Looking more like an operetta stage set than the capital of a major European country, Vichy was as far removed from the chaos and fear afflicting much of the rest of France as one could possibly imagine. But that was exactly what the Pétain government wanted—a quiet, out-of-the-way place, with no smoke-belching factories, restive workers, or would-be resisters.
For more than two centuries, Vichy, famed for its reportedly health-restoring spring water, had attracted the well-to-do from all over Europe, who came there each year to take the cure. Along with its baths, Vichy boasted a casino, restaurants, tearooms, daily band concerts, and several Belle Époque hotels. When they arrived in early July, Pétain and his staff had taken over the Hotel du Parc, with its wrought-iron balconies and rooms awash in blue and pink toile de Jouy fabric depicting charming, restful pastoral scenes. While most ministries had been assigned offices in other hotels, the ministry of the interior, responsible for policing the free zone, was incongruously housed in the town’s sprawling Grand Casino, which boasted a Moorish cupola encased in gold tiles.
“Never was Vichy…as busy and as gay as in the summer of defeat in 1940,” noted the CBS correspondent David Schoenbrun. Wives and mistresses of government officials, in their best summer dresses, took daily strolls along the town’s tree-lined main avenue, opposite the beautiful Parc des Sources. There were endless queues in front of Vichy’s most fashionable restaurants, with the competition for tables particularly fierce at the dining room of the Hotel du Parc, where Pétain and leading members of the government held court.
The cheerful holiday atmosphere, however, was just a facade. Behind it, the government had embarked on a mission to kill parliamentary democracy in France and install an authoritarian regime modeled on that of Nazi Germany. On July 8, in the casino’s theater, the French parliament yielded to pressure and voted to turn over all its powers to Pétain and, by extension, to Pierre Laval, Pétain’s deputy and the power behind the throne. Henceforth, the legislature would assemble only at Pétain’s request. He in turn would govern at the sufferance of the Germans—and would continue to do so only as long as he did what they ordered.
After several conversations with Pétain and others in Vichy, William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France, wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt that “the physical and moral defeat [of the French leaders] has been so absolute that they have accepted completely for France the fate of becoming a province of Nazi Germany. Moreover, in order that they may have as many companions in misery as possible, they hope that England will be rapidly and completely defeated by Germany.”
From its beginning, the Vichy government instituted policies of persecution and repression of French citizens, particularly Jews. In early July 1940, less than a month after France’s capitulation, Vichy began enforcing anti-Semitic measures in its territory without receiving orders from Berlin to do so.
Yet despite the growing oppression, Pétain and his government could do no wrong in the eyes of many if not most of the French, regardless of which part of the country they lived in. They saw Pétain as their savior, whose wisdom and firm direction would help heal the trauma of their country’s collapse. Shortly after the capitulation, Jean Guéhenno, an anti-German writer and literary critic in Paris, noted with disgust that the French radio “says ‘the Marshal’ in the same way it would say ‘my love.’ ” According to the French historian Henri Michel, “the Marshal’s authority was accepted by all with more than resignation. He offered consolation and hope.”
When Pétain had announced the armistice terms to the French people, he told them that a “new spirit of sacrifice” was needed. In order to recover from the anguish of defeat, he declared, France must undergo a complete transformation of its society, adhering to the conservative spirit of his government’s new motto—Travail, famille, patrie—rather than to France’s national motto since the French Revolution—Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Obedience to authority and devotion to work, he made clear, must replace the idea of freedom and equality. There must be a return to tradition, to working the land, and to so-called family values, which in his and Vichy’s eyes meant accepting men as the unquestioned authority figures of the family and viewing women solely through the prism of motherhood and caregiving.
Even before Pétain, France had treated women as second-class citizens, refusing them the right to vote, to own or control property without permission from male relatives, or to have a bank account in their own name. As was true in America and elsewhere, many in France were profoundly shocked by the emergence of large numbers of young women in the 1920s and 1930s who had made clear their contempt for conventional feminine behavior through their independent ways, which included bobbed hair, short skirts, dancing, drinking, smoking, getting jobs, and having premarital sex.
In patriarchal France, the behavior of the “new woman” was considered brazen and threatening, and the Vichy government struck back hard. Among other new restrictions, it decreed the death penalty for performing an abortion, made it much more difficult to get a divorce, barred married women from working in the public sector, and ordered all female students in high school to take classes in housekeeping.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, of course, embodied everything the new regime detested. She was separated from her husband, had a mind of her own and ambitions that stretched far beyond housekeeping, and had given up care of her children in order to take part in a nascent resistance campaign against the Germans. “She never operated according to society’s rules; she followed her own rules,” said a longtime acquaintance. “Basically, she acted like a man.”
Fourcade in turn was disgusted by Pétain’s government and everything it stood for, and she hated its seat of power from the start. To her, Vichy was nothing but a nest of gossip, infighting, and intrigue, filled, as she put it, with the “aristocracy of defeat”—politicians, businessmen, civil servants, military officers, and others—all seeking jobs or other personal or political gain from the new government.
Conspiracies were being hatched everywhere. The conspiratorial Navarre managed to convince Pétain that he had given up his rebellious ways and now fully supported his former boss’s policies. “The Marshal received me as if I was his son,” Navarre told an acquaintance. “He does not look touched by the cyclone. To see him, one would believe that the disaster that has befallen France was only a badly cooked meal.”
During their meeting, he persuaded Pétain to make him an official of the Légion Française des Combattants, a new national organization of military veterans created and funded by the government. Fourcade greeted the news with unconcealed exasperation. How would such a group fit into their plans for resistance? she asked. What exactly were they doing in Vichy, anyway? And what was her role supposed to be? Perhaps, she said, it would be better if she went to London after all.
Navarre tried to calm her down. “You know very well that I need you,” he said. He added that they were going to do what they had done in the late 1930s: create a network to provide intelligence about the German armed forces, only this time those based in France. The British, he noted, were in desperate need of such information to help them survive the German onslaught that they were about to face.
But, he said, he personally must be above suspicion. His League position would allow him to circulate throughout the free zone, making contacts, collecting information, and covertly drumming up political support for a future transformation of the League into an instrument of resistance. In the meantime, he said, pointing his cigarette at Fourcade, she would do the actual work of recruiting agents and setting up the initial intelligence operation.
She was stunned by his directive. How could she possibly do that? She was a woman, after all, barely thirty years old. Did he really believe military men like himself would accept her as a leader? He swept her objections aside, pointing out that as his deputy in the interwar years, she had amassed considerable experience in the handling of agents and other aspects of the labyrinthine world of collecting intelligence. And as for being a woman, he said, that in itself was an excellent reason for her to do it because no one would suspect her.
When she failed to respond, Navarre shrugged and said that if she wasn’t strong enough to take the job, he would do it himself. After hesitating for a moment, Fourcade decided she had no choice but to give in.
AT HIS MEETING WITH PÉTAIN, Navarre had persuaded the marshal to authorize and pay for the establishment of a reception and rehabilitation center for the many thousands of former servicemen who were still roaming the country after their sudden demobilization. Under the armistice, Vichy was allowed an army of just one hundred thousand men, which meant that the vast majority of France’s wartime forces were no longer needed.
The idea of the center, Navarre told Pétain, was to provide meals, medical care, rest, recreation, and job advice, which hopefully would ease these young men’s transition back to civilian life and keep them under control. What he didn’t reveal was that the real purpose of the center would be to identify and enlist a select few as spies for his and Fourcade’s new operation, to be known as Crusade. It would be, he told Marie-Madeleine, “the first stronghold of the interior resistance.”
With Pétain’s blessing and Vichy funds, Navarre and Fourcade leased one of the few hotels not appropriated for government offices and hired a small staff to run it, with Fourcade as its manager. Radio Vichy, meanwhile, announced the center’s opening, inviting all former servicemen to come and take advantage of its programs.
From its first day, it was packed with former officers and enlisted men, lured by the promise of comfortable rooms, good food, a clinic, and recreational facilities. The place was so crowded that few of its guests noticed the intense conversations that Fourcade struck up with various individuals on the ground floor. Nor did they pay attention when some of those men disappeared up the stairs to the second floor, where the real work of recruitment went on.
This venture of Fourcade’s and Navarre’s was a rare phenomenon in France so early in the war. As the historian Julian Jackson observed, “The hackneyed phrase ‘he or she joined the Resistance’ is entirely inappropriate to 1940–41. Before it could be joined, resistance had to be invented….Resistance was a territory without maps.”
In the fall of 1940, most French citizens were still in a state of shock, not sure how to react, much less fight back. As one Frenchman remarked, “The French have no experience of clandestine life; they do not even know how to be silent or how to hide.” At that point, too, the German occupiers seemed all-powerful. For most of the French, the paramount aim was simple survival.
Further complicating the issue was the fact that France’s own government was actively cooperating with the Nazis. For many in the country, disobeying the dictates of Pétain and his men would have caused a greater crisis of conscience than obeying them. That was particularly true for most current and former members of the armed services, for whom unquestioning obedience to their superiors was an inviolable rule and who, in any case, revered Pétain perhaps even more than did the general public. In addition, the armistice explicitly prohibited members of the French military from engaging in any form of anti-German activity.
Yet it’s also important to note that Navarre and Fourcade were not alone in plotting resistance within the confines of Vichy. Indeed, many of the earliest resisters in France were followers of Pétain, and a substantial number of them could be found in the Vichy government. Such facts fly in the face of conventional wisdom, which advances the theory that everyone in Vichy marched in lockstep with Pétain and agreed with his policy of collaboration with the Germans. In reality, Vichy was far from being a monolithic regime. It was made up of competing factions, drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and with different objectives.
One of those factions, albeit small, was populated by former and current military officers who revered Pétain as a great hero but who also were violently opposed to cooperating with the Germans. Prominent among them were Navarre and other members of the military intelligence community, who had been responsible for warning successive French governments in the 1930s about the growing threat of Hitler.
Ever since the late 1800s, France’s intelligence services had viewed Germany as the country’s most dangerous enemy and had directed most of their spying efforts against the Germans. In doing so, they had cooperated closely with their British counterparts, particularly MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence gathering agency. For more than fifteen years before the war, MI6 had maintained a significant presence in Paris, with British and French agents sharing information on Hitler’s regime, including the activities of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence and counterintelligence department, and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), which collected intelligence for Heinrich Himmler’s SS.
The most notable anti-German rebel was General Gabriel Cochet, a senior officer in the French air force and a former head of the Deuxième Bureau. Two hours after Pétain announced the country’s capitulation to Germany, Cochet called his staff together and told them that the marshal was wrong and that collaboration with Hitler would be a catastrophe. “We must learn to hide what we are doing, to camouflage our movements and our arms,” he added. “We must at all costs continue the struggle against the enemy.” Three months later, Cochet issued a public proclamation calling on the French people to “watch, resist, and unite”—and followed it with a succession of new tracts advocating resistance that began to attract small, uncoordinated groups of followers. Cochet could get away with such activities because for the first few months after the armistice, the Vichy government did little to stop such expressions of rebellion.
As it turned out, the Deuxième Bureau itself was a hotbed of anti-German activity. Its current head, Colonel Louis Baril, had sent a message of support and solidarity to MI6 shortly after the armistice. Baril’s deputy, Colonel Louis Rivet, insisted to his staff that “the fight must go on, whatever happens,” adding, “No other attitude is acceptable. Suspending hostilities for us is worse than an unforgivable mistake; it would be tantamount to infamy.”
Under Rivet’s aegis, military intelligence officials set up an undercover organization to track down German spies who had infiltrated the free zone in violation of the armistice. Called the Société des Travaux Ruraux (Society of Rural Works), this counterespionage outfit disguised itself as a private company whose job was to maintain and build rural sewage and drainage systems. Its real mission was to identify, arrest, and prosecute German agents.
According to the terms of the armistice, the only German officials allowed in the free zone were members of the so-called Armistice Commission, an organization whose mission was to monitor French compliance with the armistice. In fact, the commission was riddled with agents from the Abwehr and Gestapo. Dozens of other operatives from German intelligence and counterintelligence services also flooded the free zone, using various false identities. Among their tasks was to gather information on anti-Nazi activists who had found refuge in Vichy France.
Of all the covert anti-German activities carried out by Vichy military officers, however, none was as crucial as a secret codebreaking operation at a secluded château in the countryside of Provence. Its head was Captain Gustave Bertrand, the director of the Deuxième Bureau’s radio and cryptography department.
In the early 1930s, Bertrand had acquired from a German informant top-secret documents related to the Reich’s fiendishly complex Enigma code. When his government showed no interest in his coup, Bertrand passed the material to Polish cryptographers, who had long given top priority to breaking the military codes of Germany, Poland’s hereditary enemy. As a result of Bertrand’s largesse, the Poles in 1934 became the first to crack the Enigma code.
After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, several of its top codebreakers fled to France, where they worked with Bertrand and his subordinates at the French military’s radio intelligence and cryptography center, housed in an elegant château about twenty-five miles northeast of Paris. Bertrand’s department cooperated closely with the British government’s codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park, which, just before the war began, had received from the Poles a copy of the Enigma machine, along with detailed information on how to use it.
When the Germans marched into Paris, Bertrand evacuated his French and Polish codebreakers—not to a safe location outside France but, in an audacious and breathtakingly risky move, to the Provençal château in the free zone. The cryptographers rarely left the château, whose ground-floor windows were barred and kept shut, making working conditions distinctly unpleasant in the hot, sultry summer of 1940. As a further precaution, three cars were ready, day and night, to whisk the team and its equipment away in case of a sudden German or Vichy police raid.
For all their difficulties, the codebreakers in France never lost contact with Bletchley Park. Both operations continued their work of cracking the various Enigma military codes, with the Provence-based group providing the British with decrypts about the movements, locations, and equipment of the Reich’s air, ground, and naval forces in France and other occupied countries.
WITH THE EXCEPTION OF Bertrand’s operation, few of the early Vichy resisters had a clear idea in the first weeks of the armistice about how to translate their resolve into action. Like the others, Fourcade and Navarre were feeling their way. How would their new network function? Who would pay for it? How would they get the information collected by their agents to the British? And for Fourcade, the haunting question remained: How would these operatives react to a woman as their leader? Would they obey her?
Among her first recruits were a young air force pilot named Maurice Coustenoble and two of his colleagues, who had fetched up at the center after weeks of wandering around the country. Friends since flying school, they had fought in the battle for France and were furious when the armistice was announced.
Fourcade was initially doubtful about Coustenoble because of his unprepossessing appearance: slicked-back hair, waxed mustache, large dark eyes, and slender, slight frame. What could he have been in civilian life, she wondered. A professional ballroom dancer, perhaps, or some little clerk? But she was soon won over by his passion and directness.
Coustenoble told her that when his plane crash-landed near Bordeaux, he set fire to it and swore he’d find another way to fight. With his two friends, he had traveled throughout France trying to persuade other pilots, as well as anyone else they happened to meet, to join their effort. When they met Fourcade and discovered the real purpose of the center, they pulled from their pockets countless scraps of paper with names and addresses of would-be resisters scribbled on them.
Like most of the young men Fourcade enlisted, the three new recruits wanted to challenge the Germans right away. She told them that was impossible. The only way they could fight back now, she said, was by gathering intelligence. She offered to put them to work immediately. Their first task would be to recruit couriers for the network—people who had jobs like driving trucks or working on the railroad, which allowed them to travel unhindered throughout the country.
If they thought the job was too much for them, she said, they should say so. They looked at her pityingly, and she guessed what they were thinking: “It’s odd that she should want to tell us what to do.” For a moment, she feared they would back out. But after a brief pause, Coustenoble announced that they were ready.
As the weeks passed, this initial trickle of recruits for Crusade became a small stream. Most of the newcomers were former members of the French army and air force; almost none had served in the navy. Like their counterparts in the other two services, naval personnel believed strongly in unquestioning obedience to their superiors, almost all of whom strongly supported France’s capitulation to the Nazis. But they also had a very personal reason for abhorring the thought of working with Britain against Germany. On July 3, 1940, the British navy, under Winston Churchill’s orders, had destroyed much of the French fleet, then based in North Africa, to keep it out of German hands. In a matter of minutes, British shells had blown up the battleship Bretagne and destroyed or badly damaged several other ships. During the bombardment, more than twelve hundred sailors were killed.
The French people were outraged by what they saw as a deliberate massacre by the British—but none more so than the victims’ naval comrades. After the British attack, Navarre grumbled, the odds of recruiting former navy personnel for Crusade had dropped to zero.
HENRI SCHAERRER
For a couple of months, it appeared he was right. Then Henri Schaerrer appeared on the scene. Swiss by birth, the twenty-four-year-old Schaerrer had been a mechanical engineer in France’s merchant marine before enlisting in the navy in April 1939. Assigned to the Bretagne at the beginning of the war, he was stationed on a destroyer at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940 and barely escaped death when the ship was torpedoed and sunk.
From the moment they met, Fourcade recognized Schaerrer as a force of nature. Fun-loving and boyishly handsome, he exhibited a passion, energy, determination, and taste for adventure equaled by few of the other recruits she had signed up. To her and Navarre, Schaerrer promised to rally naval and merchant marine crewmen to the cause. He proposed to start in Marseille, the free zone’s only major port, more than two hundred miles southeast of Vichy.
Along with Maurice Coustenoble, Schaerrer would prove to be one of the most valuable first links in the Crusade chain. Keeping his pledge to the network’s leaders, he soon would add another crucial link—a naval officer who had almost died aboard the doomed Bretagne.