‘My trial was a complete vindication: I was completely cleared … Nobody knows how many prisoners I had released,’ she insisted. ‘Did anyone bother to ask me why I did not accept Winifred Wagner’s invitations to sing in Germany during the Occupation?’ Nevertheless she was sentenced to dégradation nationale for life (subsequently reduced to five years), confiscation of property, which included a chateau at Tours, and a form of exile which forced her to live with friends in Italy. Lubin did not return to Paris until 1950, by which time she was increasingly bitter about her treatment, claiming that she had been robbed of ten years of her singing career. But she would have derived mild satisfaction had she read Mary Wallington’s description of the gala to her parents as ‘most elaborately and vulgarly staged with press photographers creeping to the stage to flash cameras in Marjorie Lawrence’s face even while she was singing … she certainly had the most magnificent voice though unfortunately she had a bad throat and cracked on the high notes at the end of the evening’.
Not everyone was forced to account publicly for how they had lived during the Occupation, but Picasso was one of those frequently questioned. It was known that German soldiers came to visit and even buy from him (or to ensure that he had adequate supplies) as he worked away in his studio in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, a house both shabby and sumptuous that his friends felt suited him so well. André Breton, the surrealist poet who was a friend of Picasso as well as of Eluard, had spent the war years in America. When he arrived back in the summer of 1946 and was reunited with Picasso, he criticized him for his politics since the Occupation, in particular for joining the Communist Party. According to Fran?oise Gilot, who witnessed the unhappy exchange, Picasso told him: ‘You didn’t choose to stay on in France with us during the Occupation. And you haven’t lived through the events we lived through here. My stand is based on those experiences. I don’t criticise your position since your understanding of those events was acquired at a different angle from mine … I place friendship above any differences of political opinion.’
The breach was never healed, but Gilot was steadfast in her defence of her lover, believing that ‘It took a good deal of courage for him to stay there during the war since his paintings had been denounced by Hitler and the Occupation authorities took such a dim view of intellectuals. Many artists … had gone off to America before the Germans arrived. It must have seemed wiser to many not to run the risk of staying.’ She told how, when she had asked him directly why he had remained in occupied France, he responded, ‘Oh I’m not looking for risks to take … but in a sort of passive way I don’t care to yield to either force or terror. I want to stay here because I’m here. The only kind of force that could make me leave would be the desire to leave. Staying on isn’t really a manifestation of courage; it’s just a form of inertia. I suppose it’s simply that I prefer to be here. So I’ll stay, whatever the cost.’
On 27 October 1946 the French constitution was finally changed to include among the basic principles of the Republic the law ‘guaranteeing women equal rights to those of men in all spheres’, and the national elections a month later in November were the first in which women in France were able to participate. At the same time several magazines were urging women, many of whom had run households as well as holding down jobs during the war, now to return to a time of innocence and femininity, to ‘stop making decisions, stop balancing cheque books, stop being aggressively punctual’. But the prevailing feeling was that women could be interested in fashion, beauty, health and décor and still be intelligent enough to have interesting jobs. The new magazine Elle, a far cry from the pre-war Vogue, catered to this mood and in 1946 hired as its first editor the brilliant thirty-year-old journalist, writer and communicator Fran?oise Giroud, a liberated woman with a strong social conscience.*