Robert de La Rochefoucauld

Comte Robert Jean Marie de La Rochefoucauld (16 September 1923 – 8 May 2012) was a member of the French Resistance and Special Operations Executive during World War II, as well as the mayor of Ouzouer-sur-Trézée – a canal town in the Loire Valley – from 1966-96.
In honor of his work for France and as a secret agent for the British during the war, La Rochefoucauld was awarded the orders Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre, Médaille de la Résistance and the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

Early life

Robert de La Rochefoucauld was born in Paris, one of 10 children in a family living in a fashionable area near the Eiffel Tower. A son of Olivier de La Rochefoucauld, his family was part of the French nobility and Robert used the aristocratic title of count in his later years. He studied at private schools in Switzerland and Austria, and, at age 15, he received a pat on the cheek from Adolf Hitler on a class visit to his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden.

World War II

French Resistance

With the help of the French Resistance, La Rochefoucauld took a pseudonym and fled to Spain in 1942 with two downed British airmen, who were also being sheltered by the underground. He hoped to go on to England and link up with de Gaulle's movement. The Spanish authorities (under Francisco Franco) interned the three men in the prison camp Miranda de Ebro, but La Rochefoucauld pretended to be English and was delivered to the British Embassy during an organized evacuation

The British, having secured the men's freedom, were so impressed with de La Rochefoucauld's boldness and ingenuity that they asked him to join the Special Operations Executive, the clandestine unit known as the S.O.E., which Prime Minister Winston Churchill created in 1940 to "set Europe ablaze", as he put it, by working with resistance groups on the German-occupied Continent. Received by Charles de Gaulle in which he expressed his dilemma (choosing between the S.O.E. or the Free French Forces), he was encouraged to choose the SOE, "If it is for France, then go ahead".

Work for the S.O.E.

The British flew La Rochefoucauld to London, where they trained him to jump out of airplanes, set off explosives and kill a man quickly using his hands. They parachuted him into France in June 1943. In France, he destroyed an electric substation and blew up railroad tracks at Avallon but was captured and condemned to death by the Nazis. While being taken for execution, he jumped from the back of his captors' truck, dodged bullets, then ran through nearby streets. He ended up outside a German headquarters, where he spotted a limousine flying a swastika flag, its driver nearby and the keys in the ignition. He drove off in the car and then caught a train to Paris, hiding in one of its bathrooms. The Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying, "When we arrived in Paris, I felt drunk with freedom." The S.O.E. later evacuated him to England by submarine, which was subjected to a depth charge attack.

In May 1944, La Rochefoucauld parachuted back into France. Dressed as a workman, he smuggled explosives into a huge German munitions plant in Saint-Médard (near Bordeaux). Over the course of the four-day mission, code named "Sun", smuggled 40 kilos of explosives, concealed in hollowed-out loaves of bread and specially designed shoes, into the factory. He set off the explosives on 20 May and, after scaling a wall, fled on a bicycle. After sending a message to London (the reply read simply: "Félicitations"), he enjoyed several bottles with the local Resistance leader, waking the next day with a hangover. However, La Rochefoucauld was soon imprisoned by the Germans once more in Fort du Hâ. In his cell, he feigned an epileptic seizure, and, when a guard opened the door, La Rochefoucauld hit him over the head with a table leg and then broke his neck.

He took the guard's uniform and pistol, shot two other guards, and escaped. Desperate to avoid recapture, he contacted a French underground worker whose sister was a nun. He donned her habit and walked unobtrusively to the home of a more senior agent, who hid him.

With D-Day imminent, La Rochefoucauld didn't extract back to London, choosing instead to stay in France to help the Resistance overthrow the Germans. He carried out dozens of sabotage and espionage missions throughout the Normandy campaign as the Allies pushed the Germans back to Berlin.

During one mission, he was captured by the Schutzstaffel, brought out to a field to be executed by firing squad, but before the Nazis could complete the execution, La Rochefoucauld's fellows in the Resistance occupied the Nazis machine guns, buying Robert time to leave safely. His final behind-the-lines assault came in April 1945, when he led a night raid to knock out a casemate near Saint-Vivien-de-Médoc, on France's western coast at the mouth of the Gironde. Paddling up the river, he approached the casemate, killed a guard there, and blew it up, forcing the Germans to pull back to their final defensive position on the sea at Verdon. Shortly afterwards, his knee was injured in a mine explosion, forcing him to take a month's leave. La Rochefoucauld made the trip to Berlin after V-E Day and got kissed on the mouth by Soviet Red Army officer Georgy Zhukov, who was then commander of the Soviet zone of occupation.

Work after the war

The S.O.E. was disbanded in 1946. As an officer in the postwar French military, La Rochefoucauld trained French troops and conducted raids on the Việt Minh during the First Indochina War, as well as participating in the Suez Crisis, in which the French joined Britain and Israel against Egypt over control of the Suez Canal. He later pursued international business ventures, including running a banana company in Venezuela and living in Cameroon.

Mayor of Ouzouer-sur-Trézée

La Rochefoucauld was the mayor of Ouzouer-sur-Trézée for 30 years (from 1966-96). His memoir, La Liberté, C'est Mon Plaisir, 1940-1946, was published in 2002.

Maurice Papon trial

In 1997, La Rochefoucauld testified on behalf of Maurice Papon, who was being tried on charges of deporting 1600 French Jews to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps while Papon was an official with Franch's wartime collaborationist Vichy government. La Rochefoucald told the court that Papon had risked his life to help the Resistance and the Allies.

Papon was convicted of complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity but fled to Switzerland while appealing. He was arrested at a Gstaad hotel, where he had registered as Robert Rochefoucauld. One of Papon's lawyers said La Rochefoucauld had given his passport to Papon to escape. Papon was returned to France and served less than three years of his sentence before being released. Papon died in 2007.

Death

The news of La Rochefoucauld's death in Ouzouer-sur-Trézée emerged on 8 May 2012, first announced by his family in the French newspaper Le Figaro and then reported late in June in the British press. He was 88 years old.

Neither La Rochefoucauld nor his missions to France appear in the official history SOE in France, first published in 1966. His name has yet to be traced in the SOE archives, held at the National Archives, Kew.

Moreover, a number of incidents described in La Rochefoucauld's autobiography are contradicted by other evidence. For example, although he claims to have sabotaged the explosives works at St-Médard-en-Jalles in May 1944, this target had already been successfully attacked by RAF Bomber Command three weeks earlier, on the night of 29/30 April. A report in The Times on 1 May described the raid's "unusually spectacular results", and how "colossal" explosions were heard half an hour after the bombing attack had finished.

Evaluating the results shortly afterwards, an RAF photo-reconnaissance report confirmed that the target had been "heavily damaged": six large warehouse buildings had been wiped out; at least half of the smaller buildings were damaged or destroyed; the railway line into the plant had been "severed by direct hits at many points"; and three 90-foot craters were visible from the air. Such an important, large-scale demolition would have ranked at the top of SOE's achievements, but SOE's detailed report on its activities in France, written by June 1946 by an officer who had an intimate knowledge of its operations, makes no mention of La Rochefoucauld or any attack resembling that of St-Médard-en-Jalles. Neither is there a trace of this operation in SOE's extensive examination of its own sabotage work, which was undertaken across France in 1945.

He claimed he was exfiltrated by submarine off the coast of Berck near Calais at the end of February 1944, yet according to official sources SOE conducted no sea operations east of Brittany during this period.

On the subject of his recruitment, La Rochefoucauld mentions that Eric Piquet-Wicks, deputy for SOE's RF Section at the time, had spotted his potential in Spain in late 1942, but Piquet-Wicks did not arrive in Spain until the spring of 1944, when he took up a more junior role in Madrid after recovering from tuberculosis. A file on La Rochefoucauld held at the Service historique de la défense archives at Vincennes raises a further question mark: in an application to the French Forces of the Interior for recognition of his resistance activity, his record of service indicates that he did not travel to Spain or England or join SOE or any other secret service.

The fact that there is no archival or written record of his role as an SOE agent could well be attributed to the loss of a significant number of SOE files in a disastrous fire which took place in 1946. There is the possibility of attrition of the surviving recordsheld by the National Archives, Kew.

In reference to the sabotage at St. Medard-en-Jalles, the final detailed report pertaining to the SOE Circuits in France submitted in June 1946 (just prior to its amalgamation by MI6) cites the following on p. 75. Corps Franc Georges – Attack on St. Medard powder works (out of action 15 days)", which raises the question of the full extent of the damage created by the 30 April/1 May 1944 RAF raid as reported so enthusiastically the following day in the London Times. Nor do local archives in St. Medard currently report any extensive property damage for that date. With regard to the absence of any mention of his wartime activities in the forms personally filled out and submitted to French authorities by La Rochefoucauld, given de Gaulle's unfavourable opinion of the British in general and the SOE in particular. ≤ Ray Argyle. The Paris Game (2014). This omission could have been the result of a certain reluctance on La Rochefoucauld's part to reveal past association with the British or SOE Section F.

La Rochefoucauld belonged to one of the oldest families of the French nobility, whose members included François de La Rochefoucauld, the author of a classic 17th-century book of maxims. La Rochefoucauld married Bernadette de Marcieu de Gontaut-Biron; they had one son and three daughters.

• Robert de La Rochefoucauld (2002). La Liberté, C'est Mon Plaisir, 1940-1946. Perrin. ISBN 9782262019846.