Among the many remarkable portraits of famous French women displayed on the photograph pages of Anne Sebba’s Les Parisiennes are two that stand out: Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel and Geneviève de Gaulle.

Both these women’s faces are defiant, but in very different ways. Chanel stands in her lavish suite of rooms in the Ritz, where she lived throughout the war, seeming to challenge anyone who questioned her right to a stylish life, even under Nazi occupation and even if it meant conducting an affair with “Spatz”, a well-heeled German officer, Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage.

Geneviève de Gaulle’s defiance, written across her worn and earnest face, is of someone who refused to accept any form of collaboration with the enemy. De Gaulle, niece of Charles de Gaulle, and arrested for working on an underground anti-Nazi newspaper in Paris, was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, from where she was lucky to return alive.

These two opposing stories illustrate the central theme of the book: why did some Parisians collaborate during the war, and why did some resist? How did they make their choice?The debate over the extent of collaboration versus the extent of resistance during the Nazi occupation is not new, but Sebba has found an enthralling way of looking at the story by focusing on how the choice was made by French women, and, in particular, by the women of Paris.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest German soldiers with Parisian women, 1942. Photograph: Roger-Viollet/Rex/Shutterstock

When the German army entered Paris in 1940 if was, for many Parisians, “a relief” – they had feared terrible oppression but at first found German soldiers to be “well-dressed, amiable and often French-speaking”. For their part, the Germans relished being posted to Paris; buying lavish goods, enjoying French opera and exploiting the “sickeningly friendly” local population, who, according to a senior German officer, were “positively queuing up to get a German soldier into bed”.

So unprepared had France been for defeat that resistance had had no time to organise in these early days and those who did want to act against the Nazis didn’t know how. Moreover, Paris was a city that had been significantly “feminised” – many of its menfolk captured or killed at the front, so women often found themselves facing the occupier alone, able to rationalise the need to do deals in return for favours, the release of a husband or father in jail, for example.

Many female resisters were arrested and thousands ended their lives in concentration camps

At the same time, those Parisians who lived for the city’s glamour and style insisted the show must go on – telling themselves perhaps that maintaining a way of life was itself a form of resistance, even though they knew full well that they could only party at the Germans’ behest.

By 1941, with anti-Jewish propaganda intensifying in readiness for the expulsions, the abhorrent character of the occupation was becoming clear. Yet even then, as Sebba recounts in stupefying detail, many of the actresses, opera singers and cabaret artistes continued to perform before packed audiences of German officers, many even taking up Goebbels’ offer to visit Germany on propaganda tours, even as the first Jewish roundups were under way.

There were, however, many other women who by now were reacting to the German occupation very differently and the main interest in the book focuses on the personalities of those who began to say no. The true extent of resistance among women will never be known but is certainly far larger than has ever been recognised; after the war most never talked about what they’d done to resist – either because nobody asked women, whose contribution was deemed uninteresting, or because those who had not resisted didn’t want to know the stories of those who had. Moreover,, as recounted here, many female resisters were arrested and thousands ended their lives in concentration camps. As many as 10,000 French women were imprisoned in the camp for women, Ravensbrück. The stories of these returnees were, by and large, ignored too.

Sebba’s narrative is increasingly driven by her search for an explanation as to why some of these women chose to risk their lives and resist when they, like so many fellow Parisennes, could have saved their skins. What made a young lawyer, Denise du Fournier, give up her refuge in Portugal and return to Paris early in the war to join the Comet escape line, helping to hide shot-down allied airmen? What made Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian-born Parisian and a pacifist, volunteer to work behind Nazi lines for the British Special Operations Executive?

And what made Jeannie Rousseau, a brilliant young linguist, hired as an interpreter by German military chiefs, pass on everything she heard to British intelligence? After her capture, Rousseau even launched a protest against making arms while held in Ravensbrück. Rousseau’s own explanation for her particular defiance came in her last years, when she put it like this: “You can refuse what is happening or you can go along with it. I was in the refusal camp.”

And perhaps the answer is as simple as that – which is why, in the end, Sebba doesn’t offer an explanation as to why some women chose one course, others another, rightly letting their actions, compelling life stories – and the physiognomy of the wonderful selection of photographs – speak for themselves.

And yet I have a quibble. In her final sentence, Sebba says of Parisians’ behaviour. “It is not for the rest of us to judge but, with imagination, we can try to understand.” She is right to emphasise that understanding is needed, especially by those who never had to choose. But surely a judgment can and should be made that those who were in the “refusal camp” – as Rousseau put it – must take a higher moral ground than those who “went along with it”. Not to make a judgment is surely to fail to recognise the refuseniks’ special courage.





Les Parisiennes is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20). Click here to buy it for £16.40