Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of the General, testifying about conditions at Ravensbrück shortly after her return to Paris.
Christian Dior’s New Look, after years of shortages and restrictions, caused a sensation by using yards of material to create a look of opulence and ultrafemininity.
Not everyone admired the New Look; a group of older women, scandalized by what they saw as the waste of fabric in such a full skirt, tried to tear it off one model during a photoshoot in the Rue Lepic.
Catherine Dior, sister of Christian, shortly after her release from Ravensbrück in May 1945.
A pre-war photograph of Nusch Eluard, who died suddenly in 1946, modelling a Suzanne Belperron bracelet with matching ring and brooch. It was signed and inscribed by Man Ray as a present to Lee Miller upon the birth of her only son, Antony Penrose, in 1947: ‘Pour notre amie, Lee, et son petit gar?on nouveau.
Susan Mary Patten, glamorous wife of US Diplomat Bill Patten, lover of British Ambassador Duff Cooper, wearing a grey sequinned dress by the Paris-based designer Robert Piguet, who trained Christian Dior. Susan Mary was often loaned designer dresses for publicity purposes.
Paris was hit by a wave of strikes in 1946 and 1947 in protest against low wages, shortages and high prices for basic foodstuffs. Working-class women, such as these milliners, showed their solidarity by demonstrating throughout the country, and pressure from the female population had a considerable effect in improving social benefits.
English writer, Emma Smith, taken by surprise as she was working on her novel on the banks of the River Seine on a hot July day in 1948.
Julia Child, whose passion for French cuisine changed the way thousands of American women cooked, standing in the small Paris kitchen of her Left Bank apartment.
15 May 1948: the newly-wed Princess Elizabeth, speaking in French as she opened the ‘Eight Centuries of British Life in Paris’ exhibition, was scrutinized by Parisiennes for her fashion sense. The three-day official visit with her husband Prince Philip (seated) was the first time that she had left Britain.
The Murphy sisters crossing to Paris in 1948 on the Queen Elizabeth, where they became friends with the teenage actress Elizabeth Taylor.
A serene-looking Countess Germaine de Renty, résistante and Ravensbrück survivor who, as a postwar widow, hosted American students in Paris including Jacqueline Bouvier, later Kennedy.
TODAY’S WITNESSES
Si l’écho de leurs voix faiblit, nous périrons
(If the echo of their voices weakens, we will perish) Paul Eluard
Gisèle Casadesus
Rachel Erlbaum
Renée Fenby
Jacqueline Fleury
Rosa Lipworth
Madeleine Riffaud
Noreen Riols
Cécile Rol-Tanguy
Marceline Rozenberg
Emma Smith
Barbara Probst Solomon
Arlette (with Charles) Testyler
* Anthony Probst, a lawyer, had started his career as Woodrow Wilson’s campaign manager before serving as a private in the US army.
* Paco Benet became a distinguished anthropologist, killed in 1966 while on a dig when his jeep crashed in the desert. Probst studied at Columbia, married a law professor, Harold W. Solomon, and wrote a steady stream of novels, essays and memoirs. But she never shed her love of and concern for France and in 1987 reported on the trial of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons.
* Patrick Modiano, the French novelist who has long been fascinated by Corinne’s life, created in his 1974 screenplay for the film Lacombe, Lucien an amoral aristocrat he calls Jean-Bernard de Voisins, who actively worked with collaborators to enjoy the benefits of the black market with his mistress, a failed actress reminiscent of Corinne.
* Smith College had been sending women for a year of study in Paris since 1935, but the programme had stopped during the war and did not pick up again until 1947–8.
* In 2013 there was an exhibition in Aix devoted to her work, Le Salon de Lily.
* For Chanel it may have been little more than a useful sedative, but Sert appeared to need it for oblivion and forgetfulness and had even spent twenty-four hours in prison because of her habit.
* Agnès Humbert died in 1963 and is buried in the cemetery at Valmondois, the village in northern France where the Geoffroy-Dechaume family lived for generations.
Epilogue
PEACETIME PARIS
Picasso again. Picasso, the artist of towering genius who produced between three and four hundred paintings plus large numbers of drawings, prints and sculptures during the Occupation years, yet was not allowed to exhibit publicly. Picasso, the artist whose behaviour in Paris during the war is constantly questioned.