That summer, when war was finally declared, many French families were on holiday or had children away at camp without their parents. It had been an especially hot summer and Claire Chevrillon, an English teacher at the Collège Sévigné, was in the mountains of the Dr?me, at Valcroissant, helping direct a scout camp throughout August. The camp took a hundred little boys used to a suburban life in Paris and, by transplanting them into wild valleys and mountains for a month, tried to teach them to appreciate the beauty and dangers of nature. Claire, whose father André Chevrillon was one of the country’s foremost literary critics and whose mother came from a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish family, understood immediately the significance of the announcement of general mobilization. Her family had been aware for months of the dangers of Nazi doctrines spreading across Europe. Now, as parents were furiously sending telegrams to request the immediate return of their children to Paris, Claire’s fellow Director at the resort left immediately to become an army nurse. Claire single-handedly closed down the camp in twenty-four frantic hours before depositing the children with their relieved parents at the Gare de Lyon. ‘This,’ she remembered thinking, ‘is the end of happy life.’
Throughout France, women were rapidly trying to digest what war would mean 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. One of the arguments used to exclude women from participating in French elections was that their economic dependency would prevent them from making free choices. In the early twentieth century, with continuing battles between republicanism and the Catholic Church, it was further argued that the duties of mother and wife would be incompatible with exercising the right to vote. Only since 1938 had they been given the right to take on a job outside the home without their husband’s or father’s permission. There were already some mutterings that this might give them inflated ideas or, as one senator declared, ‘If, because of the hostilities, a woman might be called upon to play a role outside her normal attributes she should be aware that this is only as an exceptional measure.’ This was a vain and desperate wish, of course, on the old senator’s part. Nonetheless the laws, first forbidding then encouraging married women to work, were deeply revealing of the conflicting attitude toward women in France. The ideal of the woman as wife and mother was permanently in tension with the need for, as well as desire of, women to work.
One area where it was acceptable for women to work and which changed little with the outbreak of war was entertainment. On 24 September the Comédie-Fran?aise – the first theatre in Paris to reopen following the declaration of war – staged a poetry matinée. The historic building itself, protected by a ten-foot-high wall of sandbags at the entrance, had been emptied of its great marble busts and other thespian treasures as well as half of its male personnel. Some of the company’s actresses had also moved to the country, but enough actors remained to plan a continuing schedule, starting that autumn.
Right up until 1939, films were still being made in France, and Parisians flocked to the cinema to see the young woman hailed as the new Garbo, Corinne Luchaire. Luchaire had had a peripatetic childhood after her parents separated and she had gone with her mother to Germany where she made friends with several high-ranking Nazis. But she was not unfamiliar with Jews either, because her grandfather, the playwright Julien Luchaire, had married a Jewish woman as his third wife, and her father’s sister, Ghita, was married to the Jewish philosopher Théodore Fraenkel. Nonetheless, both she and her sister had always wanted to act, and Corinne made her debut at the age of sixteen in a play written by her grandfather called Altitude 3200. At seventeen she starred in Prison sans Barreaux, and then, because she spoke fluent English, took the lead role when it was remade in English in 1938 as Prison without Bars. The following year saw her again starring in the first film version of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was called in French Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Bend). Corinne was emblematic of a generation of women who wanted to work and for whom becoming a film star was not only liberating but financially rewarding, and it did not require a professional qualification. It was a gratifying career path for any woman who enjoyed being admired by men, which soon meant being admired by Nazis.