B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

Most abortion cases continued to be dealt with by the normal courts. In the Seine département, 1,300 police inquiries into abortion cases were made in 1943. More than three times the number of cases came before the courts in 1942 than in 1940. In the circumstances of the Occupation—the presence of strangers in local communities (whether Germans or refugees), the absence of husbands, and the burden represented by unwanted babies in a period of shortages—it is hardly surprising that the number of abortions increased. The real figures can only be guessed, but the evidence of post-abortion cases arriving in hospitals suggests a sharp rise in 1941–2, possibly between 400,000 and one million per annum. They were usually married women of modest means, often with a small family. Mostly the abortions were carried out by family friends not professional abortionists.28

  Whether in trying to keep women out of the workplace or in repressing abortion, Vichy found that it was not so easy to ‘remake’ women. But did women view the regime differently from men? The Exodus had been primarily an experience of women and children, and it possibly made women initially receptive to Pétain’s rhetoric of hearth and home.29 But they were also among the first to see how little it corresponded to the realities of life under the Occupation. Women were the people most directly affected by food shortages since it usually fell to them to find the food. Food queues brought women together in large numbers, and frequently witnessed violent criticism of the authorities.30 Food demonstrations, mainly involving women, were the first major challenge to public order facing Vichy.

  While Vichy exhorted women to return to traditional roles, many women were being forced, by the absence of their husbands in prisoner-of-war camps, to undertake new responsibilities to keep their families alive. The most generous social benefits were allocated to large families where mothers stayed at home and were supported by a working husband, but this was a mockery of the situation facing many women. In fact Vichy did concede one modification of existing legislation to take account of reality. From March 1941 the Republic’s allocation de la mère au foyer (benefit for mothers at home), which had provided women with a benefit to compensate for lost income if they stayed at home with the children, was replaced by the allocation de salaire unique (single wage benefit), available to any household with only one income, irrespective whether that income was earned by the man or the woman. This provided an incentive for women to seek a job.31

  No women were more brutally confronted by the contradictions of the regime than prisoner-of-war wives. Vichy propaganda endlessly celebrated their absent husbands whose suffering was portrayed as an expiation of the nation’s sin.32 Prisoner-of-war wives were also accorded an iconic status in propaganda, but in daily life they were the object of suspicion and jealousy. If they were seen enjoying themselves, they were judged to lack decorum; friendly relations with any man made them victims of gossip and letters of denunciation.33 It was so widely believed that many of them had turned to prostitution that the government passed a law against adultery in December 1942 with special penalties for prisoners’ wives.34 In order to overcome their isolation, and provide each other with practical assistance, prisoner-of-war wives organized themselves into groups. These eventually formed into a national federation which had 12,000 members in March 1942 and 40,000 by May 1943. They set up parcel-making centres, organized holiday camps for children, and published a bulletin. What is interesting about these groups is that they were created by women themselves. Although Vichy talked a lot to women, it did not expect them to talk back or to show that they had a separate voice: the interests of women and the family were seen as identical. But the existence of this women’s activism does not necessarily imply estrangement from the regime. The publications of the prisoner-of-war wives’ associations claimed to be non-political. They gave advice on how to be a good wife and mother, and exhorted their readers to consult absent husbands on family decisions. In short, their language and values mirrored Vichy’s official values.35

  It may even be that the vulnerability of prisoner-of-war wives rendered them more liable to support collaboration than other sections of the population. A report of the postal censors in the autumn of 1941 noted that in the Occupied Zone collaboration was supported only by wives of prisoners of war; and a year later a report noted that these circles were characterized by ‘a generalized tendency to Anglophobia’.36 Some women joined the RNP in the belief that this would get their husbands released.37 In general, however, few women joined collaborationist movements. When collaboration is discussed in relation to women, two issues are usually highlighted: denunciations and sexual relationships with Germans. Of the 901 women tried for collaboration after the war in the Seine département, 687 (76 per cent) were accused of denunciations; of 225 cases of denunciation which came to light in the Norman département of the Eure at the Liberation, 65 per cent had been committed by women.38 There is no quantitative study of delation to tell us whether women were more prone to it than men, but this is what was popularly believed. Female denunciators appear in novels about the period, like Dutourd’s Au bon beurre, and it is no coincidence that the only woman to be interviewed in the Sorrow and the Pity was an unrepentant Pétainist involved in a sordid case of denunciation.39

  The liaisons between French women and German men are the aspect of female ‘collaboration’ which most exercised the popular imagination at the Liberation. Between 10,000 and 20,000 women accused of so-called ‘horizontal collaboration’ had their heads shaved and swastikas daubed on their skulls; sometimes they were also stripped naked. Prostitutes were singled out for particular opprobrium. During the Occupation many brothels were officially reserved for German military personnel, and those working in them had no choice but to comply. The most famous brothel in Paris was the One Two Two (named after its address at 122 Rue de Provence). Its manager Fabienne Jamet managed to get the German authorities to allow it to be patronized both by Germans and French—‘I had won the One Two Two back for France’—and it was frequented by rich black marketeers like Joinovici, members of the Bonny-Lafont gang, celebrities like Sacha Guitry and Tino Rossi. Recollecting her war years Jamet looked back nostalgically on the handsome SS officers who frequented her establishment: ‘I’ve never had such a good time in my life.’40

  In the Paris region, there were thirty-two brothels operating for the Germans in 1941; there were seven in Toulouse in November 1942 with sixty-three prostitutes serving the Germans in fortnightly shifts. There were also many unregistered prostitutes—the Germans estimated 80,000–100,000 in the Paris region in 1941—most of whom were driven to prostitution by the financial necessity and the existence of a large new market. Henri Michel remarks that the ‘honourable’ prostitute of Maupassant’s Boule de suif did not find many exemplars in the 1940s, but ‘Boule de Suif’ was quite prosperous, and probably in a better position to refuse than many women finding themselves in similar circumstances in the 1940s. There are also examples of resisters who were hidden in brothels or fed information by those working in them.41

  It was not only prostitutes who were punished at the Liberation. Any woman seen in the company of a German risked finding herself accused of horizontal collaboration. The kinds of employment open to women—secretarial jobs or domestic service—were more likely to bring them into contact with Germans than was true of French men, and this did not imply any preference on their part. But it is true that many liaisons did occur. By mid-1943 80,000 Frenchwomen from the Occupied Zone alone had claimed benefit from the Germans for their offspring.42 Those who had affairs with Germans included celebrities like the actress Arletty and the couturière Coco Chanel. At the Liberation, Arletty famously dismissed the idea that her sexual choices diminished her patriotism: ‘my ass is international, my heart is French’. Both she and Chanel, however, certainly had right-wing sympathies. The actress Corinne Luchaire, daughter of Jean Luchaire, wrote empty-headed reminiscences about partying with Germans in occupied Paris while protesting that she was not in any way political.43 Luchaire moved in a tiny, self-contai
ned, and privileged Parisian beau monde. But where we have information about ordinary women who became sentimentally involved with Germans, they seem to have come from the most vulnerable sections of society. They were young, single or divorced, often with one or both parents deceased, and lacking much formal education. Often their first contact with a German had been in the workplace.44

  How were these liaisons generally viewed? Simone de Beauvoir claimed that in the early days of the Occupation, watching French women and Germans together, she often overheard people remark, with amusement rather than disapproval, ‘soon there’ll be lots of little Germans’.45 Yet in many diaries of the period, the first sighting of Germans with French women is recorded with outrage, as a moment revealing the humiliation of Occupation. The first incident dealt with by the Paris police commissioner Georges Ballyot, after the arrival of the Germans, involved a German soldier who claimed to have been insulted by a French war veteran in the street. The veteran was allowed to go free after he had explained that his insults were directed at the French woman in the company of the German.46 Women who worked for the extremely dangerous ‘Travail allemand’ section of the Resistance, which involved making friends with Germans in order to obtain information or encourage them to desert, found that the most difficult aspect of the work was braving the hostile stares of French onlookers.47

  Sexual contacts between French women and German soldiers were numerous, but the post-war fixation upon them is largely revealing of male sexual anxieties and jealousies. Quite apart from the homosexual encounters between German soldiers and Frenchmen, which history has not recorded,48 little was said after the war about the numerous liaisons between German girls and French POWs or French workers in Germany. How many of those who shaved the heads of women were assuaging their own guilt at having done so little to resist the Germans? How many of the maquisards who punished women were expressing their own sexual frustrations after months of enforced sexual deprivation?

  Rather than viewing the relationships between French women and German men as a particularly flagrant form of collaboration, they should be seen as one of the many moral dilemmas confronted by people living under foreign occupation. Were relationships with anti-Nazi Germans justifiable or was a Boche always a Boche? There were no clear rules of conduct. One woman in Normandy, who had had a child by a German, told a post-Liberation court that she did not consider the liaison reprehensible: ‘neither he nor his relatives have ever shared the ideas of the Nazi regime. His uncle spent ten years in a concentration camp because of his anti-Nazi views.’49

  The diary of Micheline Bood, a Parisian schoolgirl, 14 years old in 1940, shows one individual coping with the temptations of Occupation, and trying to reoncile curiosity and conscience. Bood’s family was Gaullist; her brother was in England during the war, flying with the RAF. Her diary is full of pro-British and pro-Gaullist sentiments. Pétain is described as senile from the start, and she is continuously getting into trouble because of her pro-Gaullist sympathies— writing ‘vive de Gaulle’ on the blackboard or drawing Vs on walls. But her diary is also about the difficulties of living out these principles in the face of daily contacts with friendly Germans.

  Most of her encounters took place at the swimming pool. In April 1941 she exchanged pleasantries (in English) with a blond 25-year-old German called Walter, who told her Paris was the most beautiful city in the world. He accompanied her to the metro and she felt ‘ashamed at the way people were looking at me’. Out of ‘propriety’, she tells him they cannot walk together; she has a clear conscience because ‘I told him all my views’. Two days later, they meet again at the pool and again she refuses to walk with him because ‘the French don’t like it’. Her mother reproaches her for talking to him, and she agrees: ‘I should never have spoken to a Boche.’ She goes to confession, but the priest is no help: he is only interested in whether sex has occurred. In June she adopts a new position: ‘I detest and will always detest the Boches … but Germans taken individually are very nice, usually well-brought up and correct … I no longer feel it is wrong to speak to a German.’50

  In July, at the pool, she encounters another German, the 19-year-old Peter, and they have several meetings which she hides from her mother. But in August, she decides again that she can never love a Boche: ‘there will always be something in me, my education probably, and my love for England which will save me’. A few days later she notes her hatred of collaboration: ‘sinking into the mire’. In December, shocked by her friend Monique, who has fallen totally in love with a German and allowed herself to be kissed by him several times, she resolves never to allow herself to be kissed by a Boche: ‘One might love a Boche, but he remains a Boche.’ With the arrival of summer the following year, however, swimming-pool flirtations with Germans resumed.51

  Micheline Bood’s experiences illustrate the limited usefulness of the vocabulary of resistance and collaboration. However one views her amorous encounters, her pro-Gaullist pranks could have got her into real trouble. Doubtless her life mirrored that of thousands of other girls of her age and situation.

  Remaking the Young: Aspirations and Reality

  Vichy wished to promote collaboration between France and Germany, but it would certainly not have approved of Bood’s flirtations with Germans—nor with French boys either. Vichy wanted boys and girls to be kept separate; co-education was frowned upon. The regime’s education policies towards the sexes overlapped on only one point: the harmfulness of too much learning. Books filled girls’ minds with thoughts unsuitable for future mothers; boys needed to build up their characters more than their minds. Bonnard had once written a book ‘in praise of ignorance’.52 One Youth Ministry representative wrote in 1940: ‘less literature and more nature … more baths, more walks, more sun’.53

  No previous government in France, including the Popular Front, had done more to promote sport than Vichy. In July 1940, it created a Commissariat for General and Sporting Education headed by the tennis star Jean Borotra, twice a Wimbledon singles champion. Borotra viewed sport as a way of improving physical fitness, building character, and instilling moral values. He wanted to phase out professionalism and allow sport to become ‘chivalrous and disinterested’. Before sports contests, participants had to swear the Athlete’s Oath: ‘I promise on my honour to practise sport disinterestedly, with discipline and firmness, so as to become a better person and serve my country better.’ To motivate young people to practise sport, Borotra created a National Sporting Certificate. Nine hours of ‘general education’ (primarily sport but also artistic activities) were introduced into the school curriculum.54

  Borotra’s aims meshed perfectly with those of the Youth Secretariat (SGJ). Georges Lamirand, its head, supported the creation of Vichy’s two new youth movements: the Chantiers de la jeunesse and the Compagnons de France. The Chantiers, run by General de la Porte du Theil, were compulsory for all 20-year-olds, who were sent to camps for eight months to undergo a regime of strenuous outdoor physical activity away from the corrupting influence of the city. Visits were arranged to local communities so that the recruits could learn about the realities of peasant life. Each camp leader (chef) was supposed to encourage comradeship, and organize games and singing around the fire in the evenings. The Chantiers were to be the embodiment of the community ideal.55

  The Compagnons de France were a voluntary organization for teenagers, founded in July 1940 by the former civil servant Henri Dhavernas. After May 1941, they were run by a career officer, Guillaume de Tournemire. The aim was to inculcate community spirit and patriotism. Recruits were admitted as ‘apprentices’ and graduated to become ‘journeymen’ (compagnons); they wore scouting-style uniforms. Full-time members lived in camps according to a strict routine. They performed useful works like forestry but also cultural activities like choral singing and drama. There were never more than about 29,000 Compagnons (of whom about 3,500 were full-time), but no other voluntary youth organization was more generously subsidized.56

  Lami
rand, de la Porte du Theil, Dhavernas, Tournemire, and many others associated with the SGJ all came, as we have seen, from the milieu of conservative social Catholicism and Catholic scouting. Their aim was to regenerate France by creating a national spiritual community. They believed in honour, duty, discipline, faith, and class reconciliation; they opposed materialism and liberal individualism. They were not, however, without competitors for the control of Vichy youth policy. There was Marion’s Information Secretariat whose fascisant views were represented within the SGJ itself by Pelorson. There were Pétain’s own advisers on youth policy, like the Maurrassian Henri Massis, who shared the political conservatism of the SGJ, but not its naive social ideas. There was the Education Ministry which saw character building as a distraction from the intellectual values which had traditionally been the priority of French education. Lamirand, who was not much of an administrator or politician, had to navigate continuously between these conflicting currents.

  Lamirand’s real problem, however, was that his ambitions came up against the realities of life in occupied France. Schools were supposed to remove unsuitable textbooks, but paper shortages made this impracticable, and the old books continued to be used.57 Borotra’s nine hours of general education were soon reduced to three because undernourishment made excessive physical activity undesirable, and most children lacked appropriate clothes and footwear. Parents were suspicious of general education in the curriculum. This explains the increasing popularity of Catholic schools which were seen as providing a serious education, not one encouraging children to ‘sing, dance, and jump’. The Church was suspicious of any cult of the body.58

  Throughout France, there was a lack of sports facilities. Although Borotra encouraged villages to apply for government subsidies to build them, most were unwilling to sacrifice agricultural land for this purpose. When they did, the result was to unleash conflicts between Catholics and anticlericals about whether the facilities should be sited near the school or the church. Instead of promoting national reconciliation, sport reopened old quarrels. Participation in sport did increase during the Occupation. By 1943, there were 6,100 football clubs, three times more than in 1939; the athletics federation increased its membership from 90,365 to 208,425 between 1940 and 1941. But this had little to do with Borotra’s Commissariat: a 1942 survey in Paris showed few people had heard of it.59 The enthusiasm for sport was a manifestation of the turning away from politics which so many prefects noticed. In the Nord/Pas-de-Calais, the population was described as incapable of enthusiasm for anything other than the success of local football teams.60