Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France 1940-1945 by Margaret Collins Weitz on John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1995
1.
My Book Report: Americana column has been, and will continue to be, dedicated to stories of past American radicals and progressives of various stripes who have fought important battles, and need to be better-known. But this piece is a digression. Having always been fascinated by “the Resistance,” avidly watching even the schlockiest Hollywood movies, I recently saw a decent Netflix film about the Dutch resistance: full of heroic men, who paid the price in full, even if they remained alive. That reminded me of this book which I’d read a while ago and decided to reread.
Sisters in the Resistance is a fascinating account, filled with oral histories of French women who were involved in the ongoing daily struggles against the Nazi occupation of France. “The very secrecy required for Resistance undertakings makes it difficult to grasp their scope and nature.” Additionally, Ms. Weitz states, “many French women involved in Resistance activities did not seek official postwar recognition…Women did not see themselves as veterans. They simply did ‘what had to be done.’ The theme of self-effacement runs through women’s testimonies: ‘My role was very minor.’”
But Weitz maintains these aggregate oral histories demonstrate women at the heart of the daily functioning of the movement. A very diligent researcher, the author expresses gratitude in being granted access to classified material in France’s Archives National and to unpublished memoirs and studies. Aware of the potential obstacles in chiefly relying on oral histories, she interviewed more than eighty résistants, mainly women, focusing on metropolitan areas.
Her goal—“to inform, not commemorate”—necessitated providing in-depth accounts of many women who performed the same tasks. “The point is that women’s contributions consisted of countless mundane, repetitive everyday tasks…that do not figure generally in traditional, historical accounts.”
Resistance was slow in getting going after the Nazis entered Paris in June, 1940. Splitting the country into two zones, of course: directly controlling the northern half; the southern “Free French” zone, headquartered in Vichy, under the nominal leadership of Marshall Phillipe Pétain, an 84-year-old, WWI hero, was officially recognized by the U.S. government. Refugees from across Europe fled to the chaotic “unoccupied zone,” especially Marseille, in the desperate hope to escape Europe by land or sea.
In an August, 1941 radio address, Pétain cited the need “to conquer the resistance of all those who oppose order.” Nevertheless, Weitz maintains, it was after the November, 1942 German occupation of this “Free French” zone that the term resistance came to be used to define opposition to the Nazis and the armistice of defeat France had signed with Germany.
The Catholic Church was a major ally of Pétain’s government: both blamed France’s secular education for the country’s defeat. Conservatives and clerics helped do away with laws mandating a clear separation between church and state. Public schools, where crucifixes now appeared in some regions, could offer religious instruction. Early on, Vichy struck down a law which required those belonging to religious orders to obtain government permission to teach.
Municipalities were free to fund parochial schools; Vichy government set the example by awarding Catholic schools a large grant in 1941. The Catholic newspaper La Croix urged Catholics “to express their unreserved gratitude to Pétain’s government for revoking the iniquitous laws of the Third Republic.” As late as October 1943, the assembly of cardinals and archbishops went so far as to condemn Catholic Resistance for its “deplorable policies of personal decisions and independence” from the authority of the Church hierarchy.
The Church did protest the February 1944 regulations mandating eligibility of single women and married women without children aged 18 to 45 for labor service. Declaring this was “a grave blow to the life of families and to the future of our country and to the dignity and moral sensibility of women and young girls, to their providential vocation.” German and French Archives indicate about 45,000 French women were shipped off to Germany to work, in addition to some 600,000 men. “Many succumbed to pressure while other were deported.”
Both Pétain’s and Church authority began to crumble as situations worsened. Although revered, Pétain “embodied the deep-rooted anti-Semitism of his caste and class and the instinctive desire of many of the French to wait out the war.” Vichy inaugurated its own anti-Semitic policies without ever having received direct orders from Germany. “Scarcely had the Vichy regime been installed when it set up a commission to review each case of French citizenship granted since 1927. More than 15,000 individuals had their citizenship revoked—including some 6,000 Jews—who automatically became foreigners without protection.”
When the war first broke out, those viewed as foreign enemies were interned. France soon had ninety camps, which “while officially described as internment centers already were being referred to as ‘concentration camps’ by authorities.” Approximately 25,000 foreign Jews were rounded up and sent to French camps—“in some instances worse than the Nazi concentration camps of the time.” The biggest roundup of both French and foreign Jews took place on July 16, 1942: 13,000, including more than 4,000 children, in a carefully planned operation involving thousands of policemen and auxiliaries.
Throughout the Occupation, German police presence in France was very limited. “The Germans could not have rounded up so many—several hundred thousand—without French collusion.” Part of Hitler’s strategy, Weitz notes. “By allowing the Vichy government with its pretensions to autonomy and legitimacy to function, Hitler could govern France with a minimal German presence and save his forces for elsewhere.” One scholar holds: “There was no other occupied country during the Second World War which contributed more to the initial efficiency of Nazi rule in Europe than France.”
Excluded from all professions, even civil service, some Jews began to organize their own resistance movements. Detailed anti-Semitic legislation was published in the Journal Officiel, “along with mundane matters, such as the required dimensions of sports fields.” But what greatly stirred up indignant French citizens was Pétain’s announcement in October, 1940 that after meeting with Hitler, now “he was embarking on the ‘path of collaboration.’”
From the start, women, chiefly on bicycles, served as couriers of messages, not only within a single town but also among different towns and cities. Women couriers carried compromising material between Paris and Lyon several times a week: extremely risky, “much more dangerous than many realized at the time. If caught, they were subject to the worst tortures,” because authorities realized they were entrusted with significant information. Many couriers became skilled at coding and decoding messages.
When not circulating in towns or cities, cyclists on missions used narrow, uncomfortable back roads, where the Germans did not “drag their boots,” as one young woman put it. Agents were required to wait one hour after a meeting before going on to the next one. During this interval, they had to keep walking outside, whatever the weather—rain, cold, or snow—and were forbidden to take refuge in a café or cinema. Again, Weitz emphasizes: this work was “rigorous, routine and time-consuming…and often consisted of very repetitive assignments that required meticulous attention. It had nothing to do with the image one has of exciting adventures.”
Women also served as clandestine social workers to help prisoners and their families and to ensure the survival of résistants who had gone underground. Prisoners were poorly nourished and needed food packages to supplement their meager rations. Prisons were dirty and infested. The exchange of laundry was used to pass on news when correspondence was forbidden. Messages written on extremely thin paper—sometimes typed on silk and sewn to the paper—were rolled and inserted into hems.
Newspapers used to wrap parcels could convey news and information; partially completed crossword puzzles contained short messages. “Brief conversations with guards and chaplains often provided important information.” Clandestine social workers secured plans of prisons and helped prisoners escape.
Most significantly, women were heavily involved in a major aspect of surviving the Occupation: collecting and distributing food for their families and for resisters hiding in people’s homes and in the countryside. Women’s protests of food shortages were among the earliest public demonstrations. In 1941, a Communist-affiliated women’s group rushed into a grocery store in the busy Paris market district: grabbing cans and cartons of food, tossing them to the crowd of women shoppers. “Working-class women came out as a force to support miners striking in the north during the early days of the Occupation.”
Food prices tripled between 1939 and ’42. Bread and meat were being rationed by the end of September 1940; other commodities soon thereafter. Allocations—determined by age and activity—diminished during the war years. “At the heart of the matter was Germany’s appropriation of a large part of France’s extensive agricultural output.”
“In 1938, posters had urged the population to eat more pastry because there was surplus flour; just a few years later in Paris posters warned citizens about the health dangers of eating rats.” Desperate people ate crows, dogs and cats—“among other fare.”
Procuring food became ever more urgent and dangerous as the war progressed. In spring 1942, mandatory work service was instituted to fill German quotas (the French came to view this deportation as “the deportation”) which had an “immediate and dramatic effect on the previously passive population.” Youths and men went into hiding to avoid helping the Reich. Some joined the maquis, small clandestine fighting units then being formed.
Weitz maintains the maquis could not have survived “without many women who procured false papers, provisions and arms and carried them to the encampments.” The logistics entailed in assisting them were daunting. Even more so because members of the Resistance were also caring for, and planning the escape of British, then American, military who’d been caught behind enemy lines. (In 1941, the U.S. began to develop its own underground resistance in Vichy.)
“From the beginning of the underground press, women typed the tracts and printed the news bulletins (sometimes on toy presses), which were distributed with instructions for others to copy and pass on”—since only six carbons could be typed at a time. Enterprising groups acquired mimeograph and rotaprint machines, on occasion purchased with false papers.
“Papers—and paper—played a crucial role in French Resistance.” For those being persecuted in occupied France counterfeit cards and coupons were printed. The French were required to have numerous documents (often with multiple seals attached): identification and ration cards, coupons for fabrics, clothing, fuel, medical certificates and passes, including one needed to cross the demarcation line; and later certificates of exemptions from forced labor. “All were successfully copied by Resistance counterfeiters.”
When presses could be acquired, it was a problem to find relatively soundproof places to hide them. Transporting the lead required for printing presses was another perilous undertaking. One woman hid ninety pounds of lead in the carriage of her sleeping infant. A related problem was storage and distribution.
Sisters in the Resistance opens with an interview with Lucienne Guezennec who worked with the major press, Combat,carrying the lead printing plates to other underground papers. Wrapping the issues of Combat in crates or in valises, they shipped them throughout the southern zone via distribution networks which they’d organized. From a monthly circulation of around 40,000 in 1942, Combat grew to more than 200,000 issues in 1944. (One print run had more than 300,000 copies.)
Combat also helped print other clandestine papers, when there was a breakdown in their machines. Their press was located on land that sloped: half the building was below grade (a former cement factory, rechristened with the rather vague name of “Bureau of Geodesic and Geographic Studies” so they could get telephone service and electricity). But to muffle the sound, they still had to build a wall around the room with the presses.
The print shop was suddenly attacked by a large group of Milice (the French paramilitary comparable to the Gestapo) in June, 1944. Lucienne was the only survivor. “Thanks to the heroic efforts of other Combat members, the next issue came out on schedule.” But they lost three comrades, and irreplaceable printing equipment: trucks, five tons of paper, and two hundred rubber stamps to authorize all sorts of passes, including demobilization papers for the many young men who had been called up for work in Germany.
The Bulletin de Presse de la France Combattante, the Resistance “press services” information board was typed and run off by two women hidden in an abbey. The rotaprint machine used to publish Defense was hidden in the basement of a Sorbonne laboratory. “Courageous, feisty, eighty-four-year-old Mme. Cumin allowed a Defense printing press –familiarly referred to as ‘Grandmother’—to be installed in her launderette in the Bastille district.”
“There’s no way to determine precisely the number and circulation of clandestine journals during the Occupation. Many were short-lived and it was dangerous to keep copies.” The Bibliotheque Nationale holds more than 1,000 papers: national papers with large circulations and smaller regional journals. Some addressed the general public while others targeted specific political or social groups such as Communists or militant Catholics. “The success of these underground publications can be measured by the many fake Resistance tracts and papers the Germans produced.”
More than 50 papers were addressed specifically to women, mostly put out by the Communist Party press which was the only political organization with important women’s groups before the war. There were even hand-written “papers” which circulated in prison. In December 1942 a German edict decreed anyone involved in production or distribution of illegal newspapers would be punished by forced labor—or, in the most serious cases, death. Many were arrested.
France’s underground press also published books. Women authored some of the close to 30 works published by Editions de Minuit (Midnight Press). Edith Thomas, an archivist by training, helped cofound the National Committee of Writers, formed by the Parti Communiste Française (PCF), “Overcoming both ideological and material obstacles, the committee wrote, printed, and distributed Les Lettres francaises, the leading journal of French intellectual resistance.” Another prominent Midnight Press author and Resistance member was Russian-born Elsa Triolet, Jewish and married to Communist writer Louis Aragon.
Another Jewish wife of an acclaimed author, Clara Malraux, estranged from her husband, and with forged papers and virtually no money, undertook dangerous Resistance work along very specific lines. Among her missions was socialization with German soldiers to try to identify those who were feeling particularly demoralized or discouraged. If she felt the despair was authentic, Clara would help the soldier procure false papers and find shelter so he could eventually join the underground. Highly perilous work, there was no way to know if she was actually trying to recruit a member of the Gestapo.
2.
Women faced many obstacles working for the Resistance. Often, they lived with their families who they couldn’t inform about their activities—for fear of reprisal, disapprobation or even betrayal. (Many women sent their children away to be raised by distant relatives.) Of course, within the Resistance movement, there was also discrimination against women (some historians view this as “unconscious”) as well as some anti-Semitism.
Weitz enumerates the few women who held leadership positions in Resistance networks. Berty Albrecht conceived of and produced the first newsletter, which developed into Combat. Lucie Abrac found the Liberation-Sud movement and worked on its newspaper. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade—the only woman to head a major network—initially served as the right hand of a Commander in setting up the British Intelligence-sponsored Alliance network. When Commander Loustaunau-Lacau was arrested early in the Occupation, Marie-Madeleine assumed leadership of the Alliance’s three thousand or so members.
A few women are known to have joined fighting groups—for the most part Communist Party members. Communists participated in more unconventional forms of fighting—sabotage and guerilla attacks—which women could help carry out. Scarcity of weapons was a problem: maquis units often drilled with broomsticks. The Communist Party used women liaison agents to deliver weapons and hide them.
Georgette (Claude) Gérard’s background helps explain how she reached the unusual position of head of a maquis. Brought up in Lorraine, certain in the ‘30s war was coming, she studied engineering while teaching math to support herself, and engaged in many sports, especially long hikes and bicycle trips. Finding herself in Lyon, she began to type up and distribute resistance tracts. By the end of 1940, Gérard had managed to contact an Allied intelligence service, and was scouting possible parachute landing spots, and furnishing details of German troops.
Arrested twice when assistant to the head of Combat, she realized she had to leave the area and began traveling from village to village: setting up sections, ensuring liaisons, planning arms raids and sabotage. When Resistance forces joined together in January 1943, Combat offered her several assignments, and she chose to become head of the maquis for seven regions. At first the only chief, she was joined by a male leader who handled the military aspects; she was in charge of the organization. By November, the total number in the maquis under her was close to five thousand, divided into camps of 120, all hidden in the forests.
Georgette’s testimony ends with her being sent to head a section of the French intelligence network, because she was too well known where she was. Arrested in May 1944, she was put in prison in Limoges. “The least I can say is that I was very badly treated. If I am alive today, it is because of the Liberation French Forces surrounded and attacked the prison before the departing Germans could massacre us.”
Even though women were active in all resistance groups, “Not a single woman was named as president of one of the liberation committees; nor was there a single woman regional head of a movement” or on the list of prefects or commissioners for the postwar republic. All these appointments had been decided by the National Council of the Resistance. In 1944, General de Gaulle created the order of Companions of the Liberation to honor those who had helped free France. Of the more than one thousand medals granted—including five to municipalities and eighteen to fighting units—only six were awarded to women.
Partly due to traditional French sexism (women were excluded from voting until after WWII), unlike in Italy and Greece there was also strong prejudice against women bearing arms (unless no men were available). Also to blame was Charles de Gaulle, acknowledged as head of the Free French forces in England by Winston Churchill.
Familiar with the activities of those who joined him in London, de Gaulle knew little of the exploits in continental France. “Further, as a career military man, he could not conceive of groups and movements composed mainly of civilians fighting the enemy in an improvised manner.” “The very secrecy required for resistance undertakings made it difficult to grasp their scope and nature,” and hindered postwar efforts to write the history of the French Resistance, Weitz maintains.
3.
One of the final chapters, “Collaboration,” discusses both the extent and ultimate punishment of the collaborators. According to one historian, the total circulation of their newspapers “suggests that one to two million were inclined that way.” This authoritative study notes about 15% of the notorious Militia members were women. “A particularly surprising figure,” Weitz comments, “given the fact that women had no political status at that time.”
Most women were relatives or companions of male collaborators. Apart from a small group of hard-core Germanophiles and those who subscribed wholeheartedly to Nazi doctrines—a group that included few women—many collaborators were opportunists who seized the opportunity to settle personal or professional rivalries. One major index of this practice is the large volume of letters or denunciations—signed or anonymous—sent to prefects and the police. Monetary rewards for denunciation made Jews particularly vulnerable.
The purification or purge in France after the Liberation was “short-lived but brutal.” Approximately half of the close to ten thousand people executed in France without legal trials for collaboration were killed just before or shortly after the Allied landings. The arrival of General de Gaulle, and the installation of his government in Paris in August 1944 didn’t ensure his immediate authority throughout France.
In de Gaulle’s memoirs, he complains the Communist Party continued to take political advantage of the disorder and fears following the liberation. One critic argues the majority of those in charge of these trials were Communists, who were there to follow Party instructions and condemn. “Viewing themselves as ‘pure’ Resistance figures, they sometimes acted worse than those whom they condemned,” he writes.
Official trials of French collaborators continued into the early 1950s. More than half of the almost seven thousand sentenced to death were tried in absentia. Fewer than eight hundred of them were ultimately executed. By then, some of the judges were former Vichy judges—“including, ironically a few who had presided earlier at trials of résistants.” To this day, Weitz comments, “hard-core Vichy supporters tend to exaggerate the ‘crimes’ committed” in this process.
In reality, because of de Gaulle’s concern over avoiding a national bloodbath in the climate of potential civil war then prevailing, sanctions for collaboration were relatively mild. “The country imprisoned and executed fewer collaborationists than did any of its neighbors.”
The Resistance had done what it could to counteract collaborationists, often publishing their activities in widespread clandestine journals. Early in 1943, one paper denounced the director of a girl’s high school to its 100,000 readers for expelling a student carrying Resistance leaflets, then sending her dossier to the Minister of Education, who had her arrested.
The testimony and appointment books of German officials reveal how renowned Parisian hostesses—particularly aristocrats—competed for the elite among the occupiers with their elegant cocktail parties. At the headquarters of the notorious Bonny-Lafont gang (criminals who became French Gestapo assistants), torture took place in the basement while extravagant feasts were held in the salons on the upper floors: prostitutes, cabaret dancers, titled aristocrats, and a Russian princess consorted with the gang and their guests. After the war, the leaders and some members were tried and executed
“What is striking in all accounts of the ‘cleansing’ is the intensity of the vengeance unleashed against women who consorted with the enemy”: often paraded through town with their heads shorn, subject to insults and sometimes the blows of the crowd. In some towns, stripped naked as well, frequently elevated on platforms (resonating with the treatment of those accused of witchcraft in earlier centuries), holding their “German” baby. “Most of these degrading spectacles took place in rural areas where neighbors were aware of the conduct of others and feelings ran deep.”
By the end of August 1944, head-shaving became a widespread practice for women thought to have collaborated. Virtually all these women were “of modest background; few upper-class women who consorted with the enemy—such as couturiere Coco Chanel or well-known actresses—were persecuted.” Major industrialists and businessmen also got off lightly. A prestigious firm was not seriously bothered after the war, even though it had manufactured fur vests for German soldiers on the Russian front.
In conclusion, Ms. Weitz assesses the impact of women of the Resistance on women’s postwar status. “While major changes were facilitated, and to some extent accelerated by the many and varied activities of French women during WWII, one cannot claim the war experience radically changed women’s status.” The author argues the changes in postwar society “had been long in preparation. The improved status of women in many other countries…also suggests this conclusion.”
“However,” Weitz argues, “to say that it was essentially a question of accepting the inevitable does not lessen the enduring value of what so many thousands of women did during the Resistance to liberate their country. France was France again, in measurable part because of what her daughters had done.
Mel Freilicher retired from some 4 decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, and American Cream, all on San Diego City Works Press.