2023-09-19 01:20:19
Why are we talking about “the shearing of Chartres” again at the start of the 2023 school year?
The one we used to call “the shorn of Chartres” was the subject of a book, published at the end of August 2023, for the literary season, by Jean-Claude Lattès editions. You don’t know anything about me is the first novel by Julie Héraclès, who herself comes from Chartres and who immediately told how the story of this woman shorn at the Liberation had always “inhabited”. On the cover of the book, a photo of Robert Capa adorns the marketing banner, and it is considerable: presented as fiction, this novel revisits the story of Simone Touseau, the 23-year-old woman at the time of the Liberation , which the American photographer had immortalized on August 16, 1944, in the streets of Chartres.
Historians were immediately choked up, as they learned that the story of Simone Touseau could thus be mixed through the sieve of fiction. The author specifying for example that she had “added episodes” to history as we now know it. The controversy took on a new dimension while the book was in bookstores, and after Julie Héraclès herself revealed, for example in an interview with Figaro, that she had ultimately read very little historians on this story – only one book at most. On the contrary, she explained that she had appropriated it more by allowing herself to be crossed by this character, passing from compassion to a form of perplexity to finally question herself: how could this woman who was not twenty years old at the beginning of the Occupation, could she have betrayed her country to the point that her city took revenge and turned against her?
In this fictionalized story, Simone, who keeps her first name but changes her last name, falls in love. His collaboration with her is primarily due to this morally reprehensible love, to the Liberation: to have slept with a German soldier was to betray one’s country. And this is where reading Julie Héraclès is particularly disturbing, and where the controversy digs deep. Indeed, it is not only a true story that the author invests, and twists for the benefit of poetic license. But it is, moreover, through clichés that she takes the winding path of storytelling. By showing implicitly that the story would ultimately be less clear-cut, more ambiguous, or by insisting on this intimate connection with a man of the occupier, the author thus ended up harvesting not only outside historical research, but also downright against the grain. His story is part of a certain vulgate of purification, such as it has long been fossilized. Now, for thirty years now, historians have been deciphering it, the better to deconstruct it. With the particular urgency of clearing away the quantity of fantasies carried by this vision of collaboration under the influence of love, or sex – but in all cases of women’s bodies.
What exactly do we know about Simone Touseau?
Simone Touseau, as Robert Capa’s photography traveled around the world, ended up becoming an object of history. Unlike many other women, who remained more anonymous, her trajectory was documented. Certainly, the baby she is holding in her arms, rue du Cheval-Blanc, when Capa immortalizes her, shorn and pale, is indeed the fruit of an affair with a German. But it was first and foremost a modest actress in the collaboration, and not a lover – or not only – that we had to deal with those who sought to judge her at the Liberation.
Because it must be remembered: already shorn, that day in August 1944, Simone Touseau had not yet been judged. She will ultimately never be brought before a court of justice of the Republic: the investigators will not be able to prove that she was involved in denunciations. And, in particular, that she would have denounced neighbors, who, in 1943, had been arrested, then deported, under the noses of the Touseau family who hosted Nazi soldiers for dinner without hiding it. It is first of all for these markers of reputation that Simone, as well as her mother, will be shorn in mid-August 1944. Simone also carries in her arms this granddaughter who made tangible this story that her mother did not had barely hidden with a German soldier. Not for acts of denunciation, contrary to the stubborn commonplace that continues to circulate.
Simone, on the other hand, had volunteered to work in Nazi Germany, and was a member of the PPF, the French Popular Party of Jacques Doriot. And it is for this reason that the civic chamber which will judge her will sentence her: ten years of national indignity, and two years and ten months in prison. Upon his release from prison, his photo had already made an impact on the readers of LIFE, but not yet on the French, who would rather discover it as his image was used to illustrate not only the purge, but also the very gendered violence that women who were considered to have collaborated were wiped out twice: first, in the hot weather of the Liberation; then, once the prisoners and deportees return, they return.
The rest of the ideas Listen later
Far from illustrating the way in which sometimes, through candor or not stupidity, women, great lovers, ended up corrupting themselves without really understanding, as Julie Héraclès’ novel seems to suggest, this photograph has everything to pose in contrast to new fresh the question of what the purification was. It shows in fact that women were in some way over-punished, and that a particularly gendered punishment was reserved for them. It also reveals, when it is sufficiently deciphered, that it can equip our gaze, as the historian Fabrice Virgili explains. A pioneer in the history of purification, it was he, the first, who brought to light the way in which these shorn women (to whom he devoted his thesis), had been the subject of specific treatment of makes gender relations:
“Because they are women, we are going to depoliticize the accusation, demilitarize the accusation, and see, precisely because they are women, either greed for gain, or carelessness, or seduction or ‘love. Anything related to political commitment takes a back seat or is even completely forgotten.
For my part, I frankly avoid using the terms “horizontal collaboration”, which date from the immediate post-war period, and which create a screen. This expression actually prevents us from understanding what the collaboration was. I was able to estimate the number of women shaved as part of the extra-judicial purge at 20,000. Half of them were arrested because they had had an intimate relationship with a German, and not all of them, contrary to popular belief. This vision depoliticizes them.
The one we call “the shorn of Chartres”, like the others, will be accused of very different forms of collaboration. She worked for the Germans, and worked in Germany, and contrary to common belief, shorn women are not shorn because they slept with the Germans. But because they are shorn, we think they slept with the Germans. In the grounds of accusation, women are ultimately accused of the same reasons as men, with the practical exception of military collaboration. But what is specific is that in addition, the suspicion of a romantic, sexual relationship with German soldiers is added because they are women. And not because a certain number of facts establish it.
Hair is seduction, and by destroying hair, we punish seduction. So it is the form of the punishment, what it implies, what it represents from an anthropological point of view which practically automatically makes the collaborator who is shorn, like a debauchee, an immoral woman. Whereas in many cases, that’s not what happened. And this will contribute to the creation of this very strong image, even if for me the one we call “the shorn of Chartres” is emblematic, but not representative: only half of the women shaved were shaved because they had had this intimate relationship with Germans. Likewise, it is always implied that they followed a man. This man can be the German soldier, or a father, or a brother, it doesn’t matter: they are not recognized as having political initiative.”
“La mowed de Chartres” by Robert Capa, a paradoxical Madonna?
It was first of all a woman who had slept and whose lover was a German, that Robert Capa captured while he was reporting in Chartres, to cover the advance of the Allies with his camera. The work of photographer Robert Capa was especially rediscovered in France from the 1970s and 1980s. The photo he took, rue-du-Cheval-blanc, in Chartres, on August 16, 1944, while he was reporting , had indeed found itself published in LIFE Magazine from the edition of September 4, 1944. But no one in France then read LIFE and this photo will take more time to crystallize as THE great iconic photo of the purge. If images of shaved women, remaining more anonymous, were taken almost everywhere, and so often, photographers from the local press had them pose to immortalize the face of betrayal, the photographs, en masse, were quickly returned to boxes, buried. Forgotten. Capa’s photo, on the contrary, continued to gain notoriety, to the point of soon taking on the strength of the symbol. It fit with all the lexicon that we discover in the archives of the Liberation, even the armistice: in the archives of the Museum of the Resistance (online), we discover for example this 3-minute film, of a truck intended for “Boche chickens”shorn in Chatou in Yvelines, August 29, 1944.
By presenting this woman as a mother and therefore also as a sexualized body whose sexual life the child betrayed, this photograph would transcribe, and ultimately engrave in the imagination, the idea that this motherhood was a sign of guilt. What does it matter, ultimately, that the investigation into Simone Touseau will ultimately not lead to the conclusion that she would have been guilty of denunciation, and even less to her lover: because in the representations in progress during the war , sleeping with a German was being guilty of treason against France, Simone Touseau will remain this traitor when she achieved notoriety: a woman of around twenty, accompanied by her parents, carrying in her arms the child of a German.
Contributing to forging an imaginary of purification as it became established in the imagery, Capa’s photography could have made it into an obscure Madonna. But by looking at the use of photography, we can go further, and bring it closer to the expression “wild purification”. Because this image of a shorn woman, which LIFE had published opposite another photo, which showed a crowd unleashed against the gates of the courthouse during a trial which was not that of Simone Touseau, will generate a storytelling of another order: as when the act of shearing women will appear in all its violence without any other form of process since it is fundamentally a question of extra-judicial cleansing, this woman will also arouse compassion. The historian François Rouquet, co-author with Fabrice Virgili of an important unpublished work published in the Folio collection, by Gallimard (The French, the French, and the purgein 2018), deciphers this representation of history – and the way in which it carves out a place despite history itself:
“With this photograph, the image of shorn women becomes that of purification. However, from the Liberation, collaborators who managed to take refuge in Switzerland or Spain wrote, particularly in newspapers; and they will pose as victims. Having become popular, this image could be used: it presented a partly distorting mirror of what the collaboration had really been. Because Simone Touseau will be well judged, and found guilty of acts of collaboration… but not for denunciation for example, which could have earned her the death penalty. By showing her, a white woman, overwhelmed, her child in her arms, we suggested that she too could have been a victim of the excesses of the purifiers.
However, in the 1980s, the far right sought to install the expression “wild purification”, who will be successful. A book appeared during this period, by a historian [Philippe Bourdel, NDLR, qui n’a pas soutenu de thèse, et est aussi éditeur] which makes an editorial coup: it lines up all the most deplorable cases of purification, to conclude with the savagery of the purifiers. But for me who supported my thesis in 1988 it was completely paradoxical: while we were starting to have figures, to soon be able to demonstrate that instead of the 100,000 deaths that some were saying, we had not exceeded 9 or 10,000 deaths, three quarters of which had were killed during the war itself… the formula hit home at a time when knowledge was finally progressing.
This expression “wild purification” will be used almost everywhere, at the same time when Robert Capa’s photography was becoming famous. At the risk that the two could overlap: this white woman, vulnerable and violently repressed, was used to show the cowardice of the resistance. By proliferating, the formula “savage purification” obscured the reality of what had been not only purification, but also collaboration. However, this image of a woman made visible the fact that women were ultimately the most worried, even though they had not all slept with Germans. While investigating ministerial offices, I was struck by the contrast: even before the great amnesties of 1950 and 1953, we had witnessed the return to the social circle of men in positions of power who had compromised themselves. The shorn woman from Chartres immortalized the fact that not everyone had been so lucky. She was also the symbol of this asymmetry.”
The silence of shorn women: between silent words and ambivalent traces
While the story of Simone Touseau finds itself, eighty years later, at the heart of a book claiming to be fiction, it is less the poetic license that we can ultimately question, than a striking contrast. Indeed, after having saturated the visual space, this woman who had already given (without choosing) her face to a certain image of the collaboration, became silent. However, she is not the only one: although they suffered a repression of great violence even before being judged, there has, for example, never been an association of shorn women, or any collective which could have helped put his own story into words.
The words of these women, in truth, were extremely rare: historians estimate that the real testimonies can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And it is in this silence that the image of the shorn woman, supported by this emblematic visual by Robert Capa, was able to unfold, and blur the historical truth – to the point of nourishing long-standing artistic creation, as the recalls Fabrice Virgili:
“Shearing quickly became a punishment that posed a problem for liberated France. That is to say, in the weeks following the Liberation: voices were raised to say that it was not worthy of the Resistance, not worthy of liberated France. These voices are not unanimous but clearly demonstrate a problem since, obviously, mowing is not part of the French legal repertoire. there is no corporal punishment and shearing is never the result of judgment.
This malaise has existed since the Liberation, and took shape, in my opinion, at the end of the 1960s. For me, two or three works are its symbol. Firstly, Hiroshima mon amour, the film by Alain Resnais whose screenplay is by Marguerite Duras. It is a fiction, without a doubt, which tells the story of the future of a woman who was shorn during the Liberation in Nevers, and who meets a Japanese architect in Hiroshima. These are two figures of victims who are put into narrative and then into images. The second is the song La Tondue, by Georges Brassens which came out one or two years later: “The beauty who slept with the king of Prussia / Whose head was shorn rasibus”.
We can clearly see that we have a figure of the collaborator who is transforming into a victim. And these two images will, in my opinion, last until recently. As part of my research, I was also able to hear people who immediately reacted by saying: “It’s terrible!” et “terrible”, that could as well have been to have collaborated as to have been fleeced. And I believe that it is this very ambiguous status which is one of the reasons why these women all kept silent. The fact that it remains a very, very silent word perhaps explains the emergence of stories alongside them.”
The Great Crossings Listen later
Purification, a gendered story that fits together
Until 1999, the purge was never considered through the experience and trajectory of the female collaborators. Even the way in which they had been treated by public opinion and by the courts, which in the most confusing cases will hand down death sentences, was not an object of study. Like the women guards of concentration camps, on whom the very first doctoral theses have only just been devoted, or those who were, for example, involved in Action Française ( even more recently with researcher Camille Cléret), the great pioneer historian Françoise Thébaud, notes that those who had paid “wrong side of history” under the Occupation were simply not the subject of any research.
Originally, with others, CLIOthe journal of women’s and gender historythe academic will however raise to the very first summary of issue 1 two articles which will discuss women in collaboration: the entire issue (accessible online) was titled “Resistance and Liberation. France 1940 – 1945”. It was in 1995 and completely new: never before had we approached this story with such scientific ambition, which, however, carried many fantasies into the collective imagination. Women’s historians, who had pushed the boundaries of their discipline in the 1970s, had not yet taken an interest in it. And conducting research on shorn women, for example, as Fabrice Virgili did with a thesis that he defended in 1999, was largely iconoclastic. In 1995, we find his signature in this number 1 of CLIOwith an article on women’s bodies in purification (which can be read ici).
Almost thirty years later, Françoise Thébaud returns to the reasons for this late interest despite the chiaroscuro notoriety of “the shorn of Chartres” :
“In the 1970s, we first began by studying women at work and in their daily lives. Then when we were simultaneously interested in the commitment of women, it was first of all those who were committed to the cause of women, feminists, women’s rights activists. Later, but only at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, work began on resistance fighters. In 1993, Alain Brossat published a book on shorn women, subtitled “Un carnival moche”. And for a long time, the purge of women was seen as this “ugly carnival”: a somewhat bizarre event, but not analyzed in the light of motivations.
It was only at the end of the 1990s that Fabrice Virgili forged this hypothesis of considerable importance: to consider this shearing no longer only as a punishment of the order of letting off steam intended to take revenge on women accused of having had stories with Germans, but rather as a sexualized punishment against any form of collaboration. However, this punishment, which targeted female commitment to collaboration, was deployed precisely at the time when women were in the process of acquiring political rights at the Liberation, starting with that of being a voter and being eligible. At the time, too, when equality was included in the preamble to the Constitution.
Considering shorn women from the angle of an inequality fundamentally linked to the fact that they are women was a considerable novelty, whereas the pioneers of women’s or gender history had initially focused on positive figures.”
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