Liberté égalité sororité

De Gaulle gave a thousand medals to resistance heroes – but only six were women. The Parisiennes who survived told Anne Sebba why history forgot them

The myth of the French Resistance goes something like this. French men, except for a “miserable fistful”, all resisted. French women, on the other hand, let the side down. Expecting monsters, many girls succumbed to the charm of the Nazis – who exercised barechested, “like Lohengrin”, as one Parisian teenager wrote in her diary. Historians estimate that between 80,000 to 100,000 Franco-German babies were born during the war.

In 1945, France purged its uneasy feelings about the Occupation in general by making scapegoats of these collaborateurs horizontales. With shaven heads, they were forced to parade seminaked, admitting their sin.

There were other totemic sacrifices. The Wagnerian soprano Germaine Lubin, Hitler’s favourite, who had sung to German audiences at Bayreuth and the Paris Opera, was imprisoned for three years for “national indignity”. She found herself “on an immense material and moral garbage heap… among odious people, nauseating smells, coffee tasting like soup from the night before”.

But other women, faced with the German occupiers, chose different, riskier paths. Vivou Chevrillon, a young music student, went to play her violin outside the walls of the Nazi concentration camp at Compiègne, hoping that her friend inside would recognise the tune and take heart. She came close to being arrested. Later, she forged ID cards. Jeanne Bucher, the avant garde Parisian galleriste, dared to show Kandinsky and other despised – often Jewish – abstract artists. German soldiers often visited to poke fun at the works (and sometimes to buy them, all the same). Once, exasperated, Bucher tore down and stamped on a photograph of a statue by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favourite sculptor, shouting: “That’s German art, so look what I do to it.”

These spontaneous acts of resistance by women didn’t fit with the narrative de Gaulle was trying to weave about the Occupation. He didn’t want the men to feel humiliated even further – shown up by their wives and daughters. Of the 1,038 people awarded the title “Compagnons de la Libération” by de Gaulle between 1940 and 1946, only six were women, of whom four were already dead.

Now, more than 70 years later, that attitude is shifting, slightly but perceptibly. Soil from the graves of Geneviève de Gaulle and Germaine Tillion, two of the bravest female resisters, was last year taken to the Panthéon, defying the inscription on its pediment: “Aux Grands Hommes La Patrie Reconnaissante”. Before that, the only woman honoured there had been Marie Curie.

French women, for their part, did not contradict de Gaulle’s version of events, which said that their experience of war had been less dangerous or less brave than the men’s. After six years of fighting, most women simply wanted to push the horrors they had witnessed to the back of their minds. Even 70 years on, when I interviewed them about their resistance work, they remained self-effacing, insisting they did “nothing” really, “simply” delivering pamphlets or “just” acting as couriers.

Cécile Rol-Tanguy, now 97, for instance, worked as the personal Agent de Liaison for her husband Henri Rol-Tanguy, carrying orders around Paris in the bedding of her baby’s pram, as well as revolvers, grenades and ammunition hidden in potato sacks. But she insisted it was “of little importance”, simply what one did. Other mothers went to extraordinary lengths not to give in, queuing several hours each day for food, sometimes rushing off to find butter in an antiquarian bookseller or sending a child on a long journey to the country for a single cauliflower.

Getting enough to eat was a form of resistance, showing the Germans that Parisians were not to be starved into submission. According to one journalist, food became “the theme song of Paris… At the theatre or movies, when there’s an old play or movie with a huge banquet scene, the audience breaks into delirious cries of joy.” Gisèle Casadesus, then a young mother of two and a hard-working actress at the Comédie-Française, whose audience was always full of nonuniformed Germans, said: “You never knew who you could trust, so nobody ever spoke about anything that mattered just in case. Food was the constant topic of conversation. What can you eat, how to cook it and where can you get it?”

In the same way, dressing well became a point of stubborn pride. When there was no shampoo to wash their hair, Parisiennes wore turbans instead. Whatever the shortages, they were determined to retain some chic. No doubt it drew the Gestapo’s attention away from any suspicious activity, too.

But even before the war was over, women were already being cast as scapegoats for the Occupation. Marshal Pétain, leader of the collaborationist Vichy government, blamed France’s defeat in 1940 on the moral corruption at the heart of the Third Republic. Women, he argued, had neglected their duty through coquetry, frivolity and

Marshal Pétain had blamed the defeat in 1940 on women’s flirtatiousness

egoism. Vichy therefore demanded a national revolution: women were to have lots of babies and glory once more in the domestic. They were officially banned from wearing trousers (too masculine) and could hold neither jobs nor bank accounts without the permission of a father or husband.

But while Vichy tried to reverse the small, liberal steps made in the Thirties, the facts of the war pulled the other way. Paris was emptied of men: almost two million were prisoners of war; others had fled to be with General de Gaulle and the