Résistantes & tondues : le destin tragique des femmes à la Libération

Elles ont été résistantes, messagères, agentes de liaison. D’autres ont été tondues en place publique, accusées — parfois à tort — de collaboration avec l’ennemi.

Dans cette vidéo, on revient sur le destin brisé de milliers de femmes françaises à la Libération. Entre héroïsme effacé et vengeance spectaculaire, découvrez la vérité sur une période que l’histoire officielle a longtemps voulu oublier.

👉 Une histoire à la fois bouleversante et dérangeante.

#Résistance #FemmesTondues #Libération1944 #HistoireDeFrance #WWII #FemmesEnGuerre #Histoire #Occupation #France1944

CHAPITRES:

00:00 Vivre sous l’Occupation – Le quotidien féminin bouleversé
07:21 Le rôle économique des femmes sous l’Occupation
13:54 Résister sous l’Occupation – Femmes dans l’ombre et le feu
19:53 Collaborer : Entre opportunisme, idéologie et survie
25:41 Les femmes tondues et la justice expéditive (1944–1945)
31:34 Mémoire, silence et reconnaissance (1944–aujourd’hui)

SOURCES

Fabrice Virgili : La France « virile » : Des femmes tondues à la Libération
📚 Éditions Payot

Françoise Thébaud : Les femmes au temps de la guerre de 1939-1945
📚 Éditions Perrin

Claire Andrieu : Les femmes dans la Résistance
📚 Éditions Cnrs

MUSIQUE :

Zr30 Polydori’s vampyre victorian dark horror

Music: High Alert by Soundridemusic
Link to Video:    • Epic Military War NoCopyright background music / High Alert by Soundridemusic

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June 1940. In six weeks, France was defeated. The German army swept in, and the Wehrmacht entered Paris on June 14. The French government requested an armistice, which was signed on June 22. The country was divided: to the north and west, the occupied zone; to the south, the “free zone,” administered by the Vichy regime, led by Marshal Pétain. A demarcation line separated the two halves. But this “freedom” was illusory: the free zone remained under indirect control of Nazi Germany until its complete occupation in November 1942. From the first days of the Occupation, a major transformation shook homes: the absence of men. Nearly 1.8 million French soldiers were prisoners in Germany, in Stalags and Oflags. Many others were dead, wounded, or missing. In every family, a father, a son, a husband was missing. The burden of daily life fell on women, who were now on the front lines. Women became managers of the shortage. Rationing was introduced in 1940: food stamps, family records, queues. Everything was counted: bread, meat, coffee, sugar, soap, coal. Basic products were often replaced by substitutes: coffee was made with barley, margarine replaced butter. Vegetable “steaks,” sometimes called economy steaks, vegetable pancakes, or meatless steaks, were made in certain areas hardest hit by the restrictions. They were made from grated vegetables (carrot, turnip, potato), bran, flour, leftover bread, or even curdled milk, and bound with eggs or starch. But access to these ingredients was still required… Women got up at dawn in the hope of a liter of milk or a few eggs. In Paris in 1941, a mother was trampled to death in a bakery queue, according to a police report. In the countryside, women replaced men in the fields. They took up the plow, tended the animals, and managed the sowing. But they faced difficulties: a lack of fertilizer, worn tools, and the requisition of horses and tractors by the Germans. Rural women nevertheless managed to keep farms afloat and supplied the cities through informal barter networks. A 1942 survey by the Vichy Ministry of Agricultural Production acknowledged that 70% of small farms were run by women. In the cities, inventiveness was a daily occurrence. Older people’s clothes were cut up to dress their children, stockings were mended with black thread, and soap was made at home. A testimony preserved in the Lyon archives recounts that a mother regularly traded salt for carrots, and a pair of spun stockings for a little pork fat. In the occupied zone, the German presence was constant. Soldiers in the streets, Nazi flags on public buildings, propaganda posters, checks, raids. A curfew was imposed from the start, often starting at 9 p.m. Women had to adapt their movements, avoid patrols, and avoid suspicion. A simple conversation in a market could earn a denunciation. Danger was everywhere, but invisible. Children were ordered to remain silent and not say anything outside. Some women sheltered a Jewish relative, others hid a radio in a cupboard or forged ration tickets. In Sèvres, near Paris, Yvonne Hagnauer, a future resistance fighter, protected several Jewish children at her school. In Paris, women were arrested for hiding Allied airmen killed during bombing raids. The women wait for news of their loved ones. The prisoners’ letters arrive in dribs and drabs, but are tightly controlled and subject to double censorship, German for sending, French for receiving. They are often limited in word count, sometimes to a maximum of 25 words, and must avoid any overly explicit political, military, or emotional content. Thus, stereotypical phrases such as: “I’m fine, I hope everyone is in good health” are extremely common, as prisoners repeat them to avoid censorship, or simply to be able to write. something. Some women no longer receive anything. Absence becomes the norm. Childbirth often occurs without a doctor, with a neighbor or an aunt. Medicines are in short supply. Hospitals are overwhelmed. A report by a social worker in Bordeaux in 1943 mentions a dramatic case: a mother had buried her child in the garden, for lack of a coffin and authorization. Women silence their pain, move forward, torn between necessity and fatigue. The Vichy regime imposes a reactionary ideology. Marshal Pétain, in his radio broadcasts, exalts the woman as mother, wife, and housewife. He proclaims that “women must stay at home” and prohibits married women from working in the civil service, by the law of October 11, 1940. Domestic science education becomes mandatory for young girls. They are taught to sew, cook, and manage a budget. But reality belies the propaganda: women work. They became mail carriers, teachers, town hall employees, tram drivers, or held administrative positions. In businesses, they replaced men who had been mobilized or imprisoned. In Marseille, in 1942, more than 40% of SNCF workshop staff were women, according to statistics from the Ministry of Labor. In the French colonial empire, situations were diverse. In North Africa, European women continued to hold positions in hospitals, schools, and administration. After Operation Torch in November 1942, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia gradually came under the control of the French Committee of National Liberation, leading to increased participation by women, particularly in health services and civilian support units. In Indochina, women lived under the dual domination of French colonial power and, from 1940, Japanese pressure. Shortages were extreme; in 1945, the great Tonkin famine killed nearly a million people. Survivor testimonies collected by historian Philippe Papin describe women reduced to eating bark, clay, or roots. In the West Indies, the Vichy regime remained in place until 1943, under the authoritarian authority of Admiral Robert. Women ensured daily survival in a context of severe rationing, maritime isolation, and censorship. Some became involved in dissidence: they supported the men fleeing the island to join the Free French Forces via Saint Lucia or Dominica. The role of these women remains little known, but was essential. Prefectural reports, diaries, and letters from resistance fighters preserved in the departmental archives speak of icy water for washing clothes, emaciated children, and sleepless nights. They also evoke daily stubbornness: continuing school even without chalk, maintaining meals even without butter, and celebrating a birthday with a boiled potato instead of a cake. The Economic Role of Women under the Occupation
In the aftermath of the French surrender, approximately 1.8 million French men were prisoners of war in Germany, and the country’s economy was in disarray. The burden fell on women’s shoulders , in a world where female labor was still perceived as secondary, even temporary. In industrial zones, the requisition of factories for the German war effort redefined the organization of work. In Boulogne-Billancourt, the Renault factory was placed under German supervision in 1940. The manufacturer now produced trucks for the Wehrmacht. The female workforce, already present before the war, became the majority. The workers were assigned to riveting, assembly, or finishing tasks. They wore cotton smocks, their hair covered by scarves, and worked under the supervision of French foremen and sometimes German engineers present in the workshop. An administrative report written in 1943 in the Paris region noted that without women’s labor, mechanical production would have been seriously compromised. Conditions were harsh. The days were long, breaks rare, and heating often absent. The workers suffered from exhaustion, solvent poisoning, and cuts. to the machines. A letter seized by the censors in 1942 mentions a worker describing her cracked hands, her arms covered in bruises, and her determination to continue despite the fatigue. Wages, already low, remained much lower than those of men before the war. In town halls, prefectures, and benefit offices, women ensured the continuity of services. In Clermont-Ferrand, for example, the administrative staff of the town hall was composed of 72% women in 1943, according to municipal records. They issued ration cards, recorded supply requests, sorted mail, and organized ticket distribution. In post offices, ticket clerks and telephone operators became indispensable, especially with the instability of telephone lines and postal interruptions . In 1941, the PTT recorded a significant increase in the number of women, particularly in the sorting centers of Lyon and Marseille. For many families, letters remained the only connection with the prisoners. Female teachers were central to maintaining education, especially in small towns. With male teachers mobilized or imprisoned, primary schools became almost exclusively female spaces. Teaching was constrained by censorship and Pétainist ideology. In textbooks published between 1941 and 1943, Marshal Pétain’s portrait appeared on the front page. Entire chapters were devoted to morality, order, and obedience. In Moulins, a school inspector reported in 1942 that certain reading books had been withdrawn because they evoked the French Revolution as progress. In their place, the history of Joan of Arc or pious peasants was taught, with a traditionalist vision. The teacher, often isolated in a multi-grade classroom, attempted to convey the essentials without betraying her conscience. Nurses were the pillars of a healthcare system weakened by shortages of medicines, equipment, and doctors. In civilian hospitals such as the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyon, they provided care to those wounded by Allied bombing raids, those suffering from typhus, and malnourished children. The Croix-Rousse Hospital, also in Lyon, saw its female staff double between 1940 and 1944. Some women, untrained but volunteers, were recruited as auxiliaries for the Red Cross or the National Defense. In territories still under Vichy control until 1943, such as Madagascar and the West Indies, resources were more limited, but caregiving remained an invisible and exhausting female task. Despite the official glorification of housewives, the Vichy regime relied heavily on women to run its institutions. Some were secretaries in prefectures, typists in ministerial offices, switchboard operators in police stations, or telegraph operators in propaganda offices. In some cases, their work contributed to administrative collaboration. At the Bordeaux prefecture, for example, women classified the Jewish census files in 1941, without always understanding the consequences. An anonymous testimony collected after the war reports the words of a typist: “I type files every day. I don’t know what we do with them. I prefer not to ask questions.” In the countryside, women carried out agricultural work alone. According to a study by the Ministry of Agriculture published in 1943, more than 60% of farms of less than 10 hectares were run exclusively by women. They plowed, harvested, cared for animals, repaired tools, all while taking care of the children and the home. The food requisitions imposed by Vichy forced them to deliver quantities of cereals, milk, or eggs. Gendarmes came to check the stocks. In Limoges, in 1942, a woman was sentenced for hiding chickens to avoid their confiscation. In Corsica, occupied by the Italian army between November 1942 and September 1943, women faced a tense situation. The fascist authorities requisitioned food and monitored movements. In certain towns like Vico or Zicavo, Women participate in forms of passive resistance: refusal to obey, clandestine mutual aid, support for hounded families. Local accounts speak of women who hid STO draft dodgers or members of the Corsican Resistance. Women’s work during the Occupation was essential: it supported transportation, education, healthcare, administration, and agriculture. Yet it remained poorly paid, invisible, and considered temporary. In 1941, a circular from the Ministry of Labor stipulated that “the return to male employment remains a desirable objective after the war.” After the Liberation, millions of women were indeed dismissed or forced into the home. But it was they who, for four years, kept occupied France functioning. This was not social progress, nor a feminist revolution. It was a concrete response to an emergency situation, a collective effort for survival, without which nothing would have held. Resisting under the Occupation – Women in the Shadow and the Fire
Resist. In occupied France, this word takes on a thousand faces. It doesn’t always mean sabotaging a railway or shooting an officer. It often means secretly listening to Radio London, copying an address onto a tiny piece of paper, hiding a package without knowing its contents. It means sheltering a stranger, crossing the street to avoid a patrol, slipping a leaflet into a raincoat pocket. For women, resistance means this: modest but vital gestures, often invisible, always risky. Without these gestures, the internal Resistance would have faltered. As early as 1940, women joined forces. Odette Sansom, an agent of the British Special Operations Executive, parachuted into France, organized liaisons and transported coded messages. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, head of the Alliance intelligence network, was one of the few women to lead a national network, under the code name “Hérisson.” In the cities, thousands of anonymous people joined informal groups: Combat, Libération, Franc-Tireur, or the French Forces of the Interior. Many became liaison agents, a vital role. They carried messages, weapons, and instructions. By bicycle, on foot, or by train, armed with false papers, they evaded control. In Paris, Hélène Viannay, wife of Philippe Viannay, contributed to the logistics of the clandestine newspaper Défense de la France, printed in tens of thousands of copies weekly. Leaflets were distributed in stairwells, train stations, and markets. Women provided shelter. In Grenoble, Marie Reynoard, a teacher, hid Jewish children and sheltered resistance fighters. She was arrested in 1944 and deported to Ravensbrück, where she died. In Lyon, Élise Garel, a member of the OSE, organized the exfiltration of children to Switzerland. She carried false papers and letters under her coat. In Paris, Suzanne Spaak, a Belgian resistance fighter active in rescuing Jewish children, printed forged documents in her apartment. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and executed in Fresnes in the summer of 1944. Some women fought. Danielle Casanova, a communist resistance fighter and founder of the Union of Young Girls of France, participated in organizing sabotage before being arrested, deported to Auschwitz, and dying of typhus in 1943. In the Vercors and Ain resistance groups, women served as lookouts, liaisons, and logistical support. Jeanne Bohec, a chemist trained in London and parachuted into Brittany in 1944, taught the use of explosives to FTP groups. From 1944 onward, some were incorporated into the French Forces of the Interior, particularly in the liberated regions. They learned to shoot, transmit orders, and monitor roads. Their effectiveness is often recognized on the ground, even if they are sometimes kept away from direct combat. Women operate in mixed networks, but also in specific channels. In Clermont-Ferrand, nuns organize rescue networks for Jewish children. The Service André network, born from the PTT, includes many telegraph operators and postal employees. In the MOI network, the Immigrant Workforce, women of foreign origin play a key role. Olga Bancic, a Romanian Jewish worker and member of the Manouchian group, participated in arms transports. She was arrested and executed in Stuttgart on May 10, 1944, the only woman in the group sentenced to death. Lucie Aubrac, a history professor in Lyon, organized the escape of her husband Raymond, arrested by Klaus Barbie in 1943. She played a leading role in the Libération-Sud movement. Germaine Tillion, an ethnologist, founded a prisoner support network in the Paris region before being arrested and deported to Ravensbrück. Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, the general’s niece, a member of the Resistance in Rennes, was arrested in 1943 and survived in the same camp. For every known name, there are thousands of invisible women, never decorated, sometimes never even identified. Seamstresses, nurses, housewives, nuns. Their actions did not always leave a trace, but they were decisive. To be captured was to risk torture, imprisonment, and deportation. At Ravensbrück, a Nazi camp reserved for women, more than 6,000 French women were deported for acts of resistance. Many died there of hunger, beatings, or in the gas chambers. Charlotte Delbo was imprisoned there in 1943. She survived and testified: “We didn’t say a word, but in our eyes, France was there. ” Women suffered the same abuse as men, sometimes more so: humiliating searches, sexual threats, and blackmail of children. At Fresnes, Fort Romainville, and La Santé prison, they were interrogated harshly. Some, like Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, were deported to Auschwitz and then Ravensbrück. She later testified at the Nuremberg trials. After the Liberation, the Resistance was glorified, but largely in the masculine. Only six women were made Companions of the Liberation out of 1,038 decorated: Berty Albrecht, Marie Hackin, Marcelle Henry, Simone Michel-Lévy, Émilienne Moreau, and Denise Vernay. Most female resistance fighters received neither recognition nor pensions. Beginning in the 1970s, historians such as Françoise Thébaud, Christine Bard, and Fabrice Virgili initiated a reinterpretation of women’s participation in the Resistance. Their work reveals what official history had long ignored: women organized, transmitted, cared for, fought, and saved. Without them, the French Resistance could not have held out. Their courage was neither incidental nor secondary. It was central. Collaboration: Between Opportunism, Ideology, and Survival Under the Occupation, not all women resisted. Some collaborated. Others accommodated. And in this fractured France, subjected to the German occupier and the Vichy regime, forms of female collaboration multiplied. Sometimes discreet, sometimes overt, they took root in cities, the countryside, government offices, and homes. Some women actively engaged in the regime’s structures. The French Militia, founded by Joseph Darnand in January 1943, included several women among its ranks, employed as secretaries, typists, or liaison officers. In Nice and Clermont-Ferrand, other women in militia uniform accompanied roundups or supervised arrests. Their presence was attested to in the purge trials, even if it was later downplayed. Some collaborated out of ideological conviction, others out of ambition or to preserve a job. In Vichy, the regime mobilized an image of the faithful, pious, submissive woman, in the service of the French state. Women’s movements such as Entraide or the social work of the Chantiers de la jeunesse féminine welcomed female volunteers, committed to spreading the values ​​of “work, family, and homeland.” Propaganda also spread through voices. At Radio-Paris, controlled by the occupier, several French female presenters read propaganda bulletins and broadcast columns written by the German services or the Vichy authorities. Some did so out of commitment, others simply to continue working. Propaganda, in its female form, sometimes softened the message, but did not make it less toxic. In the written press, articles by women were numerous. Magazines like La Gerbe or Le Petit Parisien published columns on the return to motherhood, the need for order, and republican decadence. They contained calls to support the French state and to denounce the “ lost femininity” of the 1930s. These texts did not involve direct violence, but they constructed an imaginary sense of support through words, values, and the language of home and morality. In offices, collaboration was more discreet, but just as structured. Thousands of women were employed in the food supply departments, prefectures, and town halls. They recorded, filed, and summoned people. In Bordeaux, in 1941, civilian employees participated in the logistical management of the Jewish census, at the request of Prefect Maurice Sabatier. In other cities, they handled the distribution of food cards, summonses to the STO, and official correspondence. It wasn’t always a political choice. It was a job. A function. But their work facilitated the implementation of the collaboration policy. Other women engaged in forms of proximity with the occupier. They were called “soldiers’ wives.” From 1940 onward, hotels, villas, and apartments were requisitioned to house German troops. In Paris, Caen, Nancy, Lille, and Rennes, these places became spaces where glances met. Women worked there as linen maids, chambermaids, and cooks. Some formed relationships. These liaisons took a thousand forms: romantic, self-serving, forced, ambiguous. In Nantes, several police reports after the war documented cohabitations between young French women and German officers. Sometimes with the tacit consent of their families. It wasn’t always a matter of strategy or betrayal. There were feelings. A twenty-year-old soldier, who read Baudelaire and played the piano, could seduce. He was far from home. So was she. Couples formed in squares, on benches, in hotels. People talked. We laugh. We forget. Children are born. There will be around 200,000 of them, born to French mothers and German fathers, according to civil registry services. A significant portion of the post-war demographic. But very often, the relationship is a form of exchange. Soap, white bread, a cigarette, a heated room. Survival sometimes involves a bed, or at least the illusion of connection. Some obtain a job, protection, a pass. Others settle into a relationship of convenience. Seamstresses, hairdressers, shopkeepers adapt to the German clientele. They avoid touchy subjects. They speak broken German. They arrange schedules. It’s not ideology. It’s an adjustment. There are also women who denounce. Anonymously, by handwritten letter, by phone, or by slipping a few words into the police station. In Paris, the archives of the police headquarters contain hundreds of letters sent between 1942 and 1944. A neighbor reports another for “having sheltered a Jew.” A concierge indicates that such-and-such a resident listens to “English radio.” A shopkeeper suspects a customer of hiding weapons. It’s difficult to know if it was fear, jealousy, revenge, or conviction. But these letters sometimes sealed arrests. Female collaboration is disturbing. Because it escapes heroic schemas. Because it disrupts the image of the resistant, silent, tortured woman. Because it shows that, like men, some women joined. Or believed they did. By choice, by instinct, by fatigue. At the Liberation, more than 20,000 women were reportedly shaved in public, often for having loved. Sometimes for having lived. Few of them would be tried for administrative or ideological collaboration. Their actions, however, existed. They were part of everyday life. And they remained off-screen for a long time. Probably because they disturbed the legend. Shaved women and summary justice (1944–1945)
When France was liberated in the summer of 1944, the towns regained control of their territory one by one. The maquis emerged, the resistance fighters appeared in broad daylight, the Allied troops entered the towns. But behind the flags and the songs, Another form of violence emerges, more confused, more intimate: that of savage purges. It follows neither laws nor regulations. It is brutal, immediate, irreversible. And among its first targets are women. They are arrested in the street, denounced in neighborhoods, sometimes forcibly removed from their homes. They are accused of having collaborated. Often, this means having slept with a German. Nothing is proven, rarely verified. Rumor is enough. A glance, a supposed affair, a dress seen on a balcony. Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it’s not. It doesn’t matter. The punishment is the same. The scene is repeated in dozens of cities. A woman is dragged into a square, pushed onto a chair, held down by two men. A hairdresser or a civilian militiaman approaches with scissors, then clippers. Her head is shaved, raw, without mercy. Sometimes a swastika is drawn on her head. Sometimes, they smeared tar on her face, beat her, and ripped off her clothes. They paraded her through the streets. The crowd surrounded her. Some laughed. Others screamed. Children followed the procession. A photograph was taken. It made the rounds of the newspapers. In Paris, Chartres, Tulle, Marseille, in small rural communities as well as in industrial cities, almost identical scenes were documented. In Angoulême, in August 1944, a dozen women had their heads shaved in front of the train station. In Quimper, Brittany, a young girl was paraded through the streets in a torn dress. In Montluçon, a hotel employee had her hair shaved on her doorstep, while neighbors insulted her. In Saint-Étienne, a laundress was beaten before even being tried. It wasn’t political collaboration that was being punished here. It was something else. What was being punished was behavior. A closeness. A real or supposed intimacy with the enemy. A symbolic attack on the national body. In these punishments, the sexual dimension is central. Actions are not judged: gender is punished. The woman is perceived as a traitor not because she allegedly betrayed military secrets, but because she allegedly betrayed the French bed. This savage purge, widely tolerated in the first weeks, escapes any supervision. It is carried out by impromptu resistance fighters, zealous neighbors, members of reconfigured militias, sometimes even by former collaborators eager to redeem themselves. It takes the appearance of popular justice, but it responds to logics of revenge, domination, and humiliation. It does not produce trials. It produces spectacles. In many cases, no evidence is provided. Some women did indeed maintain relationships with German soldiers. Others merely rented them a room or served them in a cafe. Some were coerced. Others acted out of love, self-interest, or fear. No distinction was made. In the crowd, no one asked. This was not the time for justice. It was the time for punishment. Alongside this extrajudicial violence, a judicial purge was organized. The Provisional Government, led by de Gaulle, wanted to regain control. Special tribunals were established. Courts of justice, civic chambers, and popular juries judged the most serious cases. Collaborators were charged, sentenced to prison, civic degradation, and sometimes death. Approximately 1,500 women were imprisoned for collaboration. About fifty were executed. Most of them for denouncing resistance fighters or for playing an active role in the repression. But these cases remained in the minority. The contrast was clear between the massive and anarchic street violence and the harshness of the courts. And above all, it was glaring between the treatment reserved for women and that reserved for men. Former militiamen, whistleblowers, traffickers, and collaborationist journalists often benefit from a trial. They are judged for what they said or did. Women, on the other hand, are judged on what they represented. This disproportion reveals a deeply gendered logic. Whereas men The collaborator is a political adversary, the female collaborator is a moral transgressor. One is the enemy. The other, shame. The punishment then becomes corporal, visible, irreversible. The shaved head exposes the fault. It makes the punishment public, prolonged, embodied. It humiliates over time. Photographs taken at this time always show the same scene: a woman in the center, her head bare, her face impassive or in tears, surrounded by a crowd of laughing men, screaming women, curious children. These photos, circulated in the press or preserved in archives, have become symbols of the brutal purge. But they say nothing of what these women felt, what they experienced, or what they had actually done. In the months that followed, some of these women would try to rebuild their lives. Some would disappear, change cities, names, and lives. Others would carry this inflicted mark throughout their entire lives. A few will take steps to have the abuse recognized. The majority will remain silent. Official history, too, will say little about these episodes. Because they are disturbing. Because they blur the line between justice and revenge. Because they say something uncomfortable about a society emerging from the war, wounded, confused, and eager to restore order through women’s bodies. Memory, Silence, and Recognition (1944–present)
The war has fallen silent. The guns have fallen, the tanks have left the cities, the enemy uniforms have faded. It is time for reconstruction, mourning, and memory. But in the narratives that are forged since the Liberation, not everyone is given equal voice. Very quickly, an official history takes hold, linear, refined, heroic. The Resistance becomes the founding myth of a nation that is recovering. A story of men, leaders, weapons, and moral victories. Women occupy a secondary place. Present, but rarely mentioned. Active, but rarely honored. Invisible, or almost. Women resistance fighters are not denied. But they are relegated to the shadow of male figures. Lucie Aubrac becomes “Raymond’s wife,” Marie-Madeleine Fourcade “the only female network leader”—an exception that proves the rule. Their commitment is valued, but as an ancillary. In the first commemorative ceremonies, they are rarely featured on the platforms. In school textbooks of the 1950s, their presence is marginal. We speak of “women from the rear,” “courageous mothers,” “caregivers,” rarely of agents, saboteurs, or forgers. Yet they transported weapons, sheltered resistance fighters, wrote leaflets, organized escapes. They were imprisoned, tortured, deported. But their heroism doesn’t fit with the image that people then want to project of French women: silent, dignified, housewives. This silence isn’t just political. It’s also intimate. Many women resistance fighters don’t speak out. They resume their lives, their work, their roles as wives or mothers. They don’t write their memoirs. They aren’t invited to testify. And when they do, it’s late, in the 1970s or 1980s, often at the request of historians, sometimes under pressure from family memory. This discrepancy is not insignificant. It reflects a hierarchy of narratives. The history of the war was written from the front, not from the rear. Collaborators, on the other hand, are given no space to speak. Whether their actions were political, emotional, or forced, their words are stifled. Out of fear, shame, or because no one wants to hear them. Their image is fixed: that of women with their heads shaved, humiliated, spectacular. They embody the fault, not the context. History classifies them without nuance, without possible memory. In the first decades after the war, people preferred to forget. Women victims, for their part, were notably absent. Those who suffered the Occupation in their flesh, in their bodies, in their daily lives, rarely find their place. The rapes, the exiles, the deprivations, the deportations are not integrated into the collective memory. Deported Jewish women are commemorated for their Jewishness, not for their gender. Widows, grieving mothers, and hidden children are treated as collective figures, never individual. Their suffering is diluted within the broader suffering of the wounded nation. It wasn’t until the 1990s that a change began. Historians finally took an interest in women’s experiences during the Occupation. Not to construct a counter-myth, but to restore these figures’ complexity. Their multiple roles are explored: resistance fighters, yes, but also informants, secretaries, ticket clerks, cooks. Collaborators, sometimes, but according to degrees, contexts, and constraints. Victims, often, but without passivity or simplification. War became a gendered space, where power relations, constraints, and commitment took different forms depending on gender. The first explicit mentions of this in school curricula appeared at the end of the 20th century. We now talk about the women of the Resistance, we question the memory of women who had their heads shaved, we highlight the ambiguities. Excerpts from testimonies are read in class. Biographies are beginning to be published. The transmission of knowledge is becoming more feminine. In museums, a few temporary exhibitions, often on the fringes of major institutions, attempt to give a face to these long-erased figures. In Caen, Lyon, and Paris, archival documents are being highlighted: letters from prisoners, photographs of resistance fighters, everyday objects. But space remains limited. In the scenography of memorials, the female presence remains a minority, often symbolic. In documentaries, the first women’s voices appear late. Some speak for the first time on camera, old, fragile, but precise. They recount the risks, the silences, the misunderstandings. They correct men’s accounts, not to contradict them, but to complete them. Even today, the memory of women under the Occupation remains incomplete. It is progressing and expanding, yet it continues to encounter stubborn representations or hasty judgments that put aside the complexity of these years of occupation…