Nearly 75 years after Paris was liberated from its Nazi occupiers during World War II, we are still gathering fresh perspectives.
Especially about women, thanks to journalists like Anne Sebba, who has written “Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation”
Rather than bury herself deep in the catacombs of the Bibliothèque Nationale reading authors like Hervé Le Boterf and Jean Galtier-Boissière, as was suggested to her by a male historian, Sebba tried another approach.
The British biographer and former Reuters foreign correspondent, opted instead to dip into the letters, diaries, ration cards and memoirs of the women who actually lived in Paris during the oppressive occupation (1940-1944), when the “City of Light” went dark.
And does she have a story to tell.
The Battle of France began on May 10, 1940, when German forces discharged its western offensive by invading Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg; three days later the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe took Allied forces by surprise by entering French territory at the river Meuse near Sedan in the Ardennes.
By June 14, German boots stormed Paris, where the French government had already fled to Bordeaux, the same day that 16 Parisians reportedly killed themselves. Estimates advanced by Sebba suggests that up to 10 million French people fled their homes during the German thrust into their homeland.
After losing between 50,000 and 90,000 soldiers, France formally surrendered to the Germany army on June 22, bringing an end to a battle that lasted all of six weeks, a calamity, moreover, that was once described by historian Julian Jackson as “the most humiliating military disaster in French history.”
The terms of the Armistice divided France into occupied and unoccupied zones. The Germans would control three-fifths of the country (northern and western France, including its entire Atlantic coast). The rest of the country would be nominally administered by the French government at Vichy (a spa town in the southern hills of Auvergne) under Marshal Pétain with the Nazis breathing down his neck.
The crushing defeat meant that the Third Republic (which had existed since the Franco-Prussian war of 1871) had ended as a political system.
What’s more, the land of liberty, once echoed by the likes of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, came to a screeching halt.
Before Paris and its neighbors were finally liberated on August 25, 1944, France had plunged into the abyss. As many as 75,000 Jews were rounded up and deported from France to Nazi death camps (only 3,000 survived), 30,000 French civilians were mercilessly gunned down as hostages or members of the Resistance with another 60,000 deported to German concentration camps.
The thrust of Sebba’s focus in “Les Parisiennes” is not to write a detailed political and military history of the four years of German occupation. Rather, her objective, is to offer readers a bitter taste of what women had to face during the war; the hard choices they had to make in order to survive, which at times meant selling their souls, others times in meant dying and taking up arms for their country, which until recently has gone practically unnoticed.
From Sebba’s perspective, very little is known about the women in Paris during World War II other than they all too willingly socialized, collaborated, and slept with their German occupiers.
Some, no doubt, did.
This was especially true of the women of lower economic means who worked in the cafés and hotels patronized by many German soldiers.
And they paid dearly for it. Research suggests that as many as 20,000 women (les tondues) had their heads shaved, after the country was liberated, their faces branded with swastikas and paraded through the streets of Paris.
Only an estimated 35 to 50 men suffered a similar fate.
Women deemed to be spies after the war were executed, but were never given a trial, which runs contrary to the Geneva Convention, Sebba argues, and should have been considered a war crime.
One of the most prominent woman of the upper echelon who had a liaison with the enemy was Coco Chanel, the French designer, businesswoman and anti-Semite, who had a romantic relationship with Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a German officer who had been an operative in military intelligence.
Despite being questioned by a French judge after the war, Chanel escaped retribution.
What’s often is overlooked is that men were equally guilty in collaborating with the enemy but their punishment wasn’t nearly as severe.
It was the French police, after all, not the Germans, who rounded up countless Jews in Paris and took them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver (a bicycling center in the heart of Paris) before being sent to a concentration camp in the Parisian suburbs at Drancy and then to the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
Additionally, underreported from Sebba’s perspective, was the significant contribution women played in the war effort. According to some estimates, women represented 15 to 20 percent of the total number of French Resistance fighters.
Of the books published between 1944 and 1995 on the French Resistance fighters, only two percent dealt with women, while among the 1,036 members of the Resistance honored by Charles de Gaulle in the Order of Liberation, only six were female.
But, I suppose, such was to be expected from a country who only permitted women the right to vote in October, 1944.
Women in France, moreover, were hardly spared from Nazi aggression. Women, in fact, represented about 15 percent of deportations to Nazi death camps.
Sebba underscores some of the unsung heroines of the French Resistance, who very often get short shrift in Vichy, France.
Women like Yvonne Oddon, the head librarian at the Musee de l’ Homme who, among other things, sent books and clothes to French prisoners of war at camps near Paris and then put herself in danger by sheltering groups of other escaping prisoners and helping them cross the demarcation lines from the occupied zone to the free zones.
Another towering figure was Germaine Tillion, an ethnologist, who helped organize intelligence for the allied forces, aided prisoners in their escape, and assisted a Jewish family by giving them her family’s paper’s. She and her mother were subsequently sent to the German concentration camp of Ravensbrück (near Berlin); her mother died in the camp in 1945, but she escaped in the spring of that year.
Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz (niece of former French president Charles de Gaulle) was a key member of the French Resistance in Paris; she was arrested by the French Gestapo in July, 1943 and deported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944, but survived and was released in 1945.
Among the many great tragedies of the war, were the aspiring writers who never survived. Women like novelist Irène Némirovsky. Arrested as Jew under the racial laws--she left behind a manuscript that would never be completed. She died at Auschwitz at the age of 39.
Some long overdue recognition to women finally came in 2014, when French President Hollande announced that the ashes of Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle, two distinguished resistance heroines, would be interred in the Panthéon (a secular monument), a prominent national honor. Prior to this announcement, Marie Curie (French physicist and chemist) was the only woman interred at the Panthéon.
Another theme that Sebba chronicles is how women kept up their signature fashion (“loud colors, short skirts, over-padded shoulders, extravagant turbans”) during the German occupation, no so much because they were oblivious to the ravages of war, but because fashion was their badge of honor, a way of letting the Germans know they haven’t stripped them of their culture, while ``providing a beacon of hope for the future.”
Sebba, a splendid writer, with meticulous eye for colorful details, gives us a well-researched narrative that paints a dark foreboding landscape over occupied Paris. It’s a book that is long overdue in batting down tired myths by stressing how important women were in the Resistance during World War II. Sebba nimbly documents narratives from those who lived through the horrors—to persuasively emphasize that women loved their country just as much as their male counterparts.
--Bill Lucey
February 9, 2017
