A Train in Winter (7 page)

A war of posters had been declared. For every message put up on the walls of Paris by resisters was to be seen a German counterpart, promising generous rewards to those who reported ‘paid agents of foreign powers’ and ‘hidden Jews’. On Christmas Eve 1940, Parisians woke to a message, in bold red and black letters in both French and German, telling of the execution of a 28-year-old engineer called Bonsergent, shot for jostling a German officer in the street. The posters were soon torn down, and the places where they had hung were marked by little bunches of flowers. Daily, it was becoming harder to feel high spirited about defying the Germans.

In this battle of words, the French right, supported and nurtured by Abetz, was coming into its own. Jean Paulhan, the former editor of the prestigious
Nouvelle Revue Française
, at the centre of the French literary world for over three decades, had departed (and gone to help the Underground press). His job had been given to the Germanophile Nietzschean Drieu la Rochelle, who vowed to put an end to its ‘Jewish and bellicose’ tone. A pro-Vichy former philosopher and politician called Marcel Déat was running
L’Oeuvre
, and the pro-Fascist Robert Brassilach was editing
Je Suis Partout:
both explored themes of decadence caused by Jews and Freemasons, and extolled the virility and adventurousness of the Nazis. Emerging from years of controversy, Jacques Doriot’s virulently anti-communist Parti Populaire Français, and Colonel François de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu were becoming popular with those young royalists and Catholics who liked these parties’ Hitlerian style.

For all this, the resisters were holding their own. The months of relative tranquillity had allowed the PCF to regroup and the Underground magazines to flourish. Georges Politzer, who declared that he would henceforth regard writers in occupied France as belonging either to ‘legal literature’ or to the ‘literature of treason’, was hard at work on a reply to a particularly hateful speech given in Paris by Alfred Rosenberg, author of some of the main Nazi ideological creeds, on the subject of race and blood.
L’Université Libre
, in the hands of the Politzers, Hélène and Jacques Solomon and Charlotte and her husband, was doing well.

The Musée de l’Homme had brought out the first number of its new paper,
Résistance
, in which its energetic young editor, the polar ethnographer Boris Vildé, wrote: ‘To resist, is already to preserve one’s heart and one’s brain. But above all, it must be to act, to do something concrete, to perform reasoned and useful actions.’ There was only one goal, Vildé declared, a goal to be shared by all resisters, regardless of their political beliefs, and that was to bring about the ‘rebirth of a pure and free France’. Here and there, as the freezing winter began to ease, the first acts of armed resistance, of the sabotage of trains and the blowing up of German depots, were being planned. What the occupiers most feared, the transformation of isolated and spontaneous gestures of rebellion into concerted acts of hostility, was just about to start. And in these, acting together or on their own, women of all ages and from all over France, such as Betty and Cécile, Charlotte, Hélène and Maï, generous-spirited and tough-minded, were about to play a crucial role.

Away from Paris, France itself was slowly turning into a police state, on the German model, a country of small internment camps, in Sarthe, Maine-et-Loire, Charente, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Loiret and Doubs, dirty, unheated, unhealthy places in which, in the extreme cold of 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. She was tall and somewhat overweight, and she liked to tease.

Arriving from Ajaccio to do her dental studies in Paris, Danielle became active in the various student associations. The Casanovas had no children and were ardent communists. Danielle had been to Moscow and returned more persuaded than ever of what communism might do for the impoverished French workers. In the evenings and at weekends, she wrote passionate articles calling on young women to rise up and engage in the great political debates of the day. She had no time for anyone who did not believe in absolute equality between men and women. She was, as Cécile would later say, as straight and honest as it was possible for a person to be.

The Jeunes Filles de France perfectly mirrored the healthy outdoor mood of the Front Populaire. When she found time, Danielle arranged to meet her friend Maï Politzer in a cafe and the two young women talked about how appalled they were by the squalor and poverty in which so many French working-class families lived. Sometimes they were joined by Marie-Claude, a handsome, strong-willed girl who had been married to Paul Vaillant-Couturier, editor of
L’Humanité
. Marie-Claude’s father was a well-known newspaper editor and publisher, and her mother wrote on fashion and cooking. Marie-Claude was a reporter and photojournalist herself, and in the 1930s
Vu
magazine had published a series of her photographs on Dachau, the first concentration camp opened by Hitler, not far from Munich. Paul, who was much older, had left his wife for her. He had died in 1937.

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, ‘Femme Tricanet’

In the offices of the JFdeF, near the Paris Opéra, where Danielle produced a newsletter calling on women to donate clothes and milk for Spanish war children, a team of similarly minded young women often gathered to talk. A few took evening classes in Russian. Though serious, they were not averse to having fun, and Danielle readily made people laugh. The fund-raising dances they gave proved very popular. By the outbreak of war, the JFdeF had over 20,000 members.

A gathering of the Jeunes Filles de France, shortly before the war

During the nine months of the phoney war, their torches dimmed by the blue paper used by French schoolchildren to cover their books, Danielle and her colleagues walked the streets writing messages about free speech and workers’ rights on the walls. The blackout was very helpful for this kind of clandestine work. When issues of the magazine she edited for the JFdeF were ready, she gave them to students and schoolchildren to distribute. Danielle was a natural organiser.

The arrival of the Germans only served to spur her on to greater efforts. Everything in her revolted at the thought of occupation. Within hours she had prudently cleared her offices of all incriminating papers. During the long hot summer of 1940, Danielle and the other members of the JFdeF went bicycling in the forests around Paris, and after playing games of volleyball sat in the grass talking about what they could do to make the lives of the Germans harder. Some of the young men who went with them grew moustaches to make themselves look older; the girls took to wearing dark glasses. They were outraged when a friend reported that he had seen a poster in the local swimming pool with the words: ‘No Negroes, Jews or dogs’.

In the autumn, when the schools and universities reopened, the members of the JFdeF volunteered to distribute the Underground copies of
L’Humanité
. There were angry scenes when parents discovered stashes of the paper hidden away in their daughters’ bedrooms. Maroussia Naitchenko, who as a 14-year-old helped out in the offices by the Opéra, would later write that it sometimes seemed as if all these young people were ‘playing at games of cops and robbers’.

Pétain’s view of women as ideologically and politically inferior beings made Danielle’s recruits extremely angry. Soon hundreds of new members were willingly tramping the streets of Paris with flyers in their rucksacks and, for a while at least, they were seldom stopped, neither the Gestapo nor the French police quite believing that such cheerful, healthy girls could have anything to do with the Resistance. As Danielle said, flirting a little with the Germans could yield excellent results. She was exceptionally good at inspiring others, making people feel that there was really no choice but to help.

It was when rationing started to bite into the lives of families that older women began to join her ranks in a new organisation, L’Union des Femmes Françaises. Watching the queues outside food shops grow ever longer, Danielle saw just how the women’s discontent could effectively be harnessed to the cause. Astutely playing on their sympathies for hungry children, she persuaded some of them to contribute articles to her own clandestine paper—
La Voix des Femmes
—as well as to other women’s magazines not banned by the Germans.