De Gaulle gave a thousand medals to resistance heroes – but only six were women. The Parisiennes who survived told Anne Sebba why history forgot them

The myth of the French Resistance goes something like this. French men, except for a “miserable fistful”, all resisted. French women, on the other hand, let the side down. Expecting monsters, many girls succumbed to the charm of the Nazis – who exercised bare-chested, “like Lohengrin”, as one Parisian teenager wrote in her diary. Historians estimate that between 80,000 to 100,000 Franco-German babies were born during the war.

In 1945, France purged its uneasy feelings about the Occupation in general by making scapegoats of these collaborateurs horizontales. With shaven heads, they were forced to parade semi-naked, admitting their sin.

There were other totemic sacrifices. The Wagnerian soprano Germaine Lubin, Hitler’s favourite, who had sung to German audiences at Bayreuth and the Paris Opera, was imprisoned for three years for “national indignity”. She found herself “on an immense material and moral garbage heap… among odious people, nauseating smells, coffee tasting like soup from the night before”.

But other women, faced with the German occupiers, chose different, riskier paths. Vivou Chevrillon, a young music student, went to play her violin outside the walls of the Nazi concentration camp at Compiègne, hoping that her friend inside would recognise the tune and take heart. She came close to being arrested. Later, she forged ID cards. Jeanne Bucher, the avant garde Parisian galleriste, dared to show Kandinsky and other despised – often Jewish – abstract artists. German soldiers often visited to poke fun at the works (and sometimes to buy them, all the same). Once, exasperated, Bucher tore down and stamped on a photograph of a statue by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favourite sculptor, shouting: “That’s German art, so look what I do to it.”