The Saboteur: True Adventures Of The Gentleman Commando Who Took On The Nazis

The 1,600-year-old cathedral in Soissons, where the La Rochefoucaulds occasionally went for Mass, carried the indentations of bullet and artillery fire, clustering here and boring into the edifice there, from its stone foundation to its mighty Gothic peaks. Storefronts all around them wore similar marks, while veterans like Robert’s father hobbled home after service. For Olivier, an ankle wound incurred in 1915 limited his ability to walk unassisted. His injury intruded into his pastimes: When he hunted game, he brought his wife, and Consuelo carried the gun until Olivier spotted the prey, which allowed him to momentarily ditch his cane and hoist the rifle to his shoulder. Olivier was lucky. Other veterans were so disfigured, they didn’t appear in public.

“Throughout my childhood, I heard people talk mostly about the Great War: my parents, my grandparents, my uncles,” Robert later said. But even as it remained a constant topic, Olivier seldom discussed its basic facts: his four years at the front, as an officer whose job was to watch artillery shells land on German positions and relay back whether the next round should be aimed higher or lower. Nor did Olivier discuss the more intimate details of the fighting, as other veterans did in memoirs: stepping on the “meat” of dead comrades in an offensive or the madness the trenches induced. Instead Olivier walked the halls of Villeneuve, in some sort of private and almost unceasing conversation with the ghosts of his past. He was a distant father, telling his children that they “must not cry—ever,” and finding solace in nature’s beauty. He had earned a law degree after the war, but spent Robert’s childhood as Villeneuve’s gentleman farmer. Olivier felt most at ease talking about the dahlias he planted. Consuelo, who’d lost two brothers to the trenches, was far more outspoken. She instructed her children that they were never to buy German-made goods and told her daughters they could not learn such an indelicate tongue. Even her job moored her to the past: As chair of the Aisne chapter of the Red Cross, Consuelo spent most of her time helping families whose lives had been upended by the war.

The La Rochefoucaulds were not unique: No one in France could look beyond his disfigured memories. The French military was itself so scarred that it did nothing in the face of Hitler’s mounting power. In 1936, the führer’s army reoccupied the Rhineland (the areas around the Rhine River in Belgium), in violation of World War I treaties, without a fight, even though France had one hundred divisions, and the Third Reich’s crippled army could send only three battalions to the Rhine. As Gen. Alfred Jodl, head of the German armed forces operational staff, later testified: “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.” But despite overwhelming numerical strength, the French did nothing, and Germany retook the Rhine. Hitler never feared France again.

German military might grew, and as a new war seemed imminent, the French kept forestalling its reality, traumatized by what they’d already endured. In 1938, the French Parliament voted 537 to 75 for the Munich Agreement, which gave Hitler portions of Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, the World War I veteran and novelist Jean Giono wrote that war was pointless, and if it broke out again soldiers should desert. “There is no glory in being French,” Giono wrote. “There is only one glory: To be alive.” Léon Emery, a primary school teacher, wrote a newspaper column that may as well have been a refrain for people in the late 1930s: “Rather servitude than war.”

This frightened pacifism reigned even after the new war began. In the fall of 1939, after Britain and France declared war on Germany, William Shirer, an American journalist, took a train along a hundred-mile stretch of the Franco-German border: “The train crew told me not a shot had been fired on this front … The troops … went about their business [building fortifications] in full sight and range of each other … The Germans were hauling up guns and supplies on the railroad line, but the French did not disturb them. Queer kind of war.”

So at last, in May 1940, when the German planes screamed overhead, many Frenchmen saw not just a new style of warfare but the nightmares of the last twenty years superimposed on the wings of those Stukas. That’s why it took four days for the La Rochefoucauld children to reach their grandmother’s house: Memory heightened the terror of Hitler’s blitzkrieg. “We were lucky we weren’t on the road longer,” Robert’s younger sister Yolaine later said.

Grandmother Maillé’s estate sat high above Châteauneuf-sur-Cher, a three-winged castle whose sprawling acreage served as the town’s eponymous centerpiece. It was a stunning, almost absurdly grand home, spread across six floors and sixty rooms, featuring some thirty bedrooms, three salons, and an art gallery. The La Rochefoucauld children, accustomed to the liveried lifestyle, never tired of coming here. But on this spring day, the bliss of the reunion gave way rather quickly to a hollowed-out exhaustion. The anxious travel had depleted the children—and the grandmother who’d awaited them. Making matters worse, the radio kept reporting German gains, alarming everyone anew.

That very night, the Second Panzer Division reached Abbeville, at the mouth of the Somme river and the English Channel. The Allies’ best soldiers, still in Belgium, were trapped. A note of panic rose in the broadcasters’ voices. The Nazis now had a stronghold within the country—never in the four years of the Great War had the Germans gained such a position. And now they had done it in just ten days.

Consuelo rejoined the family a few nights later. She told her children how she had barely escaped death. Her car, provided by the Red Cross, was bombed by the Germans. She was not in it at the time, she said, but it quickened her departure. She got another car from a local politician and stuffed family heirlooms into it, certain that the German bombardment would continue and the Villeneuve estate would be destroyed again. Her Red Cross office was already in shambles. “This is it. No more windows, almost no more doors,” Consuelo had written in her diary on May 18, from her desk at the local headquarters. “Two bombings during the day. The rail station is barely functional. We have to close [this diary] … until times get better.”

But after reuniting with her children, times did not get better. The radio blared constantly in the chateau, and the reports were grim. On June 3, three hundred German aircraft bombed the Citroën and Renault factories on the southwestern border of Paris, killing 254, 195 of them civilians. Parisians left the city in such droves that cows wandered some of its richest streets, mooing. Trains on the packed railway platforms departed without destination; they just left. The government evacuated on June 10 to the south of France, where everyone else had already headed, and the city was declared open—the French military would not defend it. The Nazis marched in at noon on June 14.

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.

CHAPTER 2

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.

The chateau of Villeneuve still rose from the earth, with its neoclassical design, brick façade, and white-stone trim, a stately home that the La Rochefoucauld family had purchased from the daughter of one of Napoléon’s generals in 1861. Beams of sunlight still winked from the windows of the northern wing, a welcoming light that bathed the interior, and all the chateau’s forty-seven rooms, with an incandescent glow. But at the circular driveway at the side of the home, something strange came into view.

German military vehicles.

A cadre of German soldiers seemed to have made the La Rochefoucauld house their own, judging from the armored cars and trucks parked at odd angles. But this wasn’t even the worst news: On closer inspection, the family saw that the chateau’s roof was missing.

My God, Robert thought, trying to absorb it all.

The children clustered together in the driveway, gawking. Then, unsure what else to do, the family made its way to the front door.

When they opened it, Consuelo and her children saw the same stone staircase rising from the entryway to the front hall. But passing above them were German officers, who barely acknowledged their arrival. The Nazis had indeed requisitioned Villeneuve, just as they would other homes and municipal buildings, hoping that the houses and schools and offices might serve as command posts for the French Occupation, or as forward bases for Germany’s upcoming battle with Britain. From the Germans’ apathetic looks, the family saw that the chateau was no longer theirs. “There was absolutely nothing we could do against it,” Robert later said.

Consuelo told her children not to acknowledge the officers, to show them that they were impermanent and therefore unremarkable: Robert would not sketch in any journal who these Germans were, what they looked like, or which one led them. But he and his siblings did record the broad outlines of the arrangement. The Nazis begrudgingly made room for the family. They soon redistributed themselves across one half of the house, so the La Rochefoucaulds could have the other. On the first floor, the officers chose the great room, whose floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the magnificent manicured gardens, and the dining room, which seated twenty. The family took the salon—where they had once entertained visiting dignitaries and had debated Hitler’s rise to power—and the living room, cozy with chairs, rows of books, and, above the fireplace, the family crest, which depicted a beautiful woman with a witch’s tail—which in earlier times instructed La Rochefoucauld to live fully and enjoy all of life’s delights. The second and third floors—the bedrooms and playrooms for the children, and utility rooms for the staff of twelve—were divided similarly: Nazis on one side, the family on the other. Robert still had his own room, a grand chamber with fifteen-foot ceilings, a private bathroom, and fireplace. But he couldn’t stand the heavy clacking echo of German boots going up and down the second and third floors’ stone staircase. The noise seemed to almost taunt him.

The family and Germans did not eat together. The La Rochefoucaulds set up a new dining room in the salon. They shared the grand spiral staircase because they had to, but the family and its staff never spoke to the Germans, and the Germans only spoke to Consuelo, once they learned she was the matriarch and local head of the Red Cross.

Consuelo’s relationship with these occupying officers was, to put it mildly, difficult. In little time they settled on a nickname for her: the Terrible Countess.

It is easy to understand why. First, Consuelo had built this house. When she and Olivier were married after the Great War, a plump girl who was more confident than pretty, she looked at the ruins of what remained of the La Rochefoucauld estate and told her husband she would prefer it if the rebuilt chateau no longer faced east-west, as it had for centuries, but north-south. That way the windows could take in more sunlight. Olivier obeyed his young wife’s wishes and brick by brick a neoclassical marvel emerged, one that indeed glowed with natural light. Now, twenty years later, the Germans were sullying the chateau, German soldiers who played to type, too, always loud, always shouting Ja!, parking up to seven bulky tanks in her yard and then endlessly cleaning them, meeting in her house, meeting in a tent they set up outside her house, their decorum gauche regardless of where they went, the sort of people who literally found it appropriate to write on her walls.

Then there was the damage to the roof. And though Consuelo learned that a British bomb, and not a German one, had missed the bridge it aimed for a half mile distant during the fight for France and instead flattened the fourth floor of the chateau, she resented that the Nazis hadn’t offered to close the gaping hole above them, especially as the summer became late fall and the temperature turned cold. The Villeneuve staff had to put a tarp over the roof’s remnants, but that did little good. When it rained, water still flowed down the stairwell. Winter nights chilled everyone, brutal hours that required multiple layers of clothing. The bomb had set off a fire that momentarily spread on the second floor, which destroyed the central heating system. Now, before the children went to bed, they had to warm a brick over a wood-fired oven and then rub the brick over their sheets, which heated their beds just enough so they might fall asleep.

Finally, there was Olivier. The family found out that he had been arrested by German forces near Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, a commune in Lorraine in northeastern France, on June 27, five days after the armistice. He was now imprisoned in the sinister-sounding Oflag XVII-A, a POW camp for French officers in eastern Austria known as “little Siberia.” He was allowed to write two letters home every month, which had been censored by guards. What little Consuelo gleaned of her husband’s true experience at the camp infuriated her further.

Given all this, it wasn’t really a surprise to see Consuelo act out against the Germans. On one occasion, a Nazi officer, who was a member of the German cavalry and an aristocrat, wanted to pay his respects to Madame La Rochefoucauld, whose name traveled far in noble circles. When he arrived at Villeneuve, he walked up the steps, took off his gloves, and approached Consuelo, who waited at the entry, all stocky frame and suspicious gaze. He gripped her hand in his and kissed it, but before he could tell her it was a pleasure to stay in this grand home, she slapped him across the face. The Terrible Countess would not be wooed by any German. For a moment, no one knew how to respond. Then the officers, only half joking, told Consuelo a welcome like that put her at risk of deportation.

Robert was his mother’s son. The fact that the Nazi officers were a few rooms away only increased his talk about how much he hated them, those Boche. He was brash enough, would say these epithets just loud enough, that even Consuelo had to shush him. But Robert seemed not to care. His olive complexion reddened with indignant righteousness when he listened to Charles de Gaulle’s speeches, and even after the German high command in Paris banned the French from turning on the BBC, Robert did it in secret. He never wanted to miss the general’s daily message. Oftentimes, to evangelize, he would travel across Soissons to the estate of his cousin, Guy de Pennart, who was his age and shared, roughly, his temperament. Guy and Robert talked about how they were going to join the British and fight on. “I was convinced that we had to continue the war at all costs,” Robert later said.

He was seventeen by the fall of 1940 and had graduated from high school. He wanted to join de Gaulle but wasn’t sure how. One didn’t “enlist” in the Resistance. Even a well-connected young man like Robert didn’t know the underground routes that could get him to London. So he enrolled at an agricultural college in Paris, ostensibly to become a gentleman farmer like his father, but, more likely, he went to meet people who might help him reach de Gaulle.

These individuals, though, were not easy to find. There was little reason to be a résistant in 1940. The Germans had disbanded the army and all weapons, all the way down to hunting knives, had been handed in or taken by Nazi authorities. The “resistance” amounted to little more than underground newspapers that were often snuffed out, their editors imprisoned or sentenced to death by German judges presiding in France.

So Robert and a small number of new friends, all of them more boys than men, turned to one another with refrains about how much they despised the Germans, and despised Vichy, a spa town in the south of France where Pétain and his collaborating government resided. The boys talked about how France had lost her honor. “I didn’t have much good sense,” Robert said, “but honor—that’s all my friends and I could talk about.”

Its vestiges were all around him. Villeneuve was not just a home but also a monument to the family’s history, replete with portraits and busts of significant men. The La Rochefoucauld line dated back to 900 AD and the family had shaped France for nearly as long. Robert had learned from his parents about François Alexandre Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a duke in Louis XVI’s court. He awoke the king during the storming of the Bastille in 1789. King Louis asked La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt if it was a revolt. “No, sire,” he answered. “It is a revolution.” And indeed it was. Then there was François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century duke who published a book of aphoristic maxims, whose style and substance influenced writers as diverse as Bernard Mandeville, Nietzsche, and Voltaire. Another La Rochefoucauld, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, helped found the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, which abolished slavery some seventy years before it could be done in the United States. Two La Rochefoucauld brothers, both priests, were martyred during the Reign of Terror and later beatified by Rome. One La Rochefoucauld was directeur des Beaux Arts during the Bourbon Restoration. Others appeared in the pages of Proust. Many were lionized within the military—fighting in the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, against the Prussians. The city of Paris named a street after the La Rochefoucaulds.