de CLARENS, Vicomtesse (#161)

“She was one of the most remarkable young women of her generation”

“Shortly before D-Day, a plan to evacuate her and two other agents was aborted by the Gestapo. She was the first to be caught. But even as she was being captured, she succeeded in warning her comrades so that one was able to escape.” (CIA speech honouring Amniarix and R.V. Jones, Signatory 63)

Aged 23, as ‘Amniarix’ in the Druides network, showed great courage evading Gestapo to capture crucial German rockets programme information, vital intelligence leading to Bombing of Peenemünde (German V-1 Doodlebug and V-2 Rockets). Captured twice and sent to three concentration camps.

‘I teased them, taunted then, looked at them wide-eyed, insisted that they must be mad when they spoke of the astounding new weapon that flew over vast distances, much faster than any airplane. I kept saying: ‘What you are telling me cannot be true!’ I must have said that 100 times.”

“I’ll show you!” one of the Germans finally said, eager to convince the pretty, young Frenchwoman. He displayed a document from Peenemünde; de Clarens, with her photographic memory, registered every word and transmitted the information through her case officer to London.’ (Washington Post)

“‘Amniarix’, Madame Jeannie Rousseau (et la Vicomtesse de Clarens), King’s Medal for Service in the cause of Freedom, whose outstandingly courageous work as a 23 year old in the Druides network for France and the Allies supplied vitally useful intelligence at one of the most critical times of the war: details and deployment plans of the German V-1 Doodlebug and V-2 Rocket Vergeltunqswaffen, the reduction and delay of which were vital prerequisites for Allied landings and later victory.

“Also, through her signature, we remember all those many others from Occupied Europe who did not survive their incarceration in the Concentration Camps, which Amniarix was also so fortunate to have survived.  Professor R V JONES (Signatory no. 63), dedicated his book:

‘To all those who in lone obscurity and of their own will risked torture and death for scientific intelligence, like “Amniarix”… for “Courage is the quality which guarantees all others.”’

“Particularly recalled too here was “Petrel”, Georges Lamarque, a university friend who led the Druides Network, whose messages were so vital, and who was killed after he gave himself up to avoid savage reprisals in his own village.’ [ARP]

“Her formal career as a spy began in 1941, with a chance meeting with Georges Lamarque on a night train from Paris to Vichy… During 1943, she filed, among other reports, two particularly remarkable ones about Peenemünde. These reports led R.V. Jones and, ultimately, the rest of the British government and the rest of the Allies, directly to the missile and rocket development work going on there. Her collection and forwarding of this intelligence under very difficult circumstances led, through Jones’ analysis and persuasive abilities in London, to British raids on Peenemünde…as RV Jones put it: “AMNIARIX’s reports stand brilliantly in the history of intelligence, and three concentration camps — Ravensbruck, Königsberg (a punishment camp), and Torgau could not break her.” [Wikipedia]

“Jeannie de Clarens is hereby awarded the Agency Seal Medallion for heroic and momentous contribution to Allied efforts during World War II as a member of the French Resistance. At the age of 20, she used her position as an interpreter for the Germans to report what she saw and heard. Arrested and released by the Gestapo in 1941, she devised a new cover and with her language skills as entree used her extraordinary intuition and considerable wiles to provide intelligence on German missile research.

“In September 1943 she filed a stunningly accurate report on the German missile order of battle. When captured by the Gestapo in 1944, Madame de Clarens had both the mettle and heart to warn her companions, who successfully escaped. With her place in history secure and having spent the last year of the war in three German concentration camps, we could understand had she rested on her laurels.

“Instead, Madame de Clarens has continued her fight for human dignity and freedom, including her work for Amnesty International. Her wartime exploits remind us that, even in a world of high-technology espionage, the human agent remains indispensable to vital operations beyond the reach of science and that there can be no substitute for human courage “in the defense of freedom.”” (R. James Woolsey, Director, CIA, in a speech honouring ‘Amniarix’)

New York Times obituary

After five decades, a spy tells her tale by David Ignatius, Washington Post (in which she first revealed her story)

A diminutive woman – and a spy who defined courage
(a fine obituary by David Grimes in the Washington Post)

Jeannie Rousseau on BBC Radio 4’s superb ‘Last Word’ programme

SciencesPo named a Lecture Hall after Jeannie Rousseau

The Spy Who Studied at Sciences Po

After graduating at the top of her class in July 1940, Jeannie de Clarens, née Rousseau, set out on an extraordinary career in the world of interpretation and espionage. At 23 years old, she was to hand Allied Forces one of the Second World War’s most precious pieces of intelligence. In memory of de Clarens, a true heroine of the French Resistance, Sciences Po now pays homage by giving her name to a lecture hall.

It can often be from the blandest of backgrounds that history begins to unfold. Yet few reading the report card of Sciences Po student Jeannie Rousseau today would fail to be moved. As brilliant as it is completely banal, this report produced in Autumn 1940 reminds its reader that “due to current events, you have not been able to sit the entirety of the exams necessary for the awarding of your degree”. In the neutral language of bureaucracy, no elaboration follows as to what these “events” might be. Nor that these pages, which did not ultimately prevent Jeannie from graduating first of her class in 1940, had as their subject one of the most distinguished female spies of the Second World War. A heroine at the centre of scenes like those immortalised in Jean-Pierre Melville’s iconic film Army of Shadows, Jeannie more recently caught the attention of journalists at the New York Times. The American newspaper published in August 2017 an obituary that pays homage to the spy’s “heroic and momentous achievements” on behalf of the French Resistance. French journalists have yet to produce an equivalent.

Student in Finance at 18, spy and interpreter at 21

Out of the monotony of a flawless academic record emerged the thrilling career of Jeannie Rousseau: enrolled at 18 in Sciences Po’s Finance course, by 21 the young graduate was working underground in occupied Paris. How did it happen that a young girl fresh from university would come to outwit the German military, collecting information on a secret weapons project to save countless civilian lives?

Firstly, thanks to her perfect command of both German and English. The young Jeannie excelled in languages as in all subjects, from social economics to the study of insurance, not forgetting ‘Modern Forms of Movable Property’. But beyond that, as her friend Claude de Granrut (FR) put it, “she loved the window Sciences Po gave her onto foreign cultures”. Granrut, who met Jeannie in 1946, admits that “it was thanks to Jeannie that I studied at Sciences Po! She did everything to convince me to apply. She had loved the constant emphasis on cultural exchange and had made some very dear friends there.”

Alias Amniarix, a special recruit for the French Resistance

After the war, Rousseau’s fluency in English would be the gateway to a career in interpretation for international bodies. During the conflict, her perfect German was both a strength and an affliction. It was this that led her to make her first break as an interpreter and then spy. It all began in Dinard, where her father had thought it wise to move his family: Jeannie became a go-between for local officials and the German authorities, communicating all that she could learn about the plans of the occupiers. Next she returned to Paris, becoming in 1941 an interpreter for a collective of businessmen – and putting into practice, perhaps, the training she had gained only recently in classes on ‘Great Modern Industry’ and ‘Powerful Commercial Policy’.

Jeannie continued to use her charm and her cunning to win the confidence of the Germans, affecting naïveté to gather military secrets of the utmost importance. “I gazed at them stunned, repeating that they could not be serious when they spoke of these new weapons that would travel faster than an airplane”, she recalled to a journalist from the Washington Post in 1998, referring here to the German’s newly developed V1 and V2 Rockets. Keen to convince her, one officer went as far as to present Jeannie with full plans of the rockets, which she committed instantly to her photographic memory. As she stated, as if self-evident: “what’s the use of collecting information, if not to pass it on?”

If there were to be a war film based on Jeannie’s life, we would now come to a classic scene: the man intended to receive Jeannie’s precious information is in a packed night train speeding through occupied France. His name is Georges Lamarque (FR) and he recognises Jeannie despite the dim light inside the train: it is indeed the very lively and very gifted young lady he knew at Sciences Po before the war. She would be a unique recruit for the “Druids”, a resistance network affiliated to the Alliance, founded by Lamarque. Rousseau accepts his proposition without hesitation, and thus commences her double life under the code name “Amniarix”.

An exceptional character

Alongside her natural talent for languages, Rousseau’s exceptional intelligence was noticed by all of her professors. Pierre Waline, who taught Social Economics, noted on two of her oral presentations in 1938: “One was good, the other almost too good. Speaks easily, a little too fast. Intelligent student, evidently more at ease in oral presentations than written work, should do better…”

She did more than better: her path was to be extraordinary. But her linguistic abilities would bring her into grave danger. In 1944, she was arrested while attempting to exfiltrate to London. Deported first to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück and then moved to Torgau, Jeannie took the helm of a prisoner’s revolt. It’s hard to imagine the almost fatal audacity it must have taken for this 25 year-old woman to stand before the authorities of her prison camp, explaining how, within the terms of the Geneva Convention, they had no right to force their prisoners into manufacturing arms. Jeannie’s courage almost cost her her life. Placed in solitary confinement at Ravensbrück and in the throes of tuberculosis, she faced a horror she would later struggle to articulate to her children.

It was a dying woman that the Swedish Red Cross liberated from the camp in 1945. Despite the odds, Jeannie survived, meeting in her convalescence a fellow survivor: her soon-to-be husband, Henri de Clarens. He too had been a victim of the camps, in his case Büchenwald and Auschwitz. Never again was a word of German to pass through Jeannie’s lips. “But that didn’t stop her enrolling her children in German classes at school”, her son Pascal de Clarens remembers with admiration. Evidently his mother’s openness could withstand anything, even the unspeakable.

“Heroism is a question of instinct”

Now an interpreter of the highest level working for the United Nations and other international organisations, Jeannie de Clarens avoided nearly all requests from journalists and historians after the war. “People want to forget”, she told the Washington Post in 1998, “people don’t want to know.” In 1993, decades after the end of the war, she accepted the Seal Medal of Honour from Director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey. To this decoration was added the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix de Guerre, and in 2009 she was nominated Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour. Yet in her single and precious interview for the Washington Post, de Clarens dodged the issue of her own courage: “Why did I do it? I just did it, that’s all. How could I not have done it? Heroism is not a question of choice but of instinct. It’s something that starts in our nervous system, not in the brain.”

Jeannie might raise an eyebrow ironically at the sight of her name fixed on the door of a lecture hall. We can only hope that her fond memories of the rue Saint-Guillaume are permission enough for Sciences Po to break its silence on her incredible story. Until the day a curious script-writer might unearth it again…?

Sources

Wikipedia

‘Jeannie de Clarens, héroïne de la Résistance’ (FR), article by Christopher Thiéry on the site of the AIIC (International Association of Conference Interpreters)

‘Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens, Valiant World War II Spy, Dies at 98’ – The New York Times, 29 August 2017

‘Amniarix, The Reluctant Spy’ – The Washington Post, 28 December 1998

Find out more about the renaming of Sciences Po lecture halls“

Mémorial de la Résistance en Vercors

Repose en paix