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.”
Two weeks later, Robert and the résistant met again. The Germans patrolled the coast between France and England, so a Frenchman’s best bet to reach the UK was to head south, to Spain, which had stayed out of the war and was a neutral country. If La Rochefoucauld could get there and then to the British embassy in, say, Madrid, he might find a way to London.
Robert was grateful, even joyous, but he had a question. Before he could cross into another country, he’d have to cross France’s demarcation line, separating the occupied from unoccupied zones. How was he to do that under his own name? The Parisian said he could help arrange a travel permit and false papers for La Rochefoucauld. But this in turn only raised more questions. If lots of Frenchmen got to London by way of Spain—if that passage was a résistant’s best bet—wouldn’t the Germans know that, too?
Probably, the man said. Everything in war is a risk. But the Parisian had a friend in Vichy with a government posting who secretly worked for the Resistance. If the Parisian placed a call, the Vichy friend could help guide Robert to a lesser-known southern route. Robert asked the man to phone his friend.
The Parisian and Robert also discussed false IDs. Maybe Robert needed two aliases. With two names it would be even harder to trace him as he traveled south. Of course, if the Germans found out about either, Robert would almost certainly be imprisoned. La Rochefoucauld seemed to accept this risk because French military files show him settling on two names: Robert Jean Renaud and René Lallier. The first was a take on his given name: Robert Jean-Marie. The second he just thought up, “a nom de guerre I’d found who knows where,” he later wrote. Both had the mnemonic advantage of carrying some of his real name’s initials.
He used René Lallier for the journey south to Vichy. The photo in his false identity card depicted La Rochefoucauld in a three-piece suit, with his wavy black hair parted to the right in a pompadour, the corner of his lips curling into a smile, as if he couldn’t keep from laughing at the deception. At the demarcation line, the Nazi auxiliaries in the gray uniforms who checked papers, and whom the French called “the gray mice,” studied La Rochefoucauld’s ID, the name René Lallier in big block type, the black-and-white photo beneath. The date of birth was given as August 28, 1925, almost two years after La Rochefoucauld’s real birthday. The residence was listed in the Oise department, which was to the immediate west of La Rochefoucauld’s actual home in the