Paul Kix - The Saboteur

The man stared hard at Robert. He told him that he and his cousin could not carry out their mission. Even if they stole this train, what would they do with it? And how would it defeat the Germans? And did they realize that their act risked more lives than their own? German reprisals for “terrorism” sometimes demanded dozens of executions.

Already, an amateur rebellion had cost the community lives. A Resistance group in Soissons called La Vérité Française had affiliated itself with one in Paris that formed in the Musée de l’Homme. It was a brave but naive group, unaware of the double agents within its ranks as it published underground newspapers and organized escape routes for French prisoners of war. The German secret police raided the Musée and Vérité groups. One museum résistant was deported, three sentenced to prison and seven to death. In Soissons, two members of Vérité Française were beheaded, six shot, and six more died in concentration camps. The Nazi agents who organized the Soissons raid worked in an elegant gray-stone building—across the street from the cathedral where the La Rochefoucaulds occasionally attended Mass.

So their plan was foolish, the man said, and Robert and his cousin were lucky to be stopped before the brutal secret police or, for that matter, the army officers billeting in Robert’s house could get to them.

The scolding shamed La Rochefoucauld, and stilled his intent. But the situation in France continued to worsen. The French government was responsible for the upkeep of the German army in France, which cost a stunning 400 million francs a day, after the Nazis rigged the math and overvalued the German mark by 60 percent. Soon, it was enough money to actually buy France from the French, one German economist noted. Oil grew scarce. Robert began biking everywhere. The German-backed government in Vichy imposed rations, and Robert soon saw long lines of people at seemingly every bakery and grocery store he passed. The Germans set a shifting curfew for Paris, as early as 9 p.m. or as late as midnight, depending on the Nazis’ whims. This would have annoyed any college-aged man, but the German capriciousness carried a sinister edge, too: After dark, Parisians heard the echo of the patrolling secret police’s boots and might wake the next day to find a neighbor or acquaintance missing and everyone too frightened to ask questions. In 1941, the terror spilled out into the open. Small cliques of Communist résistants in Nantes and Bordeaux assassinated two high-ranking Nazi officers, and, in response, Hitler ordered the execution of ninety-eight people, some of them teenagers, who had at most nominal ties to Communism. One by one they were sent to the firing squad, some of them singing the French national anthem. As news of the executions spread—ninety-eight people dead—a police report noted: “The German authorities have sown consternation everywhere.”

The urge to fight rose again in Robert and his college friends. Pétain seemed to be speaking directly to young men like Robert when he warned in a broadcast: “Frenchmen … I appeal to you in a broken voice: Do not allow any more harm to be done to France.” But that proved difficult as 1941 became 1942, and the Occupation entered its third year. Travel to certain areas was allowed only by permit, thirteen thousand Jews were rounded up in Paris and sent to Auschwitz, and the United States entered the war. The Germans, to feed their fighting machine, gave the French even less to eat, forcing mothers to wait all morning for butter and urban families to beg their rural cousins for overripened vegetables. Robert now heard of sabotages of German equipment and materiel carried out by people very much like himself. He no doubt heard of the people who feared the growing Resistance as well, who wanted to keep the peace whatever the cost, who called résistants “bandits” or even “terrorists,” adopting the language of the occupier. In 1942, denunciations were common. Radio Paris had a show, Répétez-le (Repeat It), in which listeners named their neighbors, business associates, or sometimes family members as enemies of the state. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the feared agency colloquially known as the Gestapo, read at least three million denunciatory letters during the war, many of them signed by Frenchmen.

This self-policing—which can be read as an attempt to curry favor with the Germans or to divert attention from oneself or simply to spite a disliked neighbor—oppressed the populace more than the SD could have. As the historian Henry Charles Lea said of the culture of denunciation: “No more ingenious device has been invented to subjugate a whole population, to paralyze its intellect and to reduce it to blind obedience.” Even children understood the terror behind the collective censorship. As Robert de La Rochefoucauld’s younger sister, Yolaine, who was thirteen years old in 1942, put it: “I remember silence, silence, silence.”

Robert, though, couldn’t live like that. “Every time I met with friends,” Robert would later say, “we always endlessly talked about how to kick the Germans out, how to resolve the situation, how to fight.” By the summer of that year, Robert was about to turn nineteen. The German officers had moved on, as quickly as they’d come, leaving the chateau without explanation for another destination. This only emboldened La Rochefoucauld, who still listened to Charles de Gaulle and cheered when he said things like, “It is completely normal and completely justified that Germans should be killed by French men and French women. If the Germans did not wish to be killed by our hands, they should have stayed home and not waged war on us.”

One day a Soissons postman knocked on the door of the chateau and asked to see Robert’s mother, Consuelo. The conversation they had greatly upset her. When he left, she immediately sought out Robert.

She told him that she’d just met with a mail carrier who set aside letters addressed to the secret police. This postman took the letters home with him and steamed open the envelopes to see who in the correspondence was being denounced. If the carrier didn’t know the accused, he burned the letter. But if he did, well, and here Consuelo produced a piece of paper with writing scrawled across it. If the postman did know the accused, Consuelo said, he warned the family. She passed the letter to her son. It had been sent anonymously, but in it the writer denounced Robert as being a supporter of de Gaulle’s, against collaboration, and above all a terrorist.

Anger and fear shot through him. Who might have done this? Why? But to fixate on that obscured the larger point: Robert was no longer safe in Soissons. If someone out there had been angry enough to see him arrested, might not a second person also feel this way? Might not another letter appear and, in the hands of a less courageous postal worker, be sent right along to the Nazis? Robert and his mother discussed it at length, but both knew instinctively.

He had to leave.

He went first to Paris, in search of someone who could at long last get him to de Gaulle and his Free French forces. After asking around, Robert met with a man who worked in the Resistance, and Robert told him about his hope to head to London, join de Gaulle, and fight the Nazis. Could the Parisian help?

The man paused for a moment. “Come back in fifteen days,” he said, “and I’ll tell you what I can do.”