Robert de La Rochefoucauld

Robert de La Rochefoucauld was born in Paris, one of 10 children in a family living in a fashionable area near the Eiffel Tower. His father, Olivier de La Rochefoucauld, and his mother, the daughter of the Duke of Maillé, were members of the French nobility; he used the aristocratic title of count in his later years. He studied at private schools in Switzerland and Austria, and, at age 15, received a pat on the cheek from Adolf Hitler on a class visit to his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden.[1]

La Rochefoucauld was 16 and a follower of Charles de Gaulle when Nazi Germany invaded France. His father was taken prisoner[2] and he was also reported to the Gestapo so, with the help of the French Resistance, he took a pseudonym and fled to Spain in 1942,[3] hoping to go on to England and link up with de Gaulle's movement. He escaped with two downed British airmen, who were also being sheltered by the underground.[2] 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 organised evacuation.[1]

The British, having secured the men's freedom, were so impressed with La Rochefoucauld's boldness and ingenuity that they asked him to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the clandestine unit 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, he expressed his difficulty choosing between service in the SOE and the Free French Forces, and was encouraged to choose the SOE: "If it is for France, then go ahead."[4]

The British flew La Rochefoucauld to London, where they trained him to jump out of aeroplanes, set off explosives and kill a man quickly using his hands. In June 1943 they parachuted him into France, where 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.[2] 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."[1][2] The SOE later evacuated him to England.[5]

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-en-Jalles, near Bordeaux. Over the course of the four-day mission, La Rochefoucauld, 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.[1]

However, La Rochefoucauld was soon imprisoned by the Germans once more in Fort du Hâ in Bordeaux. In his cell, he feigned an epileptic seizure, and, when a guard opened the door, hit him over the head with a table leg and then broke his neck.[2] 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.[2] With D-Day imminent, La Rochefoucauld was not extracted 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.[6]

During one mission, he was captured by the Schutzstaffel and 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 took care of the Nazis' machine guns, buying La Rochefoucauld 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.[1] 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 coast at Verdon. Shortly afterwards, his knee was injured in a mine explosion, forcing him to take a month's leave. After V-E Day, he made the trip to Berlin and was kissed on the mouth by Soviet Red Army officer Georgy Zhukov, then the commander of the Soviet zone of occupation; Zhukov had misheard his name as La Rochezhukov.[1]

The SOE 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.[2]

La Rochefoucauld was the mayor of Ouzouer-sur-Trézée for 30 years, from 1966 to 1996.[2] His memoir, La Liberté, C'est Mon Plaisir, 1940-1946, was published in 2002.

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 an official with France's wartime collaborationist Vichy government. La Rochefoucald told the court that Papon had risked his life to help the Resistance and the Allies.[2] 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.[7] One of Papon's lawyers said La Rochefoucauld had given his passport to Papon to help him escape.[8] Papon died in 2007.

The news of La Rochefoucauld's death at the age of 88 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.