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 duty 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.
In Paris, a wave of panic enveloped the government and military. As Navarre and de Gaulle had forecast four years before on rue Vaneau, the vaunted French army was collapsing like the proverbial house of cards.
THREE WEEKS LATER, MARIE-MADELEINE Fourcade fled Paris, joining a mass exodus. With the Germans closing in on the capital, the French government had decamped six days before, sneaking out in the middle of the night without making any arrangements for the evacuation or defense of the city.
In keeping with its panicked residents’ funereal mood, Paris was shrouded in a thick, choking fog of smoke and soot from nearby oil and gas tanks that had been set alight by retreating troops. Soot covered the trees and streets, and some people noticed an eerie lack of birdsong as they left. Most of the birds, it turned out, had been killed by the black pall of smoke.
Overall, more than six million French citizens, resembling “an anthill that had been knocked over,” flooded south—the largest single movement of people in Europe since the Dark Ages. The scene was pure chaos, filled with “all the ugliness of panic, defeat, and demoralization” of a disintegrating society, remarked the American diplomat George Kennan, who witnessed the flight. Thousands of children became separated from their families, and for months afterward, anguished parents placed ads in newspapers trying to find their missing offspring. According to one refugee, “We had lost all points of reference. All our habits and all the rules of life were floating.”
Several weeks earlier, Marie-Madeleine had had the foresight to send her own children—ten-year-old Christian and eight-year-old Béatrice—to Noirmoutier, an island off France’s Atlantic coast, in the care of her mother. She had had advance warning from Navarre, who, before he left for the front, told her that the situation was hopeless and that when the time came for her to leave Paris, she should head for his country home in Oloron-Sainte-Marie, a village in southwestern France near the French-Spanish border. She followed his advice, setting off by car with her maid, her dog, and a married couple who were friends of hers.
For a day and a half, her Citroën inched slowly southward in an endless line of cars, wagons, trucks, taxis, delivery vans, and even pushcarts and hay wagons. Other refugees—pushing wheelbarrows and prams piled high with children and possessions—trudged along both sides of the road. An American journalist, caught up in the middle of the exodus, said it was like “a stream of lava flowing past, the unstoppable river which came from the unimaginable eruption somewhere in the north.”
Finally, Marie-Madeleine and her party reached Berry, a rural region in the Loire Valley, where she hoped to stay with a close friend, Aurore Sand—the granddaughter of the famed novelist George Sand. Sand’s house, however, was already filled with friends and relatives fleeing the Germans, so she handed over to Marie-Madeleine the keys to the historic Château de Nohant, her grandmother’s home.
At the château, which was more like a large country house than a castle, Sand had written many of her books and hosted some of the most important writers, painters, and composers of her time, including Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, Delacroix, and Liszt. Arguably her most noted guest was her lover, Frédéric Chopin, who lived off and on at Nohant for more than eight years.
After a meager supper that evening, Marie-Madeleine wandered through the château, finally sitting down at a piano in the salon. It was here, she knew, that Chopin had composed some of his masterpieces, including the Polonaise in A-flat Major, the Sonata Funèbre, two nocturnes, and four mazurkas.
That night, however, she identified most with another of Chopin’s works—his Étude op. 10, no. 12, otherwise known as the Revolutionary Étude. An exile from his native Poland, Chopin had written the etude to commemorate his countrymen’s celebrated—and failed—uprising against their Russian occupiers in 1831. Marie-Madeleine caressed the piano’s keys and then began to play, pouring her grief and rage over the impending fall of France into Chopin’s passionate, thundering piece. Afterward, she went to sleep in his bed.
She clung to her anger over the next several days as she and her companions continued their journey, traveling by night to avoid the Stuka dive bombers that strafed the refugee-crowded roads and sleeping by day in ditches, woods, and other places that were hidden from view. In one of the many small towns and villages through which they passed, she and her party were given shattering news: Marshal Pétain, who had just replaced Paul Reynaud as France’s prime minister, had ordered French troops to lay down their arms and had petitioned Nazi Germany for an armistice.
In a broadcast to his countrymen, the eighty-four-year-old Pétain attributed France’s defeat to “too few arms, too few allies,” and the country’s own moral failures, which included a lack of discipline and an unfortunate “spirit of pleasure.” At the same time, he expressed his compassion and concern for the millions of refugees still choking France’s roads and appealed to them and their compatriots to “rally to the government over which I preside during this difficult ordeal.”
As shocked as she was by Pétain’s capitulation, Fourcade was even more stunned by the joyful reaction of the people around her to the news. They laughed, kissed each other, and drank to Pétain’s health. Such happy scenes, which the novelist Arthur Koestler later described as “the apocalypse [disguised] as a family picnic,” were repeated throughout the country. As Fourcade saw it, the French, in their understandable relief that the war had ended for them, failed to recognize that in the process, they and their country had lost their souls.
On June 25, Pétain announced the terms of the armistice. German troops would occupy the northern three-fifths of the country, including Paris, the industrial north, and the Atlantic coast, with its valuable string of seaports. The remaining two-fifths, to be controlled by Pétain’s government and to be known as the free zone, would be made up of France’s southern provinces. The French also would retain control of French North Africa and the country’s other colonial possessions, as well as its fleet. The spa town of Vichy, in the center of France, was designated the new French capital.
Stopping for a few days in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a lovely little seaside village on the Atlantic, Marie-Madeleine was invited to dinner by acquaintances there. They showed no interest in the stories she told them of what she had seen during her flight from Paris—abandoned toddlers crying for their parents, demoralized soldiers throwing down their arms and joining the exodus, refugees huddling in fear as German dive bombers appeared overhead. When she was finished, her acquaintances merely shrugged. It was time, they told her, to forget about such misfortunes and focus on the future and France’s return to normality.
Appalled by such complacency, Marie-Madeleine refused to heed their advice, launching into a long diatribe against what she saw as Pétain’s cowardice. Her hosts had had enough. “How dare you say this!” one of them snapped. “How dare you insult the name of the marshal!” Marie-Madeleine sat in silence for the rest of the meal. Never had she felt so alone.
In early July, she finally made it to Navarre’s country home in Oloron-Sainte-Marie. His family, however, had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. For more than a month, Marie-Madeleine stayed with them while awaiting news of his fate. Finally, word came that he was alive, although badly hurt in a battle near the Maginot Line. Late in August, he hobbled home, forty pounds lighter and in terrible pain from unhealed bullet wounds in his neck and back. Despite his grave injuries, he had escaped from the German hospital to which he had been taken and had made his way several hundred miles across occupied France, slipping into the free zone and back to Oloron-Sainte-Marie.
As he recuperated, Marie-Madeleine did her best to tamp down her impatience over her prolonged stay in this peaceful rural haven. Finally, she could contain herself no longer. She pointedly noted to Navarre that Charles de Gaulle, his longtime colleague and rival, was now in London. The most junior brigadier general in the French army, de Gaulle had been appointed undersecretary of war just eight days before his dramatic escape to the British capital on June 17. He was the only French official willing to abandon his homeland to continue the fight against Hitler. From London, de Gaulle had made a BBC broadcast to France, urging his countrymen to join him in a movement to resist both the Vichy government and the Nazis. “Whatever happens,” he declared, “the flame of French resistance should not and will not be extinguished.”
Marie-Madeleine argued that they should follow de Gaulle to London and become part of his Free French operation. Her mentor rejected the idea outright. In England, he said, they would be refugees, just like de Gaulle, dependent on the British for everything. At that point, almost no one in the British government, with the prominent exception of Winston Churchill, took de Gaulle and his minuscule band of followers seriously.
Instead, Navarre said, he and Marie-Madeleine should remain in France and resist from within. The place to start, he said, was the country’s epicenter of defeatism—Vichy itself. He had many contacts there, he pointed out, thanks to his prewar political activities.
Marie-Madeleine’s heart sank. It was a phony capital, she told Navarre. What could they possibly accomplish there? He replied that in order to collect intelligence, they must go to its source—France’s current seat of government. Only there could they learn more about the country’s political and military situation.
Less than a week later, they were on their way to Vichy.