Female flesh and the boundaries of the French nation : a theoretical intervention into recent historiography of the "tondues"

Rare indeed is the historian of twentieth-century Europe who has not beheld Robert Capa's August 1944 photograph of the woman, with child in arms, her head shaved, pursued by a jeering mob of voyeurs of all genders and ages through the streets of Chartres. Indeed photographs of the "tondues" (women spontaneously accused of collaboration with the Germans in the aftermath of the Vichy regime) have become perhaps the most common, certainly the most striking visual representation of the painful trauma of collaboration and retribution in French post-war historical memory. Scholarly study of the tondues, and of the overlapping phenomenon of sexual collaborators, emerged from the beginning of the 1990s, in the wave of historiographical confrontation with the Vichy-past that followed Henry Rousso's 1987 publication Le Syndrome de Vichy. Since this time the tendency for the tondues to occupy only momentary consideration in histories of collaboration and retribution has been substantially remedied by numerous researchers who have been captivated by this mysterious and morally confusing phenomenon. Alain Brossat's 1992 poetically reflective study, followed by Fabrice Virgili's 2000 publication, La France "virile": des femmes tondues a la liberation, have undoubtedly contributed most substantially to detailed and subtle understanding of the "shearing" of women accused of collaboration in the chaotic months during and after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the subsequent collapse of the French collaborationist regime of Petain. The purpose then of my own intervention into the historiography of the tondues is in part to engender greater discussion of this question among English speaking European historians, but also to suggest that scholarly understanding of the tondues, both in French and in English, could be further developed through intersection with the parallel field of gender and sexuality studies relative to Nazi race ideology. Essentially I propose that a sexualised reading of both these phenomena suggest that the persistently rival visions of nationhood in France and Germany from the time of the Franco-Prussian war can be identified through the mutually inter-referential anxieties about masculinity expressed in events such as the shearing of women during the Liberation of France, and such as the fear of racial contamination through sexual contact with foreigners in National Socialist ideology. With this hypothesis in mind, a study of the language used to describe both the fondues and sexual collaborators reveals the theoretical possibility that the body of the fondue functioned as the metaphoric site upon which the national humiliation of France in the Second World War was rectified and avenged in relation to the perception of the German nation as a symbol of penetration and sexual domination.