Gender and national identity in Vichy France
traumatic than the loss of an actual breast’ (Freedman, 1994). Head shaving was an act of psychological warfare. The act of shaving the women was a total reconquest of their sexuality and body, which they had ‘given up’ to the Nazis in the eyes of the French vigilantes. Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that approximately 40% of women who were shaved actually slept with Nazis, and the majority were merely under suspicion or had helped Nazis by giving them food, for example. Even among those who did sleep with the Nazis, Virgili divides them into 3 distinct groups: genuine collaborators, women in love, and women left to themselves. Genuine collaborators were those who slept with Nazis for personal gain, and these women would by most accounts be seen as having done wrong. Women in love often had true and meaningful relationships with their German counterparts, and they were part of the group that created the 200,000 children born of French mothers and Nazi fathers. Women left to themselves were the most innocent of the three, having slept with Germans out of necessity, to feed themselves and their families, and for money in the case of many prostitutes. After the German invasion, the number of prostitutes in Paris was measured as 6 times higher than prior to the war. Often these women were raped or coerced and yet were seen as the same as those who had actively collaborated with the enemy and paid the price for it. This is indicative of a French society that was deeply unequal, as women were only valued for their sexuality, and so sleeping with the enemy was seen as the ultimate crime they could commit. Their ultimate punishment was being stripping completely of their sexuality. Horizontal collaboration during the time of Vichy France grants unparalleled insights into the monumental effects of the Nazi invasion on all sectors of French society. Faced with the intense guilt of the ‘Vichy Syndrome’, many French people needed to reignite their national pride. This had suffered during the Vichy era as Nazi groups such as the ERR plundered significant amounts of culture from the country which so valued it, particularly from Jewish homes and organizations. Many French people saw the only way to move on from the horrific crimes of the Nazis in their country and clear their consciences of their complicity in these crimes was to punish the remaining collaborators, among them, the horizontal collaborators. This took the form of the shaving of 20,000 heads, granting them the name ‘femmes tondues’ with some being smeared with tar and then subsequently feathered and paraded naked in town squares. This shaving was a brutal act which symbolized many things about French society in the wake of the liberation. The act of shaving was seen as a means of cleansing society of its Nazi crimes, as well as being a total stripping of the woman's sexuality, and in doing so reducing their worth to just their sexuality. Moreover, the vulnerability of the horizontal collaborators made them perfect scapegoats for the French public, who could punish them as a way of convincing themselves to believe they had not been complicit in the crimes of the Nazis under the Vichy government, namely, the deportation of Jews to death camps. However, in attempting to reclaim their identity by punishing the female scapegoat, the horizontal collaborator, the French resistance and vigilantes mirrored the crimes of their invaders. Bibliography Cavanaugh, R. (2017) Mata Hari’s True Story Remains a Mystery 100 Years After Her Death. [online] TIME. Available at: https://time.com/4977634/mata-hari-true-history/. [Accessed 31 Aug. 2025] Clark, C. (2016) ‘ Capturing the Moment, Picturing History: Photographs of the Liberation of Paris’ , The American Historical Review 121.3: 824–860. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/43954966
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