In August 1944, in a metropolis close to Paris, Robert Capa took {a photograph} of a girl cradling a child in the course of a jeering crowd, her head shaved and her brow marked with a swastika.
The girl, Simone Touseau, would turn out to be notorious — first as a logo of the brutality of post-occupation France and later, by painstaking scholarship, for instance of the Nazi sympathies amongst among the French throughout World Conflict II.
A novel launched in France this summer time has reinvented her as soon as once more, this time as a girl scorned. It’s a reinvention that may be a disservice to the difficult fact about Ms. Touseau and her and different Frenchwomen’s deliberate collaboration with the Nazis. Girls collaborated out of cowardice, self-interest and an entire vary of ideological fervor. A actuality we should always ponder frankly if we’re to have a correct accounting of the historical past of the warfare in France.
The {photograph}, “The Shaved Girl of Chartres,” with the younger Ms. Touseau at its heart, was understood for a very long time as a doc of the brutal purges that passed off through the liberation of France on the finish of World Conflict II. Extrajudicial punishments have been carried out all around the nation, together with shaving the heads of ladies suspected of sleeping with the enemy.
The reality was extra advanced. Historians have been gradual to take an curiosity within the wartime collaboration and resistance of ladies, however within the early 2000s, a groundbreaking work by Fabrice Virgili described what number of ladies who have been shaved within the purges have been being punished not for his or her intimate relationships with Germans however for denunciations or working for the Germans.
Ultimately we received a clearer image of Ms. Touseau, too. In 2011 two historians, Gérard Leray and Philippe Frétigné, established that she was a Nazi sympathizer earlier than the warfare began. She scribbled swastikas within the pages of notebooks she stored as early because the mid-Thirties, admired Nationwide Socialism and claimed that France “wants somebody like Hitler.” Fluent in German, she labored as a translator for the occupying forces and have become a member of the nationalist Parti Populaire Français. She was accused of denouncing 4 neighbors who have been deported to the Mauthausen focus camp, two of whom by no means returned. The crime, which might have been punishable by dying, was not proved, however Mr. Leray instructed me that he’s adamant that she performed at the least some half in it.
When the Allied forces have been within the technique of releasing France, Ms. Touseau wrote to the German father of her little one that if she was killed, he ought to elevate their daughter “in hatred of the British.”
The notorious martyr of the purges was a dedicated collaborator. Mr. Capa’s picture of the shorn lady was one in all victimization but in addition accountability.
This was an vital second in our understanding of historical past. Reminiscence of World Conflict II in France continues to be mutable and fragile and underpins debates that we as a rustic are nonetheless having. (As just lately as 2019, Eric Zemmour, a far-right pundit who ran for president, was nonetheless attempting to unfold the long-disproved concept that Maréchal Pétain saved French Jews relatively than volunteered to ship extra to the dying camps.) Understanding ladies’s position appropriately is crucial to an trustworthy inspection of that historical past.
This August a brand new, fictionalized portrait of Ms. Touseau was revealed in France, within the form of a novel, “Vous Ne Connaissez Rien de Moi” (“You Know Nothing About Me”), by Julie Héraclès, which renders Ms. Touseau, renamed Grivise, as a girl scorned.
Within the novel Simone falls in love with Pierre, who’s younger and good-looking and from a bourgeois household. He sexually assaults Simone, and when she falls pregnant, he abandons her to affix the Resistance, leaving her to have an unlawful abortion on her personal.
Simone’s need for revenge drives her to begin working as a translator for the Nazis. She begins a relationship with a German officer, Otto, then falls in love with him. After he’s injured on the Jap Entrance, she joins the Parti Populaire Français to get a switch to Germany to be with him, with little consideration for the political implications.
The Simone of the novel has a Jewish good friend, lies to the Gestapo to assist a member of the Resistance, is “revulsed” by the observe of reporting neighbors and offers meals to somewhat Jewish woman — all “extremely implausible information,” Mr. Leray instructed me.
It makes for gripping studying, and the novel was on quite a few award lists and received the Stanislas Prize for finest first novel. Critics praised it as spectacular and audacious, and readers shared their enthusiasm for it — “a fantastic love story,” a “actual immersion in Simone’s life,” a narrative “that reveals us that persons are by no means angels or demons however a tangle of fine and dangerous,” a number of wrote in on-line critiques.
However the guide has additionally been the topic of criticism on the query of what fiction can permit itself in terms of this part of history.
Ms. Héraclès instructed me in a cellphone interview that she was stunned by the controversy. Her agenda was to not redeem Ms. Touseau, she mentioned, however “to discover the human situation” by attempting to think about “how a younger lady can commit legal acts.”
The novel has an epigraph: “I’ve by no means seen a saint or a bastard. Nothing is all black and white; it’s the grey that wins. Males and their souls, it’s all the identical.” However relegating Ms. Touseau to the position of a sentimental being buffeted by historical past doesn’t enrich our understanding of her. It strips her of company and impoverishes our sense of historical past on the similar time.
The shaved lady of Chartres was a pushed, ideological lady whom painstaking historic scholarship had liberated from our simplistic understanding of her. At any given time, persons are a tangle of fine and dangerous, and it’s the prerogative of fiction to mildew naked information for creative ends. However now fiction has put her again within the restricted, acquainted position of sacrificial mom that she inhabited in Capa’s photograph and the world’s creativeness.
Maybe we favor her there, relatively than considering her and others’ complicity in evil.
Valentine Faure is a contributing author to Le Monde.
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