Robert Capa's photo, and its subject, became a symbol. But the history is more complicated.
 | By Louise Loftus Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
After the liberation of France in World War II, many women accused of "horizontal collaboration" with the occupiers — in other words, sleeping with German soldiers — had their heads shaved as a form of public shaming. One of those women, Simone Touseau, was captured by the war photographer Robert Capa in an image that would become infamous. In it, a young, shorn Touseau clutches an infant in the middle of a crowded street in Chartres. Some of the people around her appear to be jeering her; others just stare. |
 | | Robert Capa's indelible photo, from 1944. Simone Touseau had had a child with a German soldier.Robert Capa/International Center of Photography, via Magnum Photos |
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For a long time, Capa's image was understood as a document of an iniquitous and gendered punishment. And many of the women who were shaved were unfairly singled out — often by newly minted members of the Resistance. But the truth about Touseau was more complicated, as Valentine Faure writes in a guest essay. |
Touseau "scribbled swastikas in the pages of notebooks she kept as early as the mid-1930s, admired National Socialism and claimed that France 'needs someone like Hitler,'" Faure writes. Fluent in German, she worked as a translator for the occupiers. She joined an ultranationalist political party. She was accused of denouncing four neighbors who were sent to a concentration camp, two of whom never returned. |
When I read Faure's initial email with her idea for the essay, the first thing I did — of course — was Google the photo. The clearly suffering figure in the center of the crowd immediately evoked my sympathy. Could she have been misunderstood? A victim of circumstances? |
But Faure, who interviewed one of the historians who helped uncover the facts of Touseau's life, makes a case for sitting with the complex portrait of a committed political collaborator. |
"Women collaborated out of cowardice, self-interest and a whole range of ideological fervor," she writes. "A reality we should contemplate frankly if we're to have a proper accounting of the history of the war in France." |
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