Horizontal collaboration and attitudes towards gender and national identity in Vichy France
Brodie B
After the liberation of France, Charles de Gaulle returned to Paris, and on the 26 August 1944 he proclaimed to the French public that they had done well, ‘liberated themselves’ with only a little help, apart from a small minority of ‘misérables’. Among these ‘misérables’ were the horizontal collaborators, otherwise known as the ‘femmes tondues’ or shorn women. They were French women who, upon the Nazi occupation, slept with German soldiers for several reasons, including coercion, love, and less frequently, greed. The relations between these ‘Nazi prostitutes’ and their German counterparts resulted in the birth of 200,000 children, who were then branded as ‘German bastards’ by French society, resulting in a generational identity crisis which caused many of these children to seek dual Franco-German citizenship. French war and gender historian Fabrice Vergili described this generation as being ‘naître ennemi’ or ‘born an enemy’. This essay discusses the reasons for which these women were treated with such brutality after the liberation, including the national sense of shame following the original surrender, the necessity for a scapegoat and finally the deeply rooted sexism and inequality in 1940s France. Firstly, one could argue that the severe treatment of the horizontal collaborators was a late bid to reignite national identity following the country's 4-year humiliation during the Vichy France era. The French surrender resulted in a wave of guilt and anger across the country, known as ‘Vichy syndrome’. This concept was reignited in Henry Rousso’s and Eric Conan’s 1994 work ‘Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas’ (‘Vichy, an ever-present past’). This discussed the ‘obsessional’ guilt around not just the French surrender but rather France's toleration of the Nazi genocide against the Jews. This guilt was preceded by initial shame among the French population who had not only lost their land but a great magnitude of their cultural heritage. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) was the Nazi special force tasked with the plunder of valuable art in occupied Nazi territory. This force operated the ‘Moebel Aktion’ in early 1942 to seize all furniture from the homes of Jews who had fled or been deported. Despite the fact that this organization targeted all occupied territories, France naturally suffered the most, having been an international artistic centre in the interwar period. An estimated 100,000 works of art and between 5 and 10 million books were taken, with large amounts stolen from private Jewish organizations, as well as from masonic lodges. French people believed that the country had betrayed itself, and the only means to regain their national pride would be to cleanse the country of its Nazi sin, which took the form of punishing the collaborators. In the case of the horizontal collaborators, an estimated 20,000 heads were shaved, an act of physical cleansing to rid the country of their wrongdoing. Many of the most violent vigilantes who took this justice into their own hands were in fact collaborators themselves, seeking to overcompensate for their own treachery and defer blame by shunning their female counterparts. Moreover, some women were treated more harshly and paraded through the streets naked, smeared with tar and feathers and, in the most severe cases, killed. The brutal treatment of these women who were often forced into relationships with German officers is
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