One of the greatest scenes from the hit French television series Un Village Français, a chronicle of the second world war viewed from a village in the Jura mountains, involves the execution by firing squad of the local Milice française, the paramilitary group created by Vichy to combat the resistance. The militia, hands tied behind their back, facing down the enemy, launch into a final rendition of their song, and the ragtag bunch that make up the firing squad balk at shooting men who are singing. Suzanne, the postmistress-turned-resistance fighter, grabs a rifle and takes aim. “Not a woman!” the militia leader shouts. “We have the right to die like men!” Suzanne yells back: “When you had to kill them, you didn’t care if they were women! The women of the resistance have a message for you! On my command: Fire!”
I thought of this scene reading Les Parisiennes, which considers the impact of the war on the lives of Parisian women. Anne Sebba’s book is filled with examples of how male soldiers could not abide the idea of a woman in power. She recalls a moment from Marguerite Duras’s wartime notebooks, just after the war had ended, in which a woman in uniform confronted a returning soldier: “So my friend – we’re not saluting? Can’t you see I’m a captain,” she said. The soldier looked at her. “Me, when I see a skirt, I don’t salute her, I fuck her.”
Vichy asked women to do nothing less than to save the soul of France by building families. In addition, or instead, they helped men escape, hid Jews, and joined the resistance. They also lived their everyday lives, staining their legs with iodine when they couldn’t afford stockings. “Our role was to put on the costume,” wrote the actor Corinne Luchaire, who was later sentenced to 10 years of dégradation nationale for “collaboration horizontale”. The book takes an unflinching and sympathetic look at the roles women were asked to play in the war, and those they wrote for themselves.
We meet women such as Jeanne Bucher, a gallerist in her 60s who hid résistants in the attic along with her paintings by Braque and Picasso, or Lise London, who organised an uprising on the Rue Daguerre. Then there are more familiar names such as the Jewish novelist Irène Némirovsky, who converted to Catholicism and even published in collaborationist newspapers, but was still deported to Auschwitz. The women referred to most often tend to be from the middle or upper class; you suspect they were the ones with the networks and the resources to leave behind testimonials. Sebba notes that, for instance, those who worked as prostitutes during the war “wrote no memoirs, were not part of the resistance, and so, in spite of being responsible for several courageous acts during the occupation, such as sheltering airmen in brothels as well as undertaking individual acts of great kindness in the [Ravensbrück] camp, have largely been forgotten by history”.
Sebba interviewed many of the surviving women, and tells their stories here, many for the first time. Why did they decide to risk their lives, she asked them, in situations where many people would be tempted to stay out of trouble? “I don’t even understand the question,” answered Jeannie Rousseau, a member of the Druids resistance network, who provided key military information on the Germans’ rocket programme to the British. “It was a moral obligation to do what you are capable of doing. As a woman you could not join the army but you could use your brain.”
Quite early on, however, it becomes apparent that Les Parisiennes suffers from its ambition, as the women the book is meant to celebrate get lost in a melee of facts about, and descriptions of, wartime Paris. The book proceeds year by year, and individual stories disappear, to be picked up again a few chapters later. After the Lise London incident in the Rue Daguerre, for instance, we are told she was sent to Ravensbrück and her husband to Mauthausen. By the time she resurfaces, 260 pages later, it’s hard to remember who she is. This confusion seems to have been anticipated, as the book features a glossary of names and an index. But I wish Sebba had chosen instead to focus on a few figures, and, through them, get at the larger issues.
Les Parisiennes insists on the moral incertitude of wartime, “especially through the eyes of women”. Perhaps because their lives were so complicated and roles so divided, they were more able to perceive, and be at home with, ambiguity. Reading the past through the eyes of the women who lived it is an act of feminist historiography, but Sebba’s approach is conventional, and too reminiscent of big history books written by blokes, even as it celebrates the women who have too long escaped their notice. A feminist writing of history needs to radically challenge modes such as chronology and dutiful scene-setting. These are desperate, devastating stories, but this format does them no favours.
Reading Les Parisiennes, I am nonetheless filled with admiration not only for the women themselves, but for Sebba’s heroic research, for her meticulous tracking of these people and their exploits, of their fragility and their strength. This book is an important reminder of the fact that fully half of the story of the second world war is buried in memory and the archive, and has only recently been unearthed.
• Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is published by Chatto. To order Les Parisiennes for £16.40 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
