December, January and February, people were dying. Only slowly were the French learning the true nature of occupation. Avenue Foch, one of the most beautiful streets in Paris, had become the Gestapo’s torture centre. The tensions between Germans and French, noted the communist critic and novelist Jean Richard Bloch, had become as taut as a violin string.
CHAPTER THREE
Daughters of the Enlightenment
One of the reasons given by Pétain for the defeat of France in 1940 was the severe lack of French children. Young women, he complained, had had their heads turned by seeing too many American films, and by being told by the Front Populaire that there was no reason why they could not study to become lawyers and doctors like their brothers. Under a law of 1938, French girls had been permitted to enrol in universities, open their own bank accounts, sign and receive cheques and have their own passports. *
Pétain intended to reverse this heady spirit of freedom, and, without an Assembly to hinder him, set about putting through a series of edicts and statutes aimed at strengthening what he saw as the degenerate moral fabric of France. Contraception had been declared illegal in the wake of the huge losses in the First World War, and would remain so, but now the penalties against abortion, and particularly abortionists, were strengthened to include the guillotine. Women who continued to breastfeed their babies beyond the age of one were given priority cards for queues (providing the baby was legitimate and French). Mothers of five children were presented a bronze medal, then a silver with the eighth and a gold with the tenth. Dozens of Vichy babies acquired Pétain as their godfather. Families were declared to be ‘patriotic’; to remain single was to be decadent.
During the 1930s, the Front Populaire had poured money into popular culture and sport, into scouting, paid holidays and auberges de la jeunesse . While French intellectuals pondered modernism, socialism and peace, the young were encouraged to travel, discover the parts of France they had never visited, take cycling holidays. Sport, the Vichy government also now decided, would be particularly beneficial in forming ‘young girls of robust beauty and well hardened character’. Since laxity of morals and seductive dress were indissolubly linked, designers were urged to tailor the new divided skirts—with the disappearance of the car, bicycles had become ubiquitous—in such a way that the division remained almost invisible. In Pétain’s new France, girls were to be serious young women; not coquettes, but candid, fresh faced and without artifice.
As it happened, the move towards sport, the outdoors and independence had appealed greatly to young French women in the 1930s. For the first time, their parents allowed them to spend nights away from home with friends. They had become accustomed to cycling in groups through the French countryside, staying in the hundreds of newly opened hostels, sitting by the fireside late into the night discussing the issues of the day—activities that would for some now play into their roles in the resistance. For Cécile, her trips into the countryside with her baby daughter, sometimes the only young woman among a dozen or so boys, were times of talk and politics. It was pleasing to feel herself so much part of a group, sharing the same notions about equality and fairness.
In 1936, when the PCF was expanding and coming to power within the Front Populaire, a young dentist called Danielle Casanova was asked whether she would like to run a youth wing for girls, as a sister organisation to the Jeunesse Communiste, to be called L’Union des Jeunes Filles de France (JFdeF). Danielle, who was born in Corsica, was then 27, a forceful, high-spirited, tenacious young woman with a dark complexion, heavy eyebrows, a snub nose and very shiny black eyes, living with her husband Laurent just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where she had her practice.
CHAPTER THREE
Daughters of the Enlightenment
One of the reasons given by Pétain for the defeat of France in 1940 was the severe lack of French children. Young women, he complained, had had their heads turned by seeing too many American films, and by being told by the Front Populaire that there was no reason why they could not study to become lawyers and doctors like their brothers. Under a law of 1938, French girls had been permitted to enrol in universities, open their own bank accounts, sign and receive cheques and have their own passports. *
Pétain intended to reverse this heady spirit of freedom, and, without an Assembly to hinder him, set about putting through a series of edicts and statutes aimed at strengthening what he saw as the degenerate moral fabric of France. Contraception had been declared illegal in the wake of the huge losses in the First World War, and would remain so, but now the penalties against abortion, and particularly abortionists, were strengthened to include the guillotine. Women who continued to breastfeed their babies beyond the age of one were given priority cards for queues (providing the baby was legitimate and French). Mothers of five children were presented a bronze medal, then a silver with the eighth and a gold with the tenth. Dozens of Vichy babies acquired Pétain as their godfather. Families were declared to be ‘patriotic’; to remain single was to be decadent.
During the 1930s, the Front Populaire had poured money into popular culture and sport, into scouting, paid holidays and auberges de la jeunesse . While French intellectuals pondered modernism, socialism and peace, the young were encouraged to travel, discover the parts of France they had never visited, take cycling holidays. Sport, the Vichy government also now decided, would be particularly beneficial in forming ‘young girls of robust beauty and well hardened character’. Since laxity of morals and seductive dress were indissolubly linked, designers were urged to tailor the new divided skirts—with the disappearance of the car, bicycles had become ubiquitous—in such a way that the division remained almost invisible. In Pétain’s new France, girls were to be serious young women; not coquettes, but candid, fresh faced and without artifice.
As it happened, the move towards sport, the outdoors and independence had appealed greatly to young French women in the 1930s. For the first time, their parents allowed them to spend nights away from home with friends. They had become accustomed to cycling in groups through the French countryside, staying in the hundreds of newly opened hostels, sitting by the fireside late into the night discussing the issues of the day—activities that would for some now play into their roles in the resistance. For Cécile, her trips into the countryside with her baby daughter, sometimes the only young woman among a dozen or so boys, were times of talk and politics. It was pleasing to feel herself so much part of a group, sharing the same notions about equality and fairness.
In 1936, when the PCF was expanding and coming to power within the Front Populaire, a young dentist called Danielle Casanova was asked whether she would like to run a youth wing for girls, as a sister organisation to the Jeunesse Communiste, to be called L’Union des Jeunes Filles de France (JFdeF). Danielle, who was born in Corsica, was then 27, a forceful, high-spirited, tenacious young woman with a dark complexion, heavy eyebrows, a snub nose and very shiny black eyes, living with her husband Laurent just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where she had her practice.
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