‘Paper Bullets’ a WWII story of love, art, resistance
“The cowardly bureaucrats of the police, who live on lies and shameful cruelty, will be destroyed by the Soldiers with No Names.” On the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, two women named Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe dropped notes such as this one, trying to sow doubt among the German military occupiers during World War II.
In his gripping historical narrative, “Paper Bullets”, Jeffrey H. Jackson rescues the story of resistance by these two remarkable women.
Jackson is a professor of history at Rhodes College.
He is the author of “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910” and “Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris”.
He answered questions from Chapter 16 via email.
Chapter 16: What was the status of Jersey during World War II?
Jackson: The history of Jersey during World War II is not widely known in the popular imagination, but it was actually quite important. Hitler constructed a series of fortifications along the eastern edge of Nazi-occupied territory to defend against Allied invasion. He called it the “Atlantic Wall.” The Channel Islands, located just off the coast of Normandy, were the only bits of British territory conquered during the war, and they were on the leading edge of the Atlantic Wall. So they were strategically very important. As a result, thousands of German troops were stationed there, and many of the aircraft during the Battle of Britain launched from the Islands.
Q: “For Lucy and Suzanne,” you write, “fighting the German occupation of Jersey was the culmination of lifelong patterns of resistance.” How so?
A: Lucy and Suzanne had grown up as daughters of wealth and privilege in the southern French city of Nantes. Lucy’s father owned and edited a newspaper, and Suzanne’s was an important surgeon and head of the medical school. But from a young age, they were also rebellious. They fell in love as teenagers, but it was difficult to pursue a same-sex relationship as daughters of such prominent fathers in a conservative society. They were also artists — Lucy was a writer and Suzanne an illustrator; they collaborated on photography — and they moved to Paris after World War I. There, they became part of avant-garde art circles and made friends with Surrealists and communists. Their work, especially their photography for which they are now somewhat famous, was really shocking to many people because it challenged traditional notions of beauty and femininity.
Q: For some queer people today, Lucy and Suzanne are seen as role models because of their lesbian relationship and their refusal to conform to traditional notions of femininity. How did their sexuality shape their identity and their politics?
A: At the time, lesbians in France were widely visible because they had created many places to meet and mingle. But they were also viewed with great suspicion. Critics argued that lesbians undermined people’s morality and were not doing their patriotic duty to produce children after the war had killed off a generation of French men. Even in the artistic world, many people — including their friend the Surrealist artist André Breton — were homophobic. Lucy and Suzanne had to navigate this world with care.
But being in Paris also allowed them to experiment with clothing, hairstyle and gender. They took gender-neutral artistic names: Lucy became Claude Cahun (in French, Claude can be either a man’s or a woman’s name), and Suzanne became Marcel Moore. They often dressed in men’s clothing (which was technically illegal in France), and they cut their hair short, which many women did in the post-world War I period. Lucy sometimes even shaved her head. For them, all of these acts were about inhabiting new personae and rejecting the stuffy, bourgeois world in which they had grown up. It also meant that the personal was political for them because they were making a statement that they did not accept traditional norms about women or femininity.
Q: Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of “Paper Bullets” is its level of detail and its feeling of immediacy. How did you conduct the research? How did you approach the writing?
A: The book was many years in the making. It required research trips to Yale, London, Jersey and a few other places. Many of the details and descriptions come from a careful reading of Lucy and Suzanne’s writings, but I’ve tried to fill in information about the historical context to help their words come to life.
I also wanted to respect their relationship without trying to describe it in ways which I could not. I am a heterosexual cisgender man writing about lesbians who some people today would consider transgender (even though neither Lucy nor Suzanne would have used that word; they didn’t even really describe themselves as lesbians in their writing). I did not want to try to imagine details or describe aspects of the love story which they did not discuss, both because they were so private about their relationship and because I wanted to acknowledge my own limits in approaching that part of the story.
To read the full version of this interview — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.