Comtesse Lily Pastré, wealthy Noilly Prat heiress, who left Paris during the Occupation and sheltered many Jewish artists at her chateau near Marseilles.
(above) Two posters produced by the Vichy government: one to celebrate Mother’s Day; the other aimed at persuading Frenchmen to volunteer for work in Germany. At the end of 1942 the Nazis demanded that France send 250,000 labourers to Germany, promising that they would repatriate one French prisoner of war for every three volunteer labourers. But there were not enough volunteers so conscription had to be introduced.
(left) Film poster for Le Corbeau, the powerful 1943 film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot which tackled denunciation and abortion, two key issues of the day.
Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, assimilated Jewish mother and writer who after the war established an organization to help deported Jews.
Many women in Paris were involved in distributing secret leaflets with news of Allied or Resistance activity. If caught the punishment could be severe as the Germans tried to discover others in their network.
Marie-France Geoffroy-Dechaume worked actively in the Resistance, mostly on the Normandy Coast where she helped evading airmen escape, made bombs to lay on railway lines and cycled with gelignite strapped to her chest.
Violette Morris, the bisexual former athlete who dressed as a man, worked with collaborators and was implicated in a number of arrests in 1943.
The Milice, a paramilitary force founded by Vichy to counter the Resistance, distributing to grateful mothers bottles of wine seized in black market raids in Paris, April 1944.
Elisabeth de Rothschild, standing in the drawing room of the family’s country home, Le Petit Mouton. She was killed at Ravensbrück in 1945.
(below left) Drawing of a skeletally thin Odette Fabius at Ravensbrück by fellow prisoner Mopse von Dorothée de Rippert. Fabius did not think she would survive her incarceration.
(below right) Several young, formerly healthy Polish girls, called lapins, were experimented on in Ravensbrück, often by having their legs cut open and injected with gangrene. They were befriended in the camp by several Parisiennes.
Parisians building barricades at Rue du Renard, next to the H?tel de Ville, after Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, commander of the FFI, organized posters on 21 and 22 August 1944 calling for barricades throughout the city.
Terrified Parisiennes run for cover as German snipers open fire from buildings in the battle for liberation of the city, 26 August 1944.
A group of armed partisans keeping watch on the roof of a house, Paris, 28 August 1944. Note the woman in a skirt and sling-backed shoes with a hard hat and submachine gun.
Jubilation at last following the Liberation of Paris. This crowd, holding banners proclaiming ‘Long live de Gaulle, long live the Republic’, were ready to celebrate but the war was not over in the rest of Europe for another eight months.
(left) Public humilation of a French woman, accused of collaboration horizontale, in Paris. She has had her head shaved and a swastika painted on her forehead, while the men surrounding her make victory gestures. Some tondues were also forced to parade semi-naked.
French women welcoming British troops bringing a food convoy to Paris at the end of August 1944.
Cartier remained open throughout the Occupation, ingeniously making objects – mostly clocks – despite shortages of luxury materials and money. In 1944 they designed a singing bird in an open cage in French national colours as a symbol of the country’s newly restored freedom.
* According to one of his biographers, Jonathan Fenby, de Gaulle ‘very rarely said the Nazis and I don’t know of any reference to the Holocaust’ (‘Charles de Gaulle and the French Resistance’, http://fivebooks.com/interview/jonathan-fenby-on-charles-de-gaulle-and-the-french-resistance/). Others, referencing remarks he made about those who died ‘pour La France’, point out that such a phrase does not address the suffering of millions of Jews in France.
* Romain Gary, born in Vilna, educated in Nice, became a pilot with the Free French and coined the phrase in telling the story of his reply when presented to the Queen Mother in England after the war. See http://mayatouviere.com/uploads/3/4/2/3/3423798/la_promesse_de_laube_romain_gary.pdf, p. 23.
* But even that did not prevent some believing that, as he had been forced to work for the German aircraft manufacturer, Junkers, to say nothing of selling Chanel perfume to the Germans, he had been a Nazi collaborator. In fact he had set up a resistance network and even tried to build planes for the Free French, but it was his deal with the Wertheimers which may have saved him from prosecution.
* Giroud went on to become Minister for Women’s Affairs under President Jacques Chirac in 1974.
PART THREE
RECONSTRUCTION
1947
PARIS LOOKS NEWISH