Not surprisingly, the Vichy belief that women were inferior beings who should stay at home made intelligent young women extremely angry, and ripe for recruitment by well-organized communist leaders such as Danielle Casanova, a charismatic dentist who lived on the Left Bank. When the Communist Party was banned, Danielle went into hiding as her husband, Laurent, was a prisoner of war in Germany and they had no children. She spent her spare time campaigning to help orphans from the Spanish Civil War as well as impoverished French workers. She and her friends Ma? Politzer and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier were involved in running a pacifist, anti-fascist youth organization called the Union des Jeunes Filles de France (UJFF), which aimed through sporting and cultural activities to help get working-class girls out of their cycle of deprivation. At the outbreak of war they had more than 20,000 members, and many of these volunteered in autumn 1940 to distribute flyers or copies of banned news-sheets such as L’Humanité, either by hiding them in prams, giving them to friendly concierges or dropping them into shopping baskets as women queued for dwindling food supplies. By the end of 1940, twenty-five out of thirty women on the National Committee of the UJFF were active members of a fledgling resistance movement. Danielle herself, while still writing for the underground press, helped set up women’s committees in the Paris region, and was one of the leaders of the anti-Nazi demonstrations on 8 and 11 November 1940 outside the Collège de France to protest against the arrest of the brilliant physician Professor Paul Langevin. In addition, thousands of college and lycée students defied the ban on public assembly and marched down the Champs-Elysées. As a result, a number of protesters were killed or wounded and more than a hundred were arrested and sent to camps.
Already in February 1941, just six months after the setting-up of the food-rationing system – or le Systeme D, as it was known from se débrouiller meaning ‘to get by or manage’, since it largely referred to the way various people got round rationing – women, now responsible as heads of family, became desperate at the hours spent queuing for so little and seeing their families suffering from hunger. Many became ingenious in numerous ways, such as roasting barley and chicory to make ersatz coffee, or keeping guinea-pigs in their apartments to be killed and eaten, or discovering country cousins with vegetables. Making counterfeit food tickets was widespread but illegal, and anyone caught doing so was fined or called in for questioning. Even so, there were occasional food riots, with women turning up at town halls holding their babies high and demanding more milk. On Saturday 22 February there was serious trouble in the central market when the German authorities made a clean sweep of all the potatoes after women had been queuing for them for hours. A riot involving rock-throwing ensued, and as a result all potato distribution was banned for forty days. When potatoes were all there was, losing a ticket which represented a kilo bordered on being a tragedy, as one Parisian mother remembered. Although every patch of public space, including the Tuileries in the very heart of Paris, was turned over to vegetable production, food supply had scarcely improved by the summer. In July a correspondent for La Gerbe magazine wrote: ‘Eating, and more important, eating well is the theme song of Paris life. In the street, in the Métro, in cafés, all you hear about is food. At the theatre or movies, when there’s an old play or movie with a huge banquet scene, the audience breaks into delirious cries of joy.’
But alongside these largely youthful, more or less spontaneous resisters, the first organized resistance movement in France grew up around an unlikely group of middle-class museum curators and librarians. Thirty-eight-year-old Yvonne Oddon, whose father had died when she was a teenager, was head librarian at the Musée de l’Homme, a newly opened museum of anthropology in Paris. She and her Director, Paul Rivet, had decided in June 1940 not to join those fleeing Paris but to remain in the city, keeping the museum open, and in this way demonstrate their refusal to capitulate to the enemy. It may have seemed a small first step, but soon Oddon was sending books and clothing to French prisoners of war, then undertaking to shelter escaping prisoners and helping them cross the demarcation line from the occupied zone into the free zone, putting herself in grave danger. She discovered others who simply wanted ‘to do something’ – as fellow resister Agnès Humbert said, ‘I feel I will go mad, literally, if I don’t do something!’ – and established contact with the ethnographer Germaine Tillion, with whom she started to discuss possible actions. Working with an escaped prisoner of war, Boris Vildé, and a freed prisoner of war, Anatole Lewitsky, both Russians, the group at the Musée de l’Homme began their resistance activities initially with the sole purpose of defending the anti-racist ideology which was a founding principle of the museum. Mostly, these were not Gaullists, as few of them had been able to hear de Gaulle’s appel from London. Rather, they were a small group of men and women who met in the museum basement and, by December 1940, were busy distributing leaflets, posters and newsletters, as well as the first issue of their own journal, called straightforwardly Résistance.* But even this was hazardous, because it was hard to know who was trustworthy, and it was all too easy for copies of the journal to fall into the wrong hands.