Revisiting the “Shorn Woman” Trope: Exploring the Untold Stories of Collaboration during Liberation

The Libé of Historians

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Libé des historiansdossierThe use in a novel of the famous figure, immortalized by Robert Capa at the Liberation, maintains the cliché of sexual collaboration, forgetting the very different situations of these women.

On the occasion of the “Rendez-vous de l’histoire”, which are held in Blois from October 4 to 8, the editorial staff of Libération invites around thirty historians to take a different look at current events. Find this special issue on newsstands Thursday October 5 and all the articles from this edition in this file.

Violette Leduc, Régine Desforges, Robert Sabatier, Romain Gary, Henning Mankell, Philippe Jaenada and I forget a few… Since the 1950s, the character of “la tondue” has experienced multiple romantic evocations. I always considered that one had every degree in art. A fiction is a fiction and the novelist has all the freedom, including that of confusing invention and reality. So why take up the pen about the novel by Julie Héraclès published at the end of August, You know nothing about me, which very freely retraces the journey of Simone Touseau (renamed here Simone Grivise), the “shorn of Chartres” immortalized by a famous photo by Robert Capa? To avoid the cliché prevailing over the event, let fiction make history.

In the very first pages of my thesis defended in 1999, I wrote: “The uniform image of the “shorn” constituted a screen behind which the facts remained hidden. […] The-young-girl-shorn-by-the-crowd-for-sleeping-with-a-German is just one case among others

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