This biography by Lynne Olson, who in recent years has become a prolific and very readable World War II historian, tells another story of a woman whose role in the war was little known until recently, but who played an important role in fighting the Germans, and contributing to the ultimate Allied victory.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was an upper-class young Frenchwoman who worked closely with a French intelligence leader just before the war, and with him set up one of the largest and most effective French spy networks early in the war, before the German invasion of France. The two of them also made contact with British intelligence, and became one of the British government's earliest and most important sources for information from within occupied France.
However, in the period after the German invasion, her boss was lost, leaving Madame Fourcade in charge of the network, despite the fact that she was only 31 years old, and a woman, on the run with two small children from whom she ultimately had to be separated for much of the war.
The rest of the book details how she managed to keep the network alive, rebuild it as members were captured or killed, repeatedly dodge capture herself despite a steep price on her head, win the trust of the men serving under her as well as leaders of other networks and the British, and navigate the dangerous politics of occupation-era France, as she steered her organization between the Vichy collaborationist authorities, the Gaullists and the Communist resistance groups.
A very well-written and interesting account of one of the greatest resistance leaders and spies in wartime France. Recommended.
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