Trade unionist and fighter for all suffering

In the dark hours of a freezing night in occupied France, a woman took off her clothes and squeezed through the narrow iron bars of a Gestapo prison cell. She held her dress between her teeth, dropped onto the street, and disappeared. Her name was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. Before the war she had lived a life of fast cars, airplanes, and classical music. When the Germans occupied France she joined a small secret network that gathered intelligence for the Allies. In 1941 its leader was arrested and handed control to her. She was thirty-one, the mother of two young children, and she accepted without hesitation. Under her leadership the group grew into Alliance, the largest secret intelligence network in France. More than three thousand men and women joined. Nearly twenty percent were women. They used animal code names. The Gestapo called the organization Noah’s Ark. Marie-Madeleine chose Hedgehog for herself. The Nazis spent years looking for a male general. They never imagined the person running the network was the fashionable young woman standing in front of them. Many of her closest agents were captured, tortured, or killed. To protect her own children she sent them away. She could not even hug them goodbye. She stood behind a curtain and watched them walk down the street. She was captured twice and escaped both times. Her agents gathered intelligence on German positions along the Normandy beaches that helped the Allies plan the invasion. When the war ended, official recognition often favored men. She was left off many lists of national heroes. She never seemed interested in personal glory. For the rest of her life she helped surviving agents and the families of those who had been killed. Near the end she said, “God gave me the strength to stand in the dark so that others could walk in the light.”