Chanel's War
INTERVIEWER: Well, let me make it easier for you. Which side were you on?
COCO CHANEL: On neither side, of course. I stood up for myself as I always have done. Nobody has ever told Coco Chanel what to think.
A few days after Paris was liberated from the Nazis in August 1944, the most notorious fashion couturière in the world collapsed on a hotel bed in Switzerland after escaping the French capital and certain death. How did an exhausted Coco Chanel get there and who helped her evade warring Allied and German troops?
For eighty years, this incredible feat of courage, luck, and ingenuity in the midst of immense danger has been deliberately shrouded in disinformation and secrecy by family, friends, wary governments, risk-averse business partners and fellow collaborators – until now. Using previously overlooked sources, including declassified French Résistance papers and evidence from organised crime figures, Chanel’s War can finally reveal what really happened to Coco Chanel at the end of the Second World War.
RICHARD WALLACE has been expelled or threatened with expulsion from most of the institutions he’s been associated with.
He was threatened with expulsion from his expensive school for not taking his university entrance exams seriously enough (he subsequently achieved the second highest result in the school’s history).
He was almost thrown out of university for writing a friend’s final honours paper, but instead had his First Class degree downgraded in retaliation.
As a junior reporter he was threatened with ejection from Wimbledon’s Centre Court press seats for clapping after a tense rally on set point.
And he was ejected from the House of Commons press gallery for reading a book during a particularly dull debate.
It’s little wonder he wound up in Public Relations and the Intelligence Services.
He has so far avoided being ejected from The History Press, with whom he published The King’s Loot in 2024.