Third Year Hon. Mention: France’s femmes tondues: Punishment, Participation, and Liberation

HIST 3844, Liberation, Violence, and Reconstruction: A History of the Second World War and its Aftermath, 1944-1949. Course Director: Deb Neill

Abstract

In “France’s femmes tondues: Punishment, Participation, and Liberation,” the author shines a light on a specific aspect of post WWII internal retribution measures taken by allied European countries, particularly France, to punish women for “supposed ‘horizontal collaboration’ with occupying Germans.” Through careful analysis of an impressive array of relevant primary and secondary sources, the narrative demonstrates how the shaving of a woman’s head, an apparently simple, non-violent form of punishment, is, in fact, a particularly complex, brutal, gender-based assertion of both nationalistic and patriarchal power. Demonstrating how documentary images and footage of these events reinforce women’s “collective rather than individual responsibility” for collaboration and a need to “wipe the slate clean” by eliminating the “French identity” of these women - embodied in their hair, a traditional signifier of French female beauty – the author argues that that the tontes were a means of excluding these women from post-war French society, thus cleansing it of any associations with the German occupation. As a convenient target to revenge the loss of life and loved ones resulting from the war, these women served as symbols of the now absent enemy, allowing French society to “reconstitute itself as a coherent whole, as a Resistant whole, morally and politically virtuous.” By thoroughly examining the varied nuances of the tontes as a socio-political event that contributed to the “reassertion of male control” and renewed sense of national identity, this paper reminds us of the attractions - and dangers – of the tendency to scapegoat particular groups to serve the national interest – a lesson we should all take to heart in these difficult and divided times.