Just before the war Dr Jean Dalsace, a friend of the avant-garde gallery-owner Jeanne Bucher, had opened the first birth-control clinic in France, but the war had put a stop to such free thinking and Giraud was victim of a corrupt regime rapidly losing control. Abortions were freely available for the rich who knew where to go and could afford a fee of around 4,000 francs. Arlette Scali, for example, a member of the haute bourgeoisie who had married as a teenager, wrote that her first husband had intended to continue with his lifestyle of mistresses ‘but he did not want children … when I was pregnant my mother-in-law paid for abortions which were illegal and costly. It was horrible.’ At the other end of the social scale the struggling author, later championed by Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc, wrote graphically in her autobiography, La Batarde, about how difficult it was for a single mother who did not want to keep a child. She made repeated attempts at an abortion, following visits to ‘so-called midwives’ – back-street abortionists – which left her close to dying and in terrible pain but bolstered by ‘my single woman’s determination to stand by herself and not to fall’. During a terrible winter without coal and heat, she only narrowly survived after several months in bed at her mother’s with ice on her belly, being sick and continually bleeding. Slowly, she learned to walk and live again, though not long enough to see her rackety life, earning money from the black market, and her painful love affair with de Beauvoir translated into a successful film in 2012 called Violette.
One of the most controversial films of 1943, produced by the German-owned Continental Studios and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, was Le Corbeau (The Raven), which tackled the issue of abortion. The film, now a classic, was notable for causing serious trouble to its director after the war and was banned at the Liberation not only because of the Continental connection but because it was perceived by the communist press and by some who had been in the underground as vilifying the French people. Le Corbeau is an extremely dark and melodramatic story about the consequences of writing anonymous poison-pen letters. Letters signed by ‘Le Corbeau’ accuse a doctor of having an affair with the pretty young wife of an elderly psychiatrist and also of practising illegal abortions. The film ends as an ambulance arrives to take away the wife, who has been deemed insane, and the doctor finds the psychiatrist dead at his desk just as he was writing Le Corbeau’s final triumphant letter. His throat had been cut by the mother of a cancer patient who had just committed suicide following receipt of one such anonymous letter warning that his cancer was terminal. A powerful illustration of the effect of paranoia on the human psyche.
The film was loosely based on a famous case in 1917, but the relevance in the fevered atmosphere of 1943 to the number of anonymous denunciations being bandied about, revealing that someone was Jewish or in hiding or involved in black-marketeering, added to its heightened air of realism. Denunciations – there had been an estimated three and a half million of them by the end of the war throughout France – acted as a chilling reinforcement of the power of life over death that individual French people could choose to wield during the Occupation. They were made by people from all social milieux, often driven by revenge or by a desire to claim the financial reward, which in some cases was significant. The highest rewards were paid to those denouncing a resister, and could range from 200,000 francs to 15 million. Radio-Paris, the German-controlled radio station, even had a popular programme called Répétez-le, which was entirely devoted to letters from listeners denouncing their neighbours, their rivals in business or love, and even members of their own family. The Germans were said to have been amazed by the response to their call for denunciations, even complaining about the workload involved in investigating them all. Many were from women, signing for example as ‘a little woman who only seeks to do her duty’, pointing out that a particular shop was Jewish-owned and asking if there were any business opportunities available from abandoned businesses.
In 1942 Pétain had weakly denounced the denouncers, but no one took any notice. By July 1943, the execution of the impoverished abortionist Giraud, whose trial had resulted from a denunciation, served to emphasize just how out of touch the Vichy regime had become, regarding abortion as a national plague while legalizing prostitution.