Piaf, like Chanel, has been the subject of numerous films, plays and biographies, and in both cases their tangled lives remain mysterious. Neither was wholly bad nor wholly good, and both made accommodations with the truth. Their lives reflect the duality of Picasso’s Minotaur, that mythical half-man, half-beast so important to his art, symbolizing the humanity and bestiality of much human behaviour. Yet there is an unyielding fascination with these two Parisiennes, and there have been regular attempts to uncover the truth about whose side they were really on during the war. (Their own, of course.) Artistic and sexual collusion has always received more attention than economic collaboration; women who performed on stage to a German audience were highly visible and therefore an easy target, while economic collaboration is harder to prove. No postwar government wanted to destroy the seeds of its own recovery with potentially dangerous consequences by punishing those responsible. In the course of researching this book I have interviewed descendants of those whose Jewish or part-Jewish families were probably saved because they owned construction companies or because they manufactured wire products, including barbed wire – activities critical to the Germans. But why talk about what at the time was necessary to preserve lives, however unsavoury the behaviour may seem today? Better to keep silent.
By contrast, there has been a prolonged and inequitable silence in France about the role of so many ordinary women who in some way resisted the occupiers – like the young woman who, persuaded by her Catholic priest, cycled around Paris distributing anti-German newsletters, or tractes as she calls them, an activity for which she could have been imprisoned if caught, yet which was important in persuading others in Paris that they were not alone in opposing the Occupation. Her work was significant enough for her to have preserved these tractes for seventy years and now, in her nineties, she shows me these fragile documents on fading brown paper. They are called Témoignage Chrétien.* The ones I see declare that ‘France disarmed is momentarily reduced to powerlessness but will not consent to let herself remain like that, to deny her traditions, her hope, her honour and her soul.’ They offer a spiritual and patriotic form of resistance against Hitlerism. Yet the woman who risked her life to deliver these asks me not to mention her name.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Oh well, what I did was nothing,’ she shrugs.
The full names of many other noble French concierges who sent police away knowing there were Jews, resisters or evaders hiding in their buildings will never be known to history. One such was Nana, the brave former concierge who during the Occupation also ran a little shop behind whose displays of soap dozens of wanted men and women hid. Nana tried to do the impossible, and with the help of a chaplain, some nuns and one or other of her ‘old aunts’ or ‘cousins’ promised to get parcels to imprisoned resisters like André Amar, husband of Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar. At least posterity knows of her existence.
Only in May 2015, seventy years after the end of the war, were two of the best-known female résistantes, Geneviève de Gaulle and Germaine Tillion, friends since Ravensbrück, honoured at a ceremony in France’s hallowed Panthéon, a secular mausoleum for the great with its famous inscription to the nation’s exemplary men: ‘AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE’. In fact the coffins of the two women were buried with only earth taken from their graves but without their remains which, according to family wishes, were to stay undisturbed. In 1964 President de Gaulle, back in office, had arranged for the transfer there of the remains of Jean Moulin, the resistance hero and his own personal emissary who was tortured and murdered by the Nazis in 1943. But until May 2015 the only woman there in her own right was the scientist, Marie Curie.
When President Hollande announced that he was planning a major ceremony to commemorate De Gaulle and Tillion entering the Panthéon (two men, Jean Zay and Pierre Brossolette, were also being honoured), the story made headline news because the function of women in the resistance has never been fully acknowledged. It was a far greater role than the one they were allowed in society at the time. After the war, many women were both self-effacing, insisting that they did little more than ‘simply’ deliver newsletters or act as couriers, and keen to get on with their normal lives – an attitude given official sanction by French authorities – or else concerned to protect children by shielding them from the harsh realities of the Occupation and war. In addition, it was harder for women to prove that they had actually been ‘combatants’ handling weapons. Only six women (four of them posthumously) were awarded the title Compagnons de la Libération by de Gaulle between 1940 and 1946, out of a total of 1,038,* and just 1,090 women received the Médaille de la Résistance (a lesser honour) out of 48,000 awarded in total between 1943 and 1947. But now, with the admission to the august Panthéon of de Gaulle and Tillion, the traditional understanding of how women resisted the German occupiers is being dramatically challenged.