The French spy who smuggled herself around in a mail bag

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was one of the great heroes of World War II.

A portrait of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade taken in 1958. Picture: Getty

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was going to be a concert pianist. She played the piano for eight hours a day and went to one of the best music conservatories in Paris. But she never did receive the applause of an audience for her musical talents – instead she received the applause of the Allied armed forces, as well as an Order of the British Empire, for her espionage talents. Fourcade was the only female leader of a Resistance network in France during WWII, and she didn’t lead just any network. She led Alliance, the largest Resistance network in the country, which numbered 3000 agents at its peak and was widely regarded by the Allies as one of the most effective.

Natasha Lester’s novel The Mademoiselle Alliance is based on the life of a magnificent World War II spy.

How did a woman who dreamed of playing Chopin on a concert stage become the woman who smuggled herself to Madrid in a mail bag, who escaped prison by squeezing her body between the cell bars, and whom MI6 called “the copybook beautiful spy”?

It began with her unorthodox childhood. Fourcade grew up in the French Concession in Shanghai and was allowed to explore the city with relative freedom alongside her siblings and nanny. The death of her father when she was in her teens took her back to France, although she didn’t stay for long — at age 17, she fell in love with a French military intelligence officer whose imminent posting to Morocco appealed to her adventurous spirit.

While Fourcade flourished in Morocco – learning Arabic, helping deliver babies at a local women’s clinic, picking up a little of the intelligence business when visiting tribal leaders with her husband – her marriage did not. Fourcade loved people and conversation, music and dancing. Her husband didn’t. She returned to France in the early 1930s accompanied by her two children and the whispers that trailed any woman separated from her husband in that era.

But Fourcade didn’t let it quash her; she took up rally car driving, learned to fly aeroplanes, and became a journalist for Radio Cité, interviewing the intelligent and artistic women who made up Paris society, but who were overlooked by the traditional press because of their gender.

A chance meeting at an evening salon in 1936 put Fourcade in the path of military officer Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, who adopted the code name Navarre. Navarre recognised Fourcade’s passion for France, her talent for intelligence work and her venturesome spirit, and he persuaded her to work with him on starting a newspaper to show the French government and the French people that Hitler was preparing for all-out war.

In 1940, when Navarre’s predictions came horrifyingly true, he started a Resistance network whose goal was to gather intelligence to help the Allies invade Europe and expel the Nazis – and to help the Allies survive until that could happen. He made Fourcade his chief of staff, codenamed POZ55, but he didn’t tell MI6 in London, whose support he’d secured, that POZ55 was a woman. Under that moniker initially, Fourcade was responsible for recruiting the agents of the Alliance network until Navarre was arrested in mid-1941.

Then, despite the fact that many Alliance agents were military men decades her senior, despite the fact that MI6 assumed she was a man, despite the fact that she had two children she’d had to send away to school and to relatives to be cared for while she concentrated on freeing France from Nazis, 31-year-old Fourcade became the leader of Alliance. From that moment on, she saw her children only for brief snatches of time because she was always on the run from the Nazis.

It’s impossible in such a limited account to show just how brave and extraordinary Fourcade was, but two incidents stand out. In late-1941, the Nazis raided her headquarters, took her radios and money, and arrested her agents. Luckily, Fourcade had had the foresight to stay elsewhere and thus avoided arrest. But her big problem now was that she had to get in touch with MI6 to ask for more radios: How to do that without a radio? The only way was to go to them.

Marie-Madeleine's overgrown grave site, photographed by the author.

That meant hiding herself in a diplomatic mailbag measuring just four feet by two feet. Fourcade had to fold herself in half, tucking her head over her knees for a journey via car and train to Madrid that was meant take about two hours, a feat of endurance for anyone, let alone a woman who suffered from painful hip dysplasia. Unfortunately, a change of train schedule meant she was forced to stay in the bag for 10 hours, without food and water, and in absolute agony. She did it because she had to – revealing her presence in the bag would have meant the end of her network and the arrest of both herself and the agent who had been authorised to escort the bag to Spain. She couldn’t walk for days when she was finally let out of the bag in Spain and had to be carried into the British embassy. After surviving that experience, revealing to the British that she was a woman seemed almost a minor problem!

The second incident occurred in 1944 when Fourcade was arrested for the second time. She’d already escaped prison once before; she’d just have to do it again, she reasoned. So she hoisted herself up and squeezed her body, inch by inch, through the bars of the cell. In her memoir, she describes it as “sheer agony”, and that she thought she’d torn her ears off. But if she didn’t escape and warn her agents that the Nazis were on to them, they’d be arrested, and she’d already lost too many people to prisons and death.

Under Fourcade, the Alliance network fed MI6 intelligence about U-boat movements for years, allowing the Allies to blow up the U-boats before they destroyed the ships bringing supplies to Britain – without supplies, you can’t plan an invasion. Alliance secretly gathered and then sent MI6 plans for the V-1 and V-2 rockets; the Allies then bombed the manufacturing plant, thus denting and delaying the impact of those weapons. Alliance agents also created a 50-footlong map showing every gun emplacement, observation tower, minefield and coastal battery along what would become the D-Day beaches – without that intelligence, the invasion might not have succeeded.

Author Natasha Lester taught herself French so she could read Marie Madeleine’s memoir as it was written. Picture: Steph King

The work of intelligence-gathering was minute and detailed and largely unheralded – and incredibly dangerous. The Nazis put a significant price on Fourcade’s head. They hunted her ruthlessly. But she kept going, despite having to send her children to Switzerland with strangers after the Gestapo put them on a most-wanted list; despite falling in love with her second-in-command, Léon Faye, and giving birth to his child while hiding in a brothel as the Gestapo surrounded the city of Lyon, looking for her. She kept going despite the murder, imprisonment and torture of her agents.

Four hundred and thirty-nine of the 3000 Alliance agents were killed by the Nazis; some of their bodies have never been found. Most of their names are unknown by anyone now. But without them, the world might be a very different and much darker place.

If my book makes anyone stop and thank the extraordinary Marie-Madeleine Fourcade and her agents, it will have been worth the effort.

Natasha Lester’s novel, The Mademoiselle Alliance, inspired by the life of World War II spy, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, is published by Hachette.