Madame Fourcade’s Secret War

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The little-known true story of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade,the woman who headed the largest spy network in occupied France during World War IIfrom the bestselling author of Citizens of London and Last Hope Island “Brava to Lynne Olson for a biography that should challenge any outdated assumptions about who deserves to be called a hero.”—The Washington Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE WASHINGTON POST In 1941 a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwomana young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamourbecame the leader of a vast intelligence organization—the only woman to serve as a chef de résistance during the war. Strong-willedindependentand a lifelong rebel against her country’s conservativepatriarchal societyMarie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. Her group’s name was Alliancebut the Gestapo dubbed it Noah’s Ark because its agents used the names of animals as their aliases. The name Marie-Madeleine chose for herself was Hedgehog: a tough little animalunthreatening in appearancethatas a colleague of hers put it“even a lion would hesitate to bite.” No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence—including providing American and British military commanders with a 55-foot-long map of the beaches and roads on which the Allies would land on D-Day—as Alliance. The Gestapo pursued them relentlesslycapturingtorturingand executing hundreds of its three thousand agentsincluding Fourcade’s own lover and many of her key spies. Although Fourcadethe mother of two young childrenmoved her headquarters every few weeksconstantly changing her hair colorclothingand identityshe was captured twice by the Nazis. Both times she managed to escape—once by slipping naked through the bars of her jail cell—and continued to hold her network together even as it repeatedly threatened to crumble around her. Nowin this dramatic account of the war that split France in two and forced its people to live side by side with their hated German occupiersLynne Olson tells the fascinating story of a woman who stood up for her nationher fellow citizensand herself. “Fast-paced and impressively researched . . . Olson writes with verve and a historian’s authority. . . . With this gripping taleLynne Olson pays [Marie-Madeleine Fourcade] what history has so far denied her. Franceslow to confront the stain of Vichywould do well to finally honor a fighter most of us would want in our foxhole.”—The New York Times Book Review