Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [43]
The revival of public dancing was short-lived. At the end of October the provisional government banned it again, this time in response to a press campaign claiming that too many families were in mourning to permit such levity. On 16 January, cabarets and nightclubs were also closed.
The Syndicat des Artistes Musiciens de Paris denounced the measure as ‘a prudery out of touch with the virility demanded by the war’. Dancing, they argued, had never been forbidden in London throughout the Blitz or the VI rocket attacks, because the authorities realized how important it was for morale. Dance halls used less electricity, because their customers did not like too much brightness, and gaiety must be kept up in the capital: ‘Afin que PARIS reste PARIS!’ But protests were in vain. Dancing in public places was not permitted again until April 1945, just before the German surrender, and even then organizations representing deportees and prisoners of war objected.
Many of the most expensive nightclubs ignored the January ban, but they received a shock the night after it came into effect. The police raided six establishments and took a total of 300 customers off to unheated cells in police stations. One of the clubs targeted was the Monseigneur. Those unfortunate enough to have picked Wednesday, 17 January, to begin their romance got off to a chilly start.
8
The Épuration Sauvage
Whenever the Allies liberated a town or village during the advance across northern France, they often found that the first victims of what became known as the épuration sauvage – the unofficial purge – were the most vulnerable members of the community. ‘At Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte yesterday,’ David Bruce wrote in his diary, ‘the inhabitants had shaved the heads of twelve women who had been sleeping with German officers and soldiers. They must henceforth slink about the village. The Frenchmen with us think it is a very fitting and salutary punishment.’ Six weeks later, he discovered that a production line for head-shaving had been established in the Prefecture at Chartres as soon as the last Germans had been rounded up.
Among the accused were married women whose husbands were in Germany as prisoners or conscripts of the STO (Service de Travail Obligatoire). With as many men imprisoned or enslaved in this war as there were dead in the last, there was hardly a family which was not missing a father, son or brother. This collective loss had developed a strong emotional solidarity among those left behind, so any wife of a prisoner or deportee accused of ‘collaboration horizontale’ was guilty of a double betrayal. The fact that sleeping with a German might have been the only way for a woman to keep her children from starvation was scarcely considered when the communal fury was unleashed.
Some women were subject to even greater degradation. There are photographs of women stripped naked, tarred with swastikas, forced to give Nazi salutes, then paraded in the streets to be abused, with their illegitimate child in their arms. There are also reports in some areas of women tortured, even killed, during these barbaric rites. In the 18th arrondissement, a working-class area, a prostitute who had served German clients was kicked to death. Victims were not just working-class women. Pastor Boegner recorded the shaving of women’s heads in the 7th arrondissement, and there were a few cases of women of fashion receiving similar treatment, including the wife of one prince, and the daughter of another – Jacqueline de Broglie, whose mother was Daisy Fellowes, and whose Austrian husband, Alfred Kraus, had been accused of betraying members of the Resistance.
Head-shaving is said to have been inflicted on a well-known French count who had fallen for the martial attractions