A shaved young woman, branded with a hot iron on her forehead, hugs an infant, jeered by a crowd surrounding her. Taken by Robert Capa in the streets of Chartres on August 16, 1944, the photo, published in the American magazine Life and soon taken over at will, has gone around the world. Emblematic image of this savage purge which taints the ideal of justice proclaimed loud and clear, this violence done to the body of women, often accused of having slept with Germans.
Deciphering what is at stake in the image as much as what Simone Touseau, the young mother, embodies, the documentary by Patrick Cabouat and Gérald Massé has a double merit. First tell how the vision of this collective violence of a cruel exemplarity was fixed, then evoke a singular destiny more original than the allegory that was made of it. An exemplary lesson that will earn them the prize for filming at the Luchon Television Creation Festival in 2019.
Engaged following the 7th Armored Division to ensure the communication of the heroic gesture of the US Army liberating France, the photographer Capa spots in the streets of Chartres, still disputed between groups of resistance fighters and occupying forces, this young an isolated woman who must be reunited with other culprits. He follows her, takes the lead in the sinister procession which is gradually growing and chooses the framing which makes Simone a Virgin and Child promised to Calvary. That would suffice to say the collective violence and the intimate drama.
Sectarian Catholicism and Swastikas
But since the work of Fabrice Virgili (La France “virile”. Des femmes tundues à la Liberation, Payot, 2004), Luc Capdevila and a few others, the real situation of these hated women has become clearer and the singular destinies taken away from them. common places. Starting with that of Simone Touseau, precisely. After a thorough investigation, Philippe Frétigné and Gérard Leray gave the young woman her true face in La Tondue, 1944-1947 (Vendémiaire, 2011).
Simone grew up in an environment of small conservative traders, with sectarian Catholicism, she drew swastikas on her notebooks in 1939, soon worked for the Germans as an interpreter and joined the French People’s Party of Jacques Doriot. She falls in love with a cultured soldier of the Wehrmacht, the siege of Stalingrad tears him away from her and she gives birth in the hospital, her father refusing her the family roof.
When Chartres is liberated, Simone embodies these particular collaborators. But, soon, he is also accused of having denounced neighbors who ended up in deportation. Even cleared by justice, which is slow to decide to extinguish hatred, she cannot recover from this media ostracism, and twice will see her new life ruined by the memory of the old one…
