcade addressed him and referred to him as Navarre for the rest of his life.
Serving as Navarre’s intermediary, she drove her Citroën to the various countries to meet with informants and pick up their material. Navarre’s main source was Berthold Jacob, an intrepid German-Jewish journalist who had left Germany shortly before the 1933 Nazi takeover and operated an independent press service in the French city of Strasbourg, near the German border. Jacob’s investigative articles revealing Germany’s preparations for war had so infuriated the Nazis that he was lured to Switzerland in 1935, kidnapped by the Gestapo, and taken to a prison in Berlin. Thanks to strenuous protests by the Swiss government over the violation of their country’s sovereignty, Jacob was released after six months and returned to France, where he continued his work for the press service—and Navarre—until the outbreak of war.
MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE
But as Navarre saw it, Nazi Germany was not the only threat to peace and the security of France. He was also deeply concerned about the activities of the Soviet Union and the French Communist Party. In his view, the French Communists, backed by the Soviet government, “were the reckless agents of a Germany that was waiting for her hour of revenge against France.”
That belief had some evidence to support it. Since the 1920s, the Soviets had secretly provided Germany with facilities deep within their country for the making and testing of tanks, aircraft, and poison gas and for the training of Luftwaffe pilots and Wehrmacht troops—all activities that had been prohibited by the Versailles Treaty.
In addition, the Soviets, in partnership with French Communists, had operated an extensive spy network in France, which gathered considerable intelligence about the country’s defense industries and military. According to Navarre, the French army was a particular target of Communist subversion, which included an intensive propaganda campaign by the French Communist Party aimed at demoralizing French troops and sowing defeatism within their ranks.
Convinced that a growing Communist influence in the army was imperiling French security, Navarre took matters into his own hands. In the mid-1930s, he created a secret organization of army officers, called the Corvignolles, to combat what he saw as Communist attempts to encourage army indiscipline and to destroy morale. The Corvignolles’ mission was to conduct surveillance of those in the army who were suspected of being Communists and to pass on information about their activities to top military officials.
Although Navarre was hardly alone in his anticommunist views—many if not most of his military colleagues shared them—his group’s vigilantism could not have come at a more politically inopportune time. In 1936, the Popular Front—a coalition of left-wing parties supported by the Communists—took control of the government. The following year, Navarre, not surprisingly, was cashiered from his post in the German section of the Deuxième Bureau, the French army’s intelligence agency. “A man of the utmost daring and rebelliousness,” he “positively relished being in hot water—wonderful to serve under, impossible to command,” the British historian M.R.D. Foot later noted.
Seemingly undaunted by his dismissal, Navarre transferred his energies to setting up a small publishing empire, comprised of several political, military, and cultural journals that were aimed, for the most part, at influential business, government, and military circles. Many of the publications’ articles detailed the growing military might of Germany, the dangers of communism, and the shocking unpreparedness of the French army and air force. In this new venture, as in Navarre’s earlier enterprises, Fourcade served as his deputy.
In March 1938, two years after she’d begun working with Navarre, Nazi Germany annexed Austria, to which the British and French governments again turned a blind eye. Six months later, at the Munich Conference, the two Western allies surrendered a huge chunk of Czechoslovakia—the Sudetenland—to the German leader, along with its vital fortifications and major centers of industry. Providing a sharp corrective to the euphoric mood of those who believed that the Munich agreement had brought “peace in our time,” Navarre wrote in one of his journals: “It is neither by speeches nor by these missions that the insane excesses of Hitler’s Germany will be defeated.” In the same journal, he published, in considerable detail, the entire order of battle of Hitler’s land, sea, and air forces, compiled from reports sent to him by Berthold Jacob.
Yet it wasn’t until September 1939, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the Allies’ declaration of war against Germany, that the French military brass implicitly acknowledged the truth of Navarre’s Cassandra-like prophecies. He was recalled to active dut
y and sent as a military intelligence officer to the Ninth Army, whose command post was in the east of France, near the Ardennes forest in southern Belgium.
Throughout 1939 and into 1940, Navarre and other French intelligence officers passed on reports to top government and military leaders of German plans for an invasion of France through the Ardennes. Both leadership groups rejected the intelligence, preferring to believe that any future German offensive would come through the flatlands of central Belgium, just as it had at the beginning of World War I. Navarre was enraged. From his Ninth Army post, he publicly lambasted what he saw as the incompetence of the French high command, which he said amounted to treason. For French military leaders, this latest insubordination was the final straw. In March 1940, he was arrested and charged with demoralizing French troops, which, under a wartime emergency decree, was punishable by death.
His case came before a magistrate on May 10, 1940, the same day that Hitler launched his blitzkrieg of Western Europe, during which German units went into battle precisely as he had predicted. For Navarre, the timing could not have been better. The magistrate acknowledged that the major had been correct in charging his military superiors with extreme negligence. He was let off with a stern reprimand—and then was sent to fight the Germans as commander of a battalion near the Maginot Line, France’s supposedly impenetrable chain of fortifications.
On May 14, another of Navarre’s predictions came true. The main German force, consisting of more than 1.5 million men and 1,800 tanks, thundered through the Ardennes, outflanking the Maginot Line. Smashing into the least protected sector of the French frontier, it routed the ill-equipped French forces assigned to guard it and crossed the Meuse River into France. In just three days, the German offensive had split the Allied forces in two.