André Girard (1901-1968)

André Girard (25 May 1901, Chinon, Indre-et-Loire – 2 September 1968, United States of America) was a French painter, poster-maker and Resistance worker. During the Second World War he founded and headed the CARTE network, also taking "Carte" as his personal codename.

He was the eldest child born to a pair of brewers, and attended the École des Beaux-Arts before doing military service at Saint-Cyr. He became a painter, studying with both Roualt and Bonnard, as well as a caricaturist, and theatre set designer, and as one of the best known publicity poster designers in Paris during the 1930s. He set himself up in Venice in 1936–37 and in Manhattan in 1938.

Having married Andrée Jouan (known as "la petite Andrée") and had 4 children (all daughters, including Danièle Delorme) before war broke out, he was not called up in 1939. He refused to see the Germans enter Paris after their success in the Battle of France, and departed in 1940 for the free zone of France, setting up at Antibes. There he painted his four daughters and founded the CARTE network. He was apolitical and tended towards recruitment and spying ready for an armed uprising against the Germans. At first hostile to Gaullism, he aroused the interest of the Special Operations Executive, who carried out a favourable evaluation of him and his network and then supplied him with arms, radio operators and money.

In July 1942 Nicholas Bodington, second in command of SOE's F section, landed in France to check on the value of reports about CARTE transmitted by agent Francis Basin, but on 12 September that year Bodington filed a report confirming SOE's highly favourable opinion of the network. However, security indiscretions and differences between Girard and his second in command Henri Frager weakened the network. For example, in November 1942 a suitcase containing a list of 200 CARTE members disappeared, either lost by André Marsac when he fell asleep on a train and finally falling into Abwehr hands, or being lost by Marsac in Marseille and coming into the hands of Dubois, police commissioner and head of security for CARTE, who then let the interested parties know of its loss via Bartroli de Mandres. Whichever account is true, no arrests resulted from the loss in the end, but CARTE was fatally weakened and the SOE network Prosper - PHYSICIAN largely took over its work (particularly using its important intelligence files).

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