“German troops entered Paris in June 1940. The dark days of the Occupation began. How would you have survived? By collaborating with the Nazi’s, or risking the lives of you and your loved ones to resist?”
The women of Paris faced this dilemma every day, whether choosing between rations and the black market, or travelling on the Metro, where German soldiers had priority seats. Between the extremes of defiance and collusion was a vast moral grey area which all Parisians had to navigate in order to survive.
The extent of Parisians resistance and collaboration, so often described as ‘the heroic endeavours of the few’, needs to be put back into the context of the local community, and one way of doing this is through the lens of gender. This project seeks to illustrate and illuminate the position and role of women during les Annees Noires.
The intention of this paper is to reinforce the intensity and complexity of this period of French history. Scholars like Megan Koreman are too quick to remark on how women sexually teased German troops, playing on their femininity and sexuality to get what they needed. When studying and reflecting on the remarkable testimonies of some local Parisian women, this paper will recognise that these women had no choice. The inconceivable choices that Parisian women made, ‘sometimes with talent, sometimes with bravery and sometimes with deceit’, were always made with the instinct of survival in mind.
Beginning in the historic summer of 1940 when war was declared, many Parisian women were quickly trying to digest what the war would signify for them. To many people, it was immediately clear that it was women, even without the right to vote and, for married women, without the right to own or control their own property, who would be playing a pivotal role in the forthcoming drama. Women’s low visibility in French society paradoxically played to their advantage under occupation; it meant they could act as ideal couriers, with no-one, least of all the Germans, suspecting them of carrying important messages, concealing arms and papers in children’s prams, or conveying vital supplies to Resistance members in hiding. However, for most of Parisienne women, the lack of representation in the political sphere and their overt dependence of men within society soon played a vital role in their fight – their fight for survival.
It is not surprising that women took the main responsibility in most Parisienne households for the survival of its members during the 1940s. Hanna Diamond’s research verified the struggle for most women to obtain food for themselves and their families after the German troops captured Paris. Diamond argued that: ‘women’s activities and everyday lives were affected by the lack of efficiency of local authorities and the subsequent structures that were put into place to ensure the fair distribution of food and household items’. This can be seen with the severe food rationing experience within the city. Bread, eggs, milk, fish and butter were rigorously rationed and as the war developed, the rations increased significantly. Rationing was meant to ensure supplies, and not necessarily to reduce consumption, but that’s not how it turned out; sometimes people simply couldn’t use up all their rationing coupons in a month because they simply couldn’t find the food to buy with the coupons. It is therefore unsurprising that the death rate rose by nearly 50%, with many Parisians having a daily ration of 820 calories. To survive theses food shortages and the onslaught of disease and malnutrition that would follow, local Parisienne women had no choice but to develop new social relations and sometimes, in order to ensure their survival, in a city plagued by war, these new social relations would find themselves entertaining their German occupiers.
With their husbands off to war, it is unsurprising that some Parisian women found themselves captivated and indeed mesmerised by the Ubermenschen who seized control of their city. Lou Taylor argued that ‘the Occupation opened up many possibilities for relations between French women and German men across Paris’. It was in fact this very attraction and allure that led some women across Paris to be targets for ‘collaboration horizontale’. Florence Gould, a glamourous and seductive American woman and Parisian resident, took up residence at the Hotel Bristol on the Faubourg Saint-Honore, a hotel with a reputation for being able to acquire black-market food. Due to severe economic decline in Paris in the 1940s and with her husband away, the salon owner struggled to manage her business. With her business deteriorating, the salonnieres found herself in the position where she became friendly with the German soldiers occupying Paris. With the collaborative relationship in full bloom, her business steadily improved and her salon started to gain a positive reputation on the Right Bank amongst the German troops. Ian Ousby carried out research and results show that in a highly competitive market, Gould was able to offer far better pickings than non-collaborationists.
Florence Gould found herself in a situation, much like many local women across Paris, where she was forced into making a decision, one in which she chose survival and co-existence alongside her occupiers. Just living her normal day-to-day life was an act of resistance itself.
French fashion designer Coco Chanel, born on 19th August 1883, in a small town in France is famous today for her beautiful designs and trademark little black dresses. However, the influential designer, located in Paris at the time of occupation made the decision to openly consort with Nazi soldier Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage. [how and why?] According to the research of Paris-based journalist and author Hal Vaughan, the famous designer was a ‘fiercely anti-Semitic’ Nazi sympathizer working for the Abwehr, Germany’s military agency. Vaughn described how Chanel’s path to becoming one of the richest women in Paris and indeed, the world was made swifter by Nazi seizure of all Jewish-owned property and business enterprises during World War Two. It is arguably arduous to empathise and identify with a woman who was showered in riches, living in extravagance whilst being a mere spectator, watching the war from a far in her hotel suite within the Hotel Ritz in Paris.
However, scholars of this period of dark Parisienne history need to question her motives and reasons behind collaboration. This essay concludes that Coco Channel, in a city that had been significantly feminised over the previous decades before the war, found herself with the ability to rationalise the need to do deals in return for favours. In doing this, a woman who lived for the city’s glamour and style insisted the show must go on – telling themselves perhaps that ‘maintaining a way of life was itself a form of resistance’, even though they knew full well that they could only party at the Germans’ behest.
On 13 August 1942, Germaine Tillion, a young French ethnologist and resistance fighter, was arrested by the German occupying authorities. When she was arrested Tillion found herself deported to Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp created solely for women. However, from the very beginning of les Annees Noires, Tillion played a major role in one of the first resistance groups in Paris. Sheltering Jewish families from the inevitable journey to death camps, helping prisoner’s escape their Nazi captors and organising intelligence for the allied forces were just a small example of Tillion’s acts of resistance.
Acts of resistance by the women of Paris came in various forms. However, this paper does not dare distinguish between their significance – each act of resistance was equally as powerful and poignant. For example, in Anne Sebba’s insightful work How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died, she recalled the testimony of Drue Tartière, a Parisian actress whose husband had been killed fighting for the Free French. When she was arrested for her resistance work, she opened her legs, blood trickling down and revealed her period to the Nazi soldier. Sebba explained how the Parisian actress demanded clean clothes and sanitary napkins from the mortified soldier. Throughout the occupation, the Parisian actress ‘medicated and starved herself to within an inch of her life’, but it won her back her freedom. She continued to resist. As seen throughout this period, decisions made by women to conspire with their Nazi occupiers or to defy them were often unclear and vague. Robert Gildea argued that: ‘Gallery-owners, actresses, translators, prostitutes, shop-girls and seamstresses may all have worked at times for German clients, but many also defied Nazi cultural edicts, reported snippets of information, hid resisters or Jewish neighbours, delivered messages and resources, or took up arms when they could’. Parisian women found themselves in a situation where each decision made (whether to collude or to resist) was made in order to survive and to one day, earn back their freedom; however limiting that appeared to be in Paris in the 1940s.
‘La France,’ as various scholars have referred to in the past, is female. Perhaps this is due to gendered assumptions about the beauty, cuisine and couture of the French capital, the symbolic revolutionary Marianne, or the patriarchal nature of language. However, as this paper has highlighted throughout, during the dark years of Occupation, Paris was more, in the very literal sense, female. For some when France fell, Paris felt emasculated in another sense and suddenly Parisian women found themselves having to decide how they were going to live alongside their almost entirely male Nazi conquerors and occupiers. The instinct to survive in the midst of war was apparent across Paris in the 1940s.
The Occupation was a dark period in Parisian history however according to Colin Jones it contributed to wider French society as it ‘marked a golden age of French cinema and theatre too’. Various films were released into mainstream French cinema during the 1940s, showing the strength and reliance of women during the Occupation. Firmly remaining as a point of debate still today between film scholars and historians, ‘some see these films as reactionary representations of women as they represent the Vichy ideology of domesticity, sacrificial motherhood and patriotism a new form of oppressed role, while others argue that they are positive films because they featured strong women’. Women, after years’ worth of chaos, disruption and hopelessness, started to be appreciated in Paris and across France in a different and profound way.
Nearly 75 years after Paris was liberated from its Nazi occupiers during World War II, we are still gathering fresh perspectives. Historians and scholars who are interested and indeed riveted by this dark period of history, Anne Sebba’s research is a great starting point – thoughtful and inspiring. Throughout the narratives of many Parisan women, Sebba inspired this paper and indeed has me contemplating the question: why did some Parisian women collaborate with the Nazis during the 1940s, and why did some resist? It is simple; both sets of women did so as they were forced into a corner, where they had to fight for the lives amongst a Parisian backdrop that was plagued with economic decline, political chaos and societal failure. Jeannie Rousseau, who took the path of defiance summarised the experience of women in world war two remarkably: ‘Paris in 1940 was unbelievable! There were no men left. It was women who started the Resistance. Women didn’t have the vote, they did not have bank accounts, they didn’t have jobs. Yet we women were capable of resisting’.