Marie-Madeleine Fourcade

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Marie-Madeleine Fourcade in 1944

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade (née Bridou) (born November 8, 1909 in Marseille ; † July 20, 1989 in Paris ) was a French resistance fighter or secret agent of the Résistance and MI6 and from October 1980 to September 1981 a member of the European Parliament .

Under the code name Hérisson (translated hedgehog ) and POZ 55 , she was the successor of the previous leader Georges Loustaunau-Lacau of the French resistance network Réseau Alliance within the Resistance during the occupation of France in World War II .

Childhood, adolescence and early adulthood

Born in Marseille, she grew up in Shanghai , where her father worked for the French maritime service. There she acquired a driver's and pilot's license .

At a young age she married the future Colonel Édouard Méric with whom she lived for a while in Morocco and with whom she had two children; but because of the couple's estrangement, she did not see her children for years.

Resistance

In 1936 Fourcade met the former French secret service officer, Major Georges Loustaunau-Lacau , code-named Navarre . Marie-Madeleine worked with Georges Loustaunau-Lacau on the magazine L'ordre national , a secret service journal . Georges believed espionage was vital to the war effort. He recruited Marie-Madeleine for a network of spies and for work on L'ordre national. At the time she was barely 30 years old. Their first mission after the occupation of France was to divide unoccupied France into sections and then recruit informants in the previously divided areas. One example of her espionage success was her agent Jeannie Rousseau , who extracted information from a Wehrmacht officer about the Wehrmacht's secret missile program. This included information about the V2 rocket and its testing in Peenemünde .

In July 1941, just over a year after the German invasion, Georges was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. Georges had appointed Marie-Madeleine as his successor in the event of his arrest, who would continue his work. At the end of 1942, when the part of France ruled by Vichy was also occupied by Germany, she fled to London, where she was recruited by the British secret service and under MI6 officer Kenneth Cohen, who worked with the French secret service ( Direction Générale des Etudes et Recherches ) and was in contact with the Special Operations Executive . So she returned to France as an MI6 agent during the war to join the resistance of her spy network and managed to avoid being captured until the end of the war.

Life after the war

Fourcade she organized the publication of the Mémorial de l'Alliance , which was dedicated to the 429 dead of the resistance group. In addition, she maintained relationships with the many contacts, former resistance fighters and survivors.

Despite her high position in the French resistance, the leader of the longest-running espionage network, Charles de Gaulle did not include her among the 1,038 people he described as resistance heroes (including only 6 women in total). She did not receive the Ordre de la Liberation , although her ex-husband Édouard Méric received it.

She remarried, taking the surname Fourcade and having more children. She and her husband fought for Charles de Gaulle's election victory and eventually became a member of the European Parliament . So she campaigned for the end of the Lebanese civil war and for the indictment against Klaus Barbie in Lyon .

From 1962 Fourcade was chairman of the resistance committee and a jury that had to decide in 1981 on the honor of Maurice Papon . She received the Legion of Honor and was Vice President of the International Union of Resistance.

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade died on July 20, 1989 at the age of 80 in the military hospital of Val-de-Grâce . The government and the few survivors of the resistance group paid their last respects on July 26th in the Invalides Cathedral; she is the first woman for whom a funeral service was held there. She was then buried in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris.

Noah's Ark

Fourcade published her war experiences in 1968 with the book L'Arche de Noé , which was later translated into English in abbreviated form under the title Noah's Ark . In it, she describes how, as a young woman in her early 30s, she became the head of the secret service network. The name of the book is a reference to the name that the National Socialists gave the network because it assigned animal names as code names to its members. Fourcades was a hedgehog. Their job was to collect information about the German troop and naval movements and logistics in France and to transmit this information to Great Britain via a network of secret radio transmitters and couriers. It was extremely dangerous work, and many of Fourcade's closest associates were captured, tortured and killed by the Gestapo . However, some managed to escape, including Fourcade herself, who twice escaped capture. Arrested with her employees on November 10, 1942, she was able to escape by a stroke of luck and was taken by plane to London, from where she continued the network. After returning to France to run the local network, she was captured a second time. But she managed to escape again. She undressed in the early hours of the morning and was able to force her petite body between the bars of the cell window. At the end of the war she was recognized for her services.

The foreword to the British-American translation was written by Kenneth Cohen, who was your “controller” or contact person in the Secret Intelligence Service during the war and post-war years ; she in turn became his son's godmother .

See also

reception

literature

  • Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler , Random House, March 5th, 2019
  • Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, un chef de la Résistance - Michèle Cointet - Perrin - 2006
  • David Ignatius : After five decades, a spy tells her tale . In: Washington Post , December 28, 1998. 
  • Noah's Ark, - Marie-Madeleine Fourcade OBE, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1974
  • L'Arche de Noé - Marie-Madeleine Fourcade - Fayard - 1968

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b SPIEGEL ONLINE: Second World War: secret agent Marie-Madeleine Méric against Hitler. Retrieved December 20, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Kati Marton , Remembering a Woman Who Was a Leader of the French Resistance , The New York Times, '' March 12, 2019.
  3. ↑ Kathryn Atwood: Women Heroes of World War II . Chicago Review Press, 2011, pp. 61 .
  4. ^ Atwood: Women Heroes of World War II , p. 61.
  5. ↑ Atwood: Women Heroes of World War II , p. 62.
  6. ^ Atwood: Women Heroes of World War II , p. 61.
  7. ^ Atwood: Women Heroes of World War II , p. 63.
personal data
SURNAME Fourcade, Marie-Madeleine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mickey (alias Hérisson)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French resistance fighter in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Marseille
DATE OF DEATH July 20, 1989
Place of death Paris