Who Was the Real ‘Shaved Woman of Chartres’?

[Tennesseer]

Inteeresting article. The article was published by the New York Times. It may be behind a paywall for those reading this. If it is behind a paywall, message me and I will reply with the complete article.

Who Was the Real ‘Shaved Woman of Chartres’?
by Valentine Faure
Ms. Faure is a contributing writer to Le Monde. She wrote from Paris.



In August 1944, in a city near Paris, Robert Capa took a photograph of a woman cradling a baby in the middle of a jeering crowd, her head shaved and her forehead marked with a swastika.

The woman, Simone Touseau, would become infamous — first as a symbol of the brutality of post-occupation France and later, through painstaking scholarship, as an example of the Nazi sympathies among some of the French during World War II.

A novel released in France this summer has reinvented her once again, this time as a woman scorned. It’s a reinvention that is a disservice to the complicated truth about Ms. Touseau and her and other Frenchwomen’s deliberate collaboration with the Nazis. Women collaborated out of cowardice, self-interest and a whole range of ideological fervor. A reality we should contemplate frankly if we’re to have a proper accounting of the history of the war in France.

The photograph, “The Shaved Woman of Chartres,” with the young Ms. Touseau at its center, was understood for a long time as a document of the brutal purges that took place during the liberation of France at the end of World War II. Extrajudicial punishments were carried out all over the country, including shaving the heads of women suspected of sleeping with the enemy.

The truth was more complex. Historians were slow to take an interest in the wartime collaboration and resistance of women, but in the early 2000s, a groundbreaking work by Fabrice Virgili described how many women who were shaved in the purges were being punished not for their intimate relationships with Germans but for denunciations or working for the Germans.

Rest of article here: Who Was the Real ‘Shaved Woman of Chartres’?

[djAdvocate]

if any of you don't know Capa and his story, you should check out this documentary. fascinating.

www.icp.org/browse/archive/collections/the-mexican-suitcase

[haapai]

She almost certainly was not Grivise.  Grivise is a weird invention.