The Nazis’ nemesis: a heroine called Hedgehog
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War
Lynne Olson
A few weeks before Christmas 1940, France’s chief spy slipped into a cafe in the grimy port city of Marseille. The super-spook was there to meet a new recruit called Gabriel Rivière, a maritime expert who was ready to spill the beans about the manoeuvres of Hitler’s fleet in the Mediterranean. Although Rivière understood that discretion was essential, he nonetheless found it impossible to maintain a proper poker face. ‘Good God,’ he blurted out as his new boss came into view. ‘It is a woman!’
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade in 1980, aged 70. Aristocratic Fourcade had spent her 20s in the upper echelons of Parisian society. A chance conversation at a dinner party in 1936 led to her being recruited by France’s top intelligence officer
And not just any woman either. Thirty-one-year-old Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was blonde and chic – the kind of girl whom most conservative Frenchmen believed belonged at home looking after her two children and her handsome officer husband. Instead here she was, travelling undercover across occupied France, building a network of 3,000 agents, among them merchants, aristocrats and even a famous former child film star, to work for the overthrow of the Nazi invaders. It was the job of these resistance operatives to gather intelligence on everything from landmines to U-boats. Fourcade would, in turn, pass on the information to her handlers in MI6. Not that the British secret service had any idea they were dealing with a woman. As far as they were concerned, their main French contact was simply ‘Hedgehog’, a code name Fourcade had chosen because, while the creature might look harmless enough, ‘even a lion would hesitate to bite’.
In this deeply researched book, American journalist Lynne Olson tells the story of this extraordinary and overlooked heroine.
Aristocratic Fourcade had spent her 20s in the upper echelons of Parisian society. A chance conversation at a dinner party in 1936 led to her being recruited by France’s top intelligence officer. By 1940, with France having fallen to the Nazis, Hedgehog was constantly on the move, disguised with a different hair colour every week, sometimes even resorting to comedy dentures to change her features. She carried cyanide with her at all times, in case she was captured. In fact she was held twice by the Nazis. And she escaped twice, once stripping down to her underwear to squeeze through the bars of her prison.
Fourcade’s work saved thousands of British, American and French lives. So why haven’t we heard of her?
Her work saved thousands of British, American and French lives. So why haven’t we heard of her? Olson believes that it comes down to old-fashioned chauvinism. At the end of the war, General Charles de Gaulle designated 1,038 people as resistance heroes, only six of whom were women. Fourcade was not among them. Could it be, suggests Olson, that de Gaulle was punishing Hedgehog for choosing to pass on her information not to de Gaulle’s own Free French organisation but directly to the British? When she died in 1989, 20 years after de Gaulle, Fourcade became the first woman in history to be granted a funeral at Les Invalides, the site where France buries its greatest military heroes.
Olson features such a vast cast list that it sometimes feels as if her depiction of minor characters – the agents who fed Fourcade information – is a little rushed. Each one of these brave souls, you feel, deserves a book as good as this one all to themselves. Until that time, this splendid biography of their remarkable leader will do very nicely indeed.