Marie-Madeleine Fourcade

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade (1909, Marseille - 1989) was the leader of the French Resistance network "Alliance", under the code name "Hérisson" ("Hedgehog") after the arrest of its former leader, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, during the occupation of France in the Second World War.

Fourcade worked with Loustaunau-Lacau (also known as Navarre) on his magazine L'ordre national, an espionage publication. Navarre believed espionage to be crucial in the war effort. Navarre recruited Fourcade for a network of spies and to work on L'ordre national. She was barely 30 at this point. Her first mission for Navarre was to create sections of unoccupied France, then recruit and assign an agent to these section. This network became the "Alliance" (later called "Noah's Ark).

Soon Navarre was arrested, and sentenced to two years in prison. She then took care of 3,000 resistance agents and survivors, as well as social works and the publication of Mémorial de l'Alliance, dedicated to the resistance group's 429 dead.

She chaired the Committee of Resistance Action from 1962, as well as the jury of honour of Maurice Papon in 1981. She remarried, was a mother of five children, a commander of the Légion d'honneur, vice president of the International Union of Resistance and Deportation from 1960 and the National Association of Medal-holders from 1947, and a member of the L.I.C.R.A.. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was represented at the assembly of the European Communities and in 1982 chaired the Defence of Interests in France and Europe. Her last fights were for the end of the Lebanese conflict and the Klaus Barbie lawsuit in Lyon.

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade died at age 80, on 20 July 1989 at the military hospital of Val-de-Grâce; the government and the few survivors of the resistance group paid an exceptional homage to her on 26 July at the time of her funeral in the Saint-Louis Church of the Invalids and her burial in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris.

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