Uncover ‘The Saboteur’
True anti-Nazi tale is captivating;
Sometimes, the best author is real life. In these cases, non-fiction tales unfold in ways that even the most imaginative novelist couldn’t dream up — and if he or she did, reviewers would scoff at the unbelievability of the book.
The subtitle of Paul Kix’s The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Com
mando (Harper, 222 pp., eeeg) promises the reader a wild ride that would put, say, Dan Brown, Agatha Christie or Tom Clancy to shame.
Robert de La Rochefoucauld was in his teens when he decided to follow an exiled Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s call for resistance against the Nazis in 1940. He walked from France — where his family tree reached back to 900 A.D. and included Hundred Years’ War soldiers, the duke who woke up Louis XVI during the storming of the Bastille in 1789, an abolitionist friendly with Benjamin Franklin and associates of writer Marcel Proust — to Spain and ultimately made his way to England. De Gaulle gave the young man the thumbs-up to join the British, who were training agents from the Continent in special operations.
La Rochefoucauld learned how to help local resisters in countries under Nazi rule fight back — everything from how to make and place explosives to how to kill an attacker with your bare hands to how to withstand torture. Scenes include his dressing up as a nun to evade German authorities and, once the Nazis captured him, escaping en route to his execution.
Kix’s real-life adventure book is informed by interviews with members of his subject’s family, piles of government records and the now-deceased La Rochefoucauld’s autobiography. Kix fastidiously cross-references dates and other facts to keep the timeline aligned with reality and uncolored by clan lore and the protagonist’s sometimes fuzzy memory. (La Rochefoucauld’s testimony on behalf of Vichy official Maurice Papon — who had deported French Jews — during Papon’s 1997-98 trial brings controversy to what otherwise would be a rather black-and-white tale. La Rochefoucauld said Papon also had helped targeted Jews avoid imprisonment and saved lives.)
The narrative voice in The Saboteur seems crafted to live up to its page-turner promise. But sometimes Kix is too eager to write like his novelist counterparts, resulting in clichés in spots where the true drama could stand on its own. The ability of Kix, a deputy editor at
ESPN the Magazine, to infuse every chapter with historical fact and analysis makes the book an enjoyable read. He telescopes between the larger themes of the period — the atmosphere of postinvasion France, the rise of the resistance movement, how England’s clandestine training program for saboteurs evolved — and his protagonist’s unrivaled personal story.
And the real-life ending seems almost too good to be true. La Rochefoucauld died on May 8, 2012, the 67th anniversary of what he had risked his life repeatedly to help bring about: V-E Day.