Gender and national identity in Vichy France
indicative of a French society in the midst of an identity crisis, with the act of cleansing the country of her traitors seen as the only possible means of going on with life without the ‘Vichy syndrome’ that was haunting them.
Secondly, one could point to the necessity of a scapegoat for the horrific crimes of Vichy France so as to explain the horrific treatment of the ‘Nazi prostitutes’ during the ‘épuration sauvage’ (‘the wild purge’): in many cases, to act as scapegoats was seen as the most useful role for the ‘femmes tondues’. The 40 million French people with no links to the resistance movement could not all be condemned for their compliance in the horrors of the Vichy government, so the 20,000 mostly young women who were alleged to have slept with Nazi officers were seen as having committed a deeper moral betrayal than standard collaborators owing to the surrender of their feminine virtue. As such, they were a much more fitting group to be accused of treason. This enabled the French public to both clear themselves of guilt but also physically punish the women who had slept, and thereby collaborated, with the enemy. This was of particular importance given the prior French surrender, in which the majority of the French public has not fought against the invading enemy; now they could blame 20,000 vulnerable women who could neither protest their innocence nor physically defend themselves. The ‘femmes tondues’ now became an outlet for the French public to convince themselves that they had in fact not been complicit in the crimes of the Nazis during the time of Vichy, and were proving that now, after the country was liberated, they would humiliate and punish those who had tolerated and aided these Nazi crimes. Ironically, the very act of shaving the head was used by the Nazis against the Jews in order to dehumanize them upon arrival in concentration camps. This proves that, in trying to clear themselves of all involvement with the Nazi crimes against humanity, the French mirrored Nazi acts. This is also clear in the treatment of the ‘Nazi prostitutes’, as the French public felt humiliated by their inability to prevent the Nazi invasion. France needed a common enemy after its liberation in order to feel as if they had in fact done something against the horrors of the Vichy government, and of the collaborators, the ‘femmes tondues’ were the best fitting scapegoat due to their vulnerability that was their gender. Deeply rooted sexism during wartime France is another reason for the brutal treatment of the horizontal collaborators: the methods used to punish these women and the severity of their ‘justice’ were more extreme than the treatment of male collaborators. Horizontal collaboration – sleeping with Nazi officers – was seen as a particularly decadent crime, and was differentiated from other forms of collaboration in that it was seen as a total surrender of feminine virtue. It was seen as being unfaithful to your nation, not just a particular individual. Virgili argues that the bodies of these women were seen as a contamination site, and their crimes were seen as a moral violation as opposed to a political one. These women had been ‘infected’ by the crimes of the Nazi invaders and were no longer French. This becomes clearer during the ‘épuration sauvage’ when the heads of the women were shaved. Not only was this cleansing them of their Nazi past; it was ridding them of their sexuality, reducing these women again to just their bodies. Hair was seen as ‘an intrinsic marker of human identification’ (Deslandes): without hair, these women were nothing. This weaponization of hair is thousands of years old, with the ancient Greeks and Romans shaving the heads of their slaves because an exposed scalp was seen as a ‘sign of degradation’ (Giacometti, 1967). Women who undergo chemotherapy describe hair loss as being the most devastating effect, describing it as ‘more
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