Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was the only woman to head one of the large networks of Resistance fighters against the Nazis in France, known as “Alliance”, 1940’s. Alliance had 3,000 members, 24% were women, making it the resistant organisation with the strongest female presence.

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Born into a bourgeois family in Marseilles, she studied music at the Ecole Normale de Musique and as a young girl lived for a time in Shanghai. Alliance played its greatest role in the Battle of the Atlantic providing information on train operations (German transports to the east), the first information about the V1 and V2 testing at Peenemunde through Amniarix (Jeannie Rousseau), records of launch pad operations in north-western France and a detailed map of the Atlantic defences. Marie-Madeleine organised General Giraud’s submarine departure from Lavandou on 4 November, 1942 to Algiers to facilitate the Allied landing there. She was held up in England following the arrest of her assistant Faye in September 1943 but got to return to France in July 1944 and, after escaping from a German barracks, carried out intelligence missions ahead of Patton’s army. In May 1945, she went to a number of detention camps looking for survivors of her network. She lost 438 of her 3,000 agents during the course of the war.