Speaking Through the Body

DE LA DOULEUR À L’IVRESSE: VISIONS OF WAR AND RESISTANCE Corina Dueñas A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (French). Chapel Hill 2007 Approved by: Advisor: Dominique Fisher Reader: Martine Antle Reader: Hassan Melehy Reader: José M. Polo de Bernabé Reader: Donald Reid © 2007 Corina Dueñas ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT CORINA DUEÑAS: De la douleur à l’ivresse: Visions of War and Resistance (Under the direction of Dominique Fisher) This dissertation explores the notion of gendered resistance acts and writing through close readings of the personal narratives of three French women who experienced life in France during the Second World War. The works of Claire Chevrillon (Code Name Christiane Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance), Marguerite Duras (La Douleur), and Lucie Aubrac (Ils partiront dans l’ivresse) challenge traditional definitions of resistance, as well as the notion that war, resistance and the writing of such can be systematically categorized according to the male/female dichotomy. These authors depict the day-to-day struggle of ordinary people caught in war, their daily resistance, and their ordinary as well as extraordinary heroism. In doing so, they debunk the stereotypes of war, resistance and heroism that are based on traditional military models of masculinity. Their narratives offer a more comprehensive view of wartime France than was previously depicted by Charles de Gaulle and post-war historians, thereby adding to the present debate of what constitutes history and historiography. Recent critical works on women and the Second World War have done much to document women’s resistance. Yet, these studies tend to highlight the distinctly feminine nature of women’s wartime resistance and narratives, ultimately reinforcing the established dichotomies based on gender difference. This dissertation suggests that women’s wartime narratives do not necessarily point to a feminization of war, resistance, history, and writing, iii but rather, to a more personalized representation of historical events based on individual experience, but which is still part of the historical discourse. iv To the memory of Lucie Aubrac 1912 – 2007 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my appreciation to my dissertation advisor, Dominique Fisher, for her guidance and patience. I would also like to thank my committee members, Martine Antle, Hassan Melehy, José M. Polo de Bernabé, and Donald Reid, for their thoughful comments and support. My heartfelt appreciation also goes out to the many friends, family members, and colleagues who offered their practical assistance and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Lucie Aubrac for inspiring this project and for the time that she shared with me. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: STYLES OF RESISTANCE/STYLUS OF RESISTANCE: WOMEN’S WARTIME ACTIVITY AND WRITING .........................13 CHAPTER 2: CLAIRE CHEVRILLON: AN ORDINARY RESISTANCE ................81 CHAPTER 3: MARGUERITE DURAS: WRITING THE WAR’S INHUMANITY.142 CHAPTER 4: CETTE EXIGEANTE HUMANITÉ DE LUCIE AUBRAC ...............188 CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................................238 APPENDIX.....................................................................................................................244 BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................249 vii INTRODUCTION The silence of the sea. A silence that hides something, a silence charged with an undisclosed intensity; an energy in reserve awaiting release, wanting to surface. (Brown and Stokes 26) Such was the silence of women in the historiography of the Second World War and the Resistance. It seems that with the men having left them out of the official history of the War and Resistance, women initially contributed to their own self-effacement from this period through their silence. But what was this silence hiding, to borrow from Brown and Stoke’s introduction to Vercor’s Le silence de la mer? Women’s post-war silence was hiding the immense and intense participation of women in the French Resistance. The three female authors in this study, Claire Chevrillon, Marguerite Duras, and Lucie Aubrac all participated in the Resistance in different capacities and from different locations.1 Each woman had her own timeline, means and motivations for joining an organized resistance movement; yet each one also resisted individually in non-conventional ways that did not conform to the standard rules of warfare which were originally dictated by men’s military model. In his clandestine novella, through his young female character’s silence towards the German soldier whom she is forced to lodge, Vercors acknowledged the power of women to resist, and that the slightest refusal to accept the Occupation constituted resistance. Yet, traditional definitions of resistance failed to see these individual acts. Only those actions 1 See the Appendix for a brief biographical overview of the authors. carried out through an organized group were counted. This is ironic since, at first, resistance was not organized, but rather, individual, subtle, and spontaneous. Established definitions were also limited to leadership roles and armed combat—actions such as fighting with the maquis or sabotage.2 Regarding female participation, the official history of the Resistance only recognized the few women who stood out in these male-dominated areas of leadership and the battlefield: women such as Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who took over the Alliance Network when its leader was arrested, and Berty Albrecht,3 head of Combat’s Social Services and assistant to the movement’s leader, Henri Frenay. Lucie Aubrac is another such women occasionally mentioned in post-war history, since she distinguished herself in terms of action and received military recognition that men understood as resistance. But in reality, the Occupation brought the Second World War to people’s doorsteps and into their homes. While WWI was fought from real trenches on a battlefield, there was no trench warfare during WWII, since actual fighting was brief. The war, then, was the Occupation, which pitted the German soldier against the common person in the streets of France. The “trenches” were everywhere, every day, all day long. Today, to be “in the trenches” means to be at work in the daily grind of everyday life. This daily resistance, depicted by many female authors in their personal narratives, has, until recently, been overlooked by historians. In the nineteenth century, historiography adhered strictly to academic or archival history. Over time, it moved towards the acceptance of other forms of historical documentation from more personal sources. During the nineteenth century, history was 2 The maquis were the militant resistance groups that set up camp in the mountains. They were largely made up of young men who, after November 1942, opted to join these fighter groups instead of being deported to Germany as forced laborers under the STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire) (Paxton 292-3). 3 References can be found under the following variations of the spelling of her first name: Berty, Berthy, Bertie and Berthie. I will use the first spelling, which is the one used by her daughter, Mireille Albrecht, in the 1986 biography titled Berty. 2 dominated by the scientific approach, “a methodology stressing a disembodied, well-trained observer, and a set of practices scrutinizing state documents” (Smith 197). Historiography rooted in archival research was considered an objective, fact-based dissection of documents concerning only the political events of nations. Adhering to Hegel’s theories of rationality, it was not to be influenced by ideologies stemming from social factors such as gender, race, or religion.4 In the first half of the twentieth century, historians such as Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Paul Lacombe and Henri Berr began to open up to other disciplines such as geography, economics, and sociology. These historians no longer focused on isolated events, but rather saw them in relation to other disciplines: “Henri Berr proposed a new kind of history, one based on the extra effort of generalizing or synthesizing. The historian had to integrate sociology, psychology, and economics, and even see himself as an artist as well as a scientist” (Smith 218). This evolution gave female historians, such as the American Lucy Maynard Salmon, the opportunity to assert themselves in the field. Until then, their work had been marginalized as superficial for its context of social, domestic, and women’s issues.5 Since the Second World War, historiography has continued in its transformation towards an interdisciplinary, contextualized field. This shift has coincided with a growing interest in related fields such as social history, cultural history and women’s history. Historians, and especially women’s historians such as Joan W. Scott, Hanna Diamond, Sarah Fishman, and Dominique Veillon understand that history does not occur as isolated events, 4 In Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, Jean-François Lyotard argues that Hegelian rational thought collapsed with Auschwitz. Ever since this senseless event, the modern

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