Paul Kix - The Saboteur

Robert and his family bunched round the radio in their grandmother’s salon that day, their faces ashen. The reporters said that roughly two million people had fled and the city was silent. Then came the news flashes: the Nazis cutting through the west end and down the Champs-Elysées; a quiet procession of tanks, armored cars, and motorized infantry; only a few Frenchmen watching them from the boulevards or storefronts that had not been boarded up; and suddenly, high above the Eiffel Tower, a swastika flag whipping in the breeze.

And still, no one had heard from Olivier, who had been stationed somewhere on the Franco-German border. Consuelo, a brash and strong woman who rolled her own cigarettes from corn husks, appeared anxious now before her children, a frailty they rarely saw, as she openly fretted about her country and husband. The news turned still worse. Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had assumed control of France’s government, took to the radio June 17. “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must try to cease hostilities,” he said.

Robert drew back when he heard the words. Was Pétain, a nearly mythical figure, the hero of the Great War’s Battle of Verdun, asking for an armistice? Was the man who’d once beaten the Germans now surrendering to them?

The war itself never reached Grandmother Maillé’s chateau, roughly 170 miles south of Paris, but in the days ahead the family heard fewer grim reports from the front, which was unsettling in its own way. It meant soldiers were following Pétain’s orders. June 22 formalized the surrender: The governments of both countries agreed to sign an armistice. On that day, the La Rochefoucaulds gathered round the radio once again, unsure how their lives would change.

Hitler wanted this armistice signed on the same spot as the last—in a railway car in the forest of Compiègne. It seemed the Great War had not ended for him either. At 3:15 on an otherwise beautiful summer afternoon, Hitler arrived in his Mercedes, accompanied by his top generals, and walked to an opening in the forest. There, he stepped on a great granite block, about three feet above the ground with engraving in French that read: HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE—VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.

William Shirer stood some fifty yards from the führer. “I look for the expression in Hitler’s face,” Shirer later wrote. “It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a masterpiece of contempt … He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide part. It is a magnificent gesture … of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.”

Then the French delegation arrived, the officers led by Gen. Charles Huntziger, commander of the Second Army at Sedan. The onlookers could see that signing the armistice on this site humiliated the Frenchmen.

Hitler left as soon as Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, his senior military advisor, read the preamble. The terms of the armistice were numerous and harsh. They called for the French navy to be demobilized and disarmed and the ships returned to port, to ensure that renegade French boats did not align themselves with the British fleet; the army and nascent air force were to be disposed of; guns and weapons of any kind would be surrendered to the Germans; the Nazis would oversee the country but the French would be allowed to govern it in the southern zone, the unoccupied and so-called Free Zone, in which France’s fledgling provisional government resided; Paris and all of northern France would fall under the occupied, or Unfree Zone, where travel would be limited and life, due to rations and other restrictions, would be much harder.

Breaking the country in two and allowing the French to govern half of it would later be viewed as one of Hitler’s brilliant political moves. To give the French sovereignty in the south would keep political and military leaders from fleeing the country and establishing a central government in the French colonies of Africa, countries that Hitler had not yet defeated and where the French could continue to fight German forces.

But that afternoon on the radio, the La Rochefoucaulds heard only about the severing of a country their forebears had helped build. Worse still, all of Paris and the Villeneuve estate to the north of it fell within the Germans’ occupied zone. The family would be prisoners in their own home. Listening to the terms broadcast over the airwaves, the otherwise proud Consuelo made no attempt to hide her sobbing. “It was the first time I saw my mother cry over the fate of our poor France,” Robert later wrote. This led his sisters and some of his brothers to cry. Robert, however, burned with shame. “I was against it, absolutely against it,” he wrote, the resolve he’d felt under the stars amid other refugees building within him. In his idealistic and proud sixteen-year-old mind, to surrender was traitorous, and for a French marshal like Pétain to do it, a hero who had defeated the Germans at Verdun twenty-four years ago? “Monstrous,” La Rochefoucauld wrote.

In the days after the armistice, Robert gravitated to another voice on the radio. The man was Charles de Gaulle, the most junior general in France, who had left the country for London on June 17, the day Pétain suggested a cease-fire. However difficult the decision—de Gaulle had fought under Pétain in World War I and even ghostwritten one of his books—he had left quickly, departing with only a pair of trousers, four clean shirts, and a family photo in his personal luggage. Once situated in London, de Gaulle began to appeal to his countrymen on the BBC French radio service. These soon became notorious broadcasts, for their criticisms of French political and military leadership and for de Gaulle’s insistence that the war go on despite the armistice. “I, General de Gaulle … call upon the French officers or soldiers who may find themselves on British soil, with or without their weapons, to join me,” de Gaulle said in his first broadcast. “Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not and shall not die.”

De Gaulle called his resistance movement the Free French. It would be based in London but operate throughout France. Robert de La Rochefoucauld listened to de Gaulle day after day, and though he had been an aimless student, he began to see how he might define his young life.

He could go to London, and join the Free French.

The family drove back to a Soissons they did not recognize. German bombs had leveled some storefronts and German soldiers had pillaged others. Out the car window Robert saw half-collapsed homes and the detritus of shattered livelihoods littering the sidewalks and spilling onto the streets. The damage was not total—some houses and shops still stood—but this capriciousness made the wreckage all the more harrowing.

Approaching the Rochefoucaulds’ home, the car turned onto the familiar secluded avenue just outside Soissons; Robert saw the lines of chestnut trees and the small brick-covered path that cut through them. The car slowed and made the left, bouncing along. Groves of oak and basswood crowded the view and the car kept jostling as the path curved to the right, then the left, and back again. At last they saw the clearing.