Les Parisiennes: how the women of Paris lived, loved and died in the 1940s
ANNE SEBBA
The history of France in the 1940s was a mix of heroism, shame and moral paradox, and so a rich source for authors and historians. In 1940 the Germans invaded France and, after a short blitzkrieg, occupied Paris. The deputies in the National Assembly who had fled to Bordeaux turned for the nation’s salvation to the hero of Verdun, Marshal Philippe Pétain. Pétain negotiated an armistice and, with Pierre Laval as his Prime Minister, governed an unoccupied zone from the spa town of Vichy.
Paris remained in the hands of the Germans, and at first the Wehrmacht behaved well: Gita Sereny, then a teenage nurse, recalled how “German soldiers invariably stepped aside politely in the street or in the Métro for us in our nursing uniforms” – which was “more than any Frenchman ever did”.
This was not to last. After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1942, the French Communists joined the fledgling and hitherto non-violent Resistance and assassinated German soldiers in the streets of Paris. Savage reprisals followed.
