It was a sickeningly misogynistic response. The women – by some estimates as many as 20,000, known to history as les tondues, or shaven ones – were punished by the men who had failed to defend them. One of them was Lisette, the French secretary whose longstanding affair with Johann, a married German soldier, was known of by many in her circle. Her pro-German parents, concierges who were helping themselves to clothes in the apartment of a deported Jewish couple, may have supported her, but her own cousins refused to speak to her. She was lucky not to have had further humiliation in the form of branding inflicted on her as payment for the luxuries she had received during the war. But at the same time de Gaulle did not punish the male political or commercial elite who had backed Pétain, seeing them as valuable allies in the fight against communism. The controversy has gathered momentum in the intervening years as historians have pointed out how much of the punishment was not only gender-based, but a question of class and ancient score-settling. In the terror of the moment there were tragic mistakes. Max and Madeleine Goa, two young resisters who, having sheltered evading airmen, were celebrating victory on the balcony of their apartment in the Avenue d’Italie when shots were fired. The mob below was convinced they had come from them, so the pair were hauled down to the street below where Max was lynched, then run over by a tank, and Madeleine taken away to a prison, locked up until she went mad, and then murdered.
Of course there were articulate and fierce opponents of the épuration sauvage – the wave of vicious punishments without trial, including executions as well as humiliation, that now swept through France – including men such as Henri Rol-Tanguy and the communist surrealist poet, Paul Eluard, both married to women who had risked their lives to resist. Eluard, in his 1944 poem ‘Comprenne qui voudra’ (Understand if you will), expressed powerfully his disgust at how, in order not to punish the real culprits, the mob had attacked defenceless girls who were trembling with fear as they lay with torn dresses, while the crowd laughed and parents held up children to see better, many of whom simply did not understand what was happening to the girls nor why. Angered by the sight of a beautiful woman’s hair lying on the pavement in front of a barber’s shop in Rue de Grenelle, Eluard pointed out that they had not, in any case, harmed anyone else. ‘They had not sold France and they often had not sold anything at all.’
Janet Teissier du Cros, a clear-eyed observer of what defeat meant to men in France, believed it affected women more tangentially. ‘Theirs was the cumulative humiliation of being little by little degraded to an exclusive preoccupation with material things, the humiliation daily renewed of having to beg even for what they bought … But the actual fact of military defeat is, I think, harder for men to bear than for women and, so long as German troops remained on French soil, the wound was kept open.’
At the same time, there were also educated people who defended the head-shaving. Andrée Doucet, a young art student at Les Arts Décos (sister school to the Beaux-Arts) during the latter part of the Occupation, believed the punishment was ‘a shame, yes, but compared with women who had risked everything for France, understandable. They deserved it. And anyway hair grows back. They soon carried on with their lives.’ Doucet had been brought up in a suburb of Paris where her father owned the local Citro?n garage. She was keenly aware of girls who had been overly friendly to the German occupiers, something her family, fiercely proud of its French identity, had instilled in her to avoid. Once, she had seen a friend of hers walking arm in arm with the local Kommandant and yelled out ‘Salle pute!’ (Dirty bitch!) – an action which got her arrested. She talked her way out of that situation by saying that what she meant was that the girl had slept with all the French boys in the village. Happily, she was allowed to go free. But the experience terrified her. ‘If you didn’t live through the Liberation, you can’t describe the atmosphere … Euphoria in the streets, people screaming with joy and enthusiasm. Head-shaving didn’t seem such a huge thing then. It wasn’t physical torture.’
The euphoria of Liberation, as other women soon discovered in 1944, could be highly dangerous. Lucienne Guézennec,* the Paris-born résistante who had given her real identity to a Jewish girl on the run, was now taking part in the celebrations of Liberation in Lyons. She attempted to intervene when she saw two naked girls trying to protect themselves from a group of loud-mouthed women spitting on them, attempting to hit them and shouting insults at other shavenheaded girls. But Lucienne, although deeply shocked by this mob justice, was herself still weak, suffering from a German bullet that had punctured her lung during a raid on her printing press, as well as once having had her arm mangled in the printing press, and could do little to protect herself when a youth, yelling at her for trying to help the ‘sluts’, grabbed her and shoved her into an open truck filled with men and women assumed to have collaborated. Luckily ‘Lucienne’ was soon recognized by people who knew who she really was and she was released. ‘Was it for this’, she asked herself, ‘that so many comrades died? Could this have been the reason for their struggles and sacrifices?’