“I was The Cat”. This is how Mathilde Carré, known as “Lily”, also known as Victoire, titled the first version of her memoirs in 1959. Nearly fifteen years after the end of the war and six years after her early release from prison, the woman who was one of the most controversial figures of the French Resistance is still trying to defend herself.
However, it was as an agent of the Abwehr, the powerful German military intelligence organ, that she betrayed her former Resistance comrades, sending many of them to deportation after her confidences to Hugo Bleicher, who was the one of his lovers.
Born in 1908 in Creuse, under the name Mathilde Bélard, she married Maurice Carré, a teacher, in the 1930s. The latter was transferred to Algeria, then French, and the latter was extremely bored there. So, when the war breaks out, she finds herself in mainland France, she seizes the opportunity to experience an adventure, a real one.
After briefly being a nurse, she found herself in the south of France, in Toulouse. In the Rose City, she crosses paths with Roman Czerniawski known as “Armand”, a Polish officer stuck on French soil after the rout of the army in 1940 – as a reminder, Poland was then an ally of France and its government in exile stopped there before reaching London just before Pétain signed the Armistice with Germany.
In this France then in the midst of chaos in the summer of 1040, and like other Polish officers, Czerniawski set up an intelligence network, which quickly relied on local resources: these were the very first resistance groups that then saw the light of day, later baptized under the name “F2”. Apart from historians and the most passionate, few people know this name. However, under its various titles “Interralié”, Marine, etc. This group maintained its activities of collecting information and then taking actions against the occupier until the end of the war. He resisted raids, arrests, denunciations… and even Mathilde Carré.
Because what was the latter doing in this story? After meeting Czernawski, who becomes her lover, she manages to reach Paris. Together, they manage to establish an intelligence cell which transmits crucial information to London. In fact, and she of course did not fail to highlight it, Mathilde Carré actually had a role in the Resistance.
In 1941, she “infiltrated” Vichy – where Pétain’s collaborationist government was based. This is where she got her nickname “Cat”, due to a rather unusual habit she had of curling up in hotel armchairs. At the end of the same year, following her own arrest, she was “returned” by the Abwehr, in particular one of its officers: Hugo Bleicher, who also became her lover. Her denunciations, which she later described as “great cowardice”, committed to save her own life, resulted in arrests and deportations.
Also in 1941, she managed to reach London but was quickly arrested and imprisoned, her double game having been unmasked. Arriving across the Channel, “Armand”, recruited by the Intelligence Service, also plays a double, even triple game. But unlike his former mistress, and despite subsequent investigations, he did not experience the same fate as ‘She.
For her actions, Mathilde Carré was in fact sentenced to death in January 1949, her sentence was then commuted to life in prison, before her release “for health reasons” in 1954.
When she published her book, Mathilde Carré still enjoyed a sort of “star” status, the director Henri Decoin dedicated two films to her: “La Chatte” (1958) and “La Chatte sort ses griffes”. Of her troubled past, only the most sulphurous sides were remembered. But who still remembers the “Mata Hari” of the Second World War? Some media outlets, notably France Inter, in an episode of Affaires sensibles, now devote investigations to her, however, like other female figures of the Second World War, Mathilde Carré has fallen back into anonymity. After a religious conversion in the 1975s, she died at the age of 98 in 2007.
Sources:
Carré, Mathilde Bélard They called me pussy. A. Michel, 1975.
Medrala, Jean. Franco-Polish intelligence networks, 1940-1944: Network F, navy, family-Interallié, Network F2, star, PSW-Africa, Enigma-team300, Switzerland 3. L’Harmattan, 2005.
National Archives, collection of depositions given at the trial of La Chatte (Mathilde Carré)
