The Forgotten Woman Who Helped Make D-Day Possible
First up, my apologies! I meant to get this newsletter out a few days earlier. But I’ve been busy working on the edits for my next book.
Yes, that pile of paper will turn into a book by next year! THE CHATEAU ON SUNSET is coming to Australia in April 2026 and North America in June 2026 and I can’t wait! Especially now that the edits are done and I’ve sent the manuscript back to my publishers. More on that very soon.
For today’s newsletter, I wanted to talk a little bit about Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the heroine of my latest book, THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE. It was the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings a couple of days ago and most people probably don’t know that Marie-Madeleine and the agents of her Alliance network were instrumental in helping the Allies prepare for those landings. So, without further ado, let me tell you a bit more about her, and also about what she and her agents did to ensure the success of the Allied invasion of Europe.
From Concert Pianist to Resistance Leader
When people think of D-Day, the images that come to mind are of soldiers running through the sea onto the sand at Omaha Beach, trying desperately to avoid the bullets raining down upon them. Most people don’t think of a thirty-four-year-old French woman. Yet without a thirty-four-year-old French woman named Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the outcome of D-Day might have been very different. In fact, the outcome of the entire war might have been very different. So who was this woman we should be thanking—along with all the heroic soldiers—on every D-Day anniversary?
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was supposed to be a concert pianist. Instead, WWII happened, and she became the only female leader of a French Resistance network. She led Alliance, the largest Resistance network in the country, which numbered three thousand agents at its peak and was widely regarded by the Allies as one of the most effective.
To understand how a pianist who dreamed of playing Chopin on a concert stage became a woman who smuggled herself to Madrid in a mail bag, who escaped prison by squeezing her body between the cell bars, who helped the Allies plan the D-Day landings, and who MI6 called “the copybook beautiful spy”, you have to go back to 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 seventeen, 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. 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 airplanes, and became a journalist for Radio Cité.
A chance meeting at an evening salon in 1936 put Fourcade in the path of military officer Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, known by the code name Navarre. Navarre recognized Fourcade’s 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. Its 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, but he didn’t tell MI6 in London, whose support he’d secured, that his second-in-command was a woman. 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, thirty-one-year-old Fourcade became the leader of Alliance. She had to sacrifice much in order to do so—from that day onward, she only saw her children for brief snatches of time because she was always on the run from the Nazis. But she was the kind of person who put the needs of a nation above her own personal desires.
Madrid Via a 10 Hour Journey in a Mailbag
It’s impossible in such a limited account to show just how brave and extraordinary she was, but two incidents stand out. In late-1941, the police raided her headquarters, took her radios and money, and arrested her agents. Luckily Fourcade avoided arrest. But her big problem 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 them.
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 ten 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’d been authorized to escort the bag to Spain. She couldn’t walk for days afterwards and had to be carried into the British Embassy in Spain. After surviving that experience, revealing to the British that she was a woman seemed almost a minor problem!
Squeezing Through the Prison Bars
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 did so by squeezing her body, inch by inch, through the bars of the cell window. In her memoir, she describes the experience as “sheer agony”; that she thought she’d torn her ears off.
But the D-Day landings had recently occurred, thanks to intelligence gathered by her agents, and she knew she couldn’t remain in the cell until morning when a Gestapo commander was arriving to interrogate her—she knew that, with the end of the war finally so close, she had to be free to help the Allies liberate all of Europe.
A Fifty Foot Long Map
Under Fourcade, the Alliance network fed MI6 intelligence about U-boat movements, as well as the Germans’ plans for the V-1 and V-2 rockets, which led to the Allies bombing both the U-boats and the rocket manufacturing plant, thus denting the impact of those weapons.
One of the most significant achievements for Fourcade and her agents was the map that helped the Allies plan the D-Day invasion of France. This map was fifty-feet long and it spilled out of a suitcase at Fourcade’s feet when she was meeting with MI6 in London. It had been hand-drawn by her agents and showed every German gun emplacement on the Normandy beaches, every observation tower, minefield, coastal battery, and barbed-wire fortification.
With that map, the Allied forces knew exactly what they were facing when their troops landed on Omaha and the other D-Day beaches in the early hours of June 6, 1944. And while the armed forces suffered a significant loss of life, the losses would have been far greater and the chance of success far less, but for the hand-drawn map that the agents of Alliance, led by Fourcade, risked their lives to create.
Let’s Not Forget
Unsurprisingly, the Nazis put a significant price on Fourcade’s head and 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.
At this time, close to the anniversary of D-Day, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade shows us exactly what one ordinary woman can do if she chooses to take action to fight for a better world. Her story and her courage are just as inspiring as the stories and courage of the soldiers who fought on the beaches on June 6. Together they changed the world, but many of their names are unknown and unremembered.
Lest we forget, we say on war memorials around the world. But we do forget. Let’s change that. Let’s acknowledge and thank all of the soldiers, as well as the thirty-four-year old French woman named Marie-Madeleine Fourcade who fought for freedom and who, in so doing, changed the world.
Wasn’t she incredible? You can see why I became a little obsessed with her over the two and a half years it took for me to write my novel. If you’ve read my book, I’d love to know which parts of her story left the deepest impression on you. Let me know in the comments! And if you haven’t read my book but would like to, you can find out more about THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE here.
I just finished your book and I’m absolutely in awe of her and all the research you did to bring her to us. Thank you! She will be remembered along with our two great uncles who perished in 1944 💔❤️
The whole of your book & the amazing story of Marie-Madeleine’s bravery left the deepest impression on me! As well as her actions, the incredible love she had for her Eagle & totally heartbreaking loss of him. Well done Natasha for highlighting to the wider world what a key role she & her agents played in enabling D-Day. I was thinking of her on the 6th!