André Girard ( 1901 – 1968 ) André Girard ( 25 May 1901 , Chinon , Indre - et - Loire – 2 September 1968 , United States of America ) was a French painter , poster - maker and Resistance worker . During the Second World War he founded and headed the CARTE network , also taking " Carte " as his personal codename . Life . Prewar . He was the eldest child born to a pair of brewers , and attended the École des Beaux - Arts before doing military service at Saint - Cyr . He became a painter , studying with both Roualt and Bonnard , as well as a caricaturist , and theatre set designer , and as one of the best known publicity poster designers in Paris during the 1930s . He set himself up in Venice in 1936 – 37 and in Manhattan in 1938 . 1939 – 45 . Having married Andrée Jouan ( known as " la petite Andrée " ) and had 4 children ( all daughters , including Danièle Delorme ) before war broke out , he was not called up in 1939 . He refused to see the Germans enter Paris after their success in the Battle of France , and departed in 1940 for the free zone of France , setting up at Antibes . There he painted his four daughters and founded the CARTE network . He was apolitical and tended towards recruitment and spying ready for an armed uprising against the Germans . At first hostile to Gaullism , he aroused the interest of the Special Operations Executive , who carried out a favourable evaluation of him and his network and then supplied him with arms , radio operators and money . In July 1942 Nicholas Bodington , second in command of SOE ' s F section , landed in France to check on the value of reports about CARTE transmitted by agent Francis Basin , but in 12 September that year Bodington filed a report confirming SOE ' s highly favourable opinion of the network . However , security indiscretions and differences between Girard and his second in command Henri Frager weakened the network . For example , in November 1942 a suitcase containing a list of 200 CARTE members disappeared , either lost by André Marsac when he fell asleep on a train and finally falling into Abwehr hands , or being lost by Marsac in Marseille and coming into the hands of Dubois , police commissioner and head of security for CARTE , who then let the interested parties know of its loss via Bartroli de Mandres . Whichever account is true , no arrests resulted from the loss in the end , but CARTE was fatally weakened and the SOE network " Prosper " - PHYSICIAN largely took over its work ( particularly using its important intelligence files ) . In 1943 Girard refused to merge CARTE with COMBAT , feeling it to be too close to Gaullism , and on the night of 20 / 21 February that year flew to England on SOE orders , having been picked up by a Lockheed A - 28 Hudson near Arles . SOE opposed his returning to France , even when he learned of his wife ' s arrest and deportation to Ravensbrück concentration camp ( she was only released in 1945 ) . He thus broke with SOE and went into self - imposed exile in the United States of America , where he remained until his death . There he gave conferences and wrote articles and books to vent his opposition to both the British and the Gaullists , thus pushing himself into relative obscurity . Post - war . In New York , he produced several religious paintings ( Stations of the Cross , Apocalypse , etc . ) and in 1952 he decorated several churches in New York , Vermont and California . In 1947 he published " Peut - on dire la vérité sur la Résistance " , in which he presented several important corrections to Bénouville ' s book " Le Sacrifice du matin " . He died and was buried in America in 1968 . Recognition . He was awarded the American Legion of Merit .