Apart from a wedding dress, I haven't owned or worn a skirt since the late 1980s, and believe it or not, the [French] law against women wearing trousers, never enforceable since its introduction in 1800, was not finally rescinded until February 2013, after 213 years. So until that date, every day of every time I visited France, four times from 2001 to 2013, I was breaking the law. Who knew? Certainly not me.

I learned about this absurd law from reading Anne Sebba's comprehensive survey of Parisian life during the Occupation, Les Parisiennes, How the Women of Paris, Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s. In the chapter called 'Paris Divided' I learned that the Vichy regime had adopted German notions about the role of women, because they believed that moral collapse was at the heart of the French defeat.

The chapter begins with the 1941 counsel of Léontine Zanta, an intellectual who in 1914 was the first French woman to receive a doctorate in philosophy. Here she is, reminding her students that it was their patriotic duty to marry, make babies and feel fulfilled in the home.

Let our young female intellectuals understand this and loyally examine their conscience. I believe that many of them, if they are sincere and loyal... will admit that... if they didn't marry since they had not found a husband to their taste or because they were horrified by household work, which means that the poor things, in their blindness or their obliviousness, did not see that this was merely selfishness, culpable individualism, and that it was this sickness that was killing France. Today we need to accept this challenge and look life squarely in the face with the pure eyes and direct gaze of our Maid of Lorraine: it is up to you, as it was up to her more than five centuries ago, to save France. (p.73)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/04/08/les-parisiennes-by-anne-sebba-and-how-lisa-b... ( )

This covers two topics I am acutely interested in- WW II and France. Yet, for all of that, at times it was a bit of a slog. Why? Too many stories, too many characters and no real through line at the outset. The focus is on a number of Parisian women, mostly famous or well-known or well connected, but others not so much, who attempt to survive the occupation of Paris and German reprisals for any and everything. Some were real collaborators, some were social compatriots of the Germans, some were members of the resistance. Mostly, the comfortable and rich were not members of the resistance, but some were. Before the war, many rich French families were intermarriages of the aristocracy and the Jewish artistic and intellectual community. Their differing responses to the German threat was both compelling and heartbreaking. I liked that the focus was on the women, many of whom consorted with the enemy to feed their children; gave their children away to protect them; learned to lie and kill to resist and aid the allies. On the other hand, others (the rich) just wanted to keep on with their previous lifestyles. The problem is the book seems all threads, jumping between characters, place, events and this was frustrating. Too late, I discovered the name reference in the back of the book! Duh. It helps. ( )

I received this book from a friend, another history buff, who said, "I hope you like it. I didn't." I loved it.

So, before writing this review, I also read the several reviews written by others. To be entirely frank, I sometimes wonder if people truly understand how history can be written in many ways. I ~loved~ this book for precisely the reasons others rated it with fewer stars. I blanched at the three star ratings, but my mouth dropped open with the rating of two stars (was the book even read?).

This book may well be--no, it IS--one of the best written histories of WW2 civilians in my reading experience, if only because it is written in the oft-choppy, always frustrating, chaotic genre of war itself. Although broadly chronological, it sometimes does not read that way. You plunge into the story of a beautiful lady, but are suddenly thrust into the story of a less than beautiful one. I got the feeling Anne Sebba realized how arcane would appear the stories of women who were, well, just women; and so, she seems to have used examples of many, whose names might just be recognized. Yet, the stories of the rich and famous were also the stories of the simple and unsophisticated. It was chaos for all and just like war, you hide behind a wall to avoid the sniper's eye, only to be thrust into the mortar blast which blows out the wall 30 yards behind you; you cannot help but glance back, then back again to insure the wall of your refuge still stands, and then to look to the safety of your children or the one special object you have preserved against the destruction. It is chaos here; destruction there; carnage everywhere.

You see, the stories are told in the same abrupt ways in which life was encountered in wartime Paris, or as the title page sub-title states, "How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation." They lived; sometimes just barely. They loved; sometimes messily but more often, bitterly and at a distance. And, they died...always messily; rarely quickly and with antiseptic cleanliness. Sometimes I found myself putting down the book to let the helter-skelterness (if that's not a word, it should be) of the wartime experience sink in; betimes also, with a tear welling in the eyes

Some reviewers seem frustrated in their reading of the tome, but the contradictions which are inherent in wartime survival were well-written by Anne Sebba to show the confusion, inequity, injustice, and raging chaos. Concerning the women of Paris, almost universally perceived in the world as scions of fashion and modernity, it cannot be told in a different way. Indeed, there's just no other way to accurately tell the broad story of wartime survival--or death--in Paris, especially with such a clear focal point of les parisiennes. Furthermore, I opine, to attempt to tell the broader story simply misses the point of telling the story at all.

One thing really screams in this book: The profound resiliency of the women who bore the brunt of wartime hostility. I really appreciate Sebba's obsessive attention to that story; it is a story which is too often neglected in favor of the experiences of armies and soldiers, campaigns and consequences, allies and enemies, farmers and merchants, businesses and economies, heroes and (even) heroines. Yet, I would challenge the reader to find even one similar account (and I do not write that lightly; in assessing my own experience of a dozen or more books written from or concerning the female experience of war--and several dozen more general accounts--I cannot think of a single one which targets what Sebba so skillfully documents.

One final point: Three sections of plates (images) profoundly enhance the text. How Sebba accomplished the gargantuan task of sorting through tens of thousands of wartime photos to create the carefully curated sections may never be fully appreciated; and I have to tell you, the final sheet of twelve of "Today's Witnesses" is particularly sobering.

But, before I go, I must also mention the copious endnotes on the text (by chapter, thankfully), extensive bibliography, annotations on the illustrations, carefully constructed index (also including the illustrations), and even a cast of characters (just in case you get lost along the way, as you most certainly will).

A superb job. Highly recommended, but mark my words: It ain't an easy read. You will weep, but you will learn. ( )

This doorstop, which purports to describe the life of Parisian women during the German occupation in WWII, pretty much boils down to a minute examination of the workings of the fashion industry during that time, interspersed with vignettes describing Holocaust victims and derring-do by the French resistance. Personally, I would have much preferred an Everywoman account; civilian life by woman who were not in one of the author's favored groups are barely touched upon, and the anecdotes from these groups, already trite (and, in the case of the fashion industry, trivial), quickly become repetitive as well. Moreover, as uninteresting as most of these women are, the tangents she follows in telling their stories are even less interesting, introducing genealogical trivialities and connections to events which occurred anywhere from the mid-nineteenth century until the 2010's, making the book scattershot and introducing an impossibly large cast of characters. And to pad out an already long book, the author extends her story past Liberation, past V-E Day, and into the early fifties. This book is a waste of time except for Holocaust specialists, Alistair MacLean fans, and fashionistas. ( )

4.5 stars. I learned about this book on a podcast - the May 26 2016 episode of Don Snow's History Hit (check it out!). The book is such an interesting history of the German occupation of Paris during WWII. I had expected something more biographical - a collection of individual stories. But this is presented chronologically, and offers a great deal more of the social and cultural history of this place and time. I was surprised to find that I was just as interested, if not more, in the chapters that covered the war aftermath. Because of it's chronological organization, it can be hard to keep track of the people and their stories throughout the book, thus my marking it down a half a star. But I was quite pleased that the history covered here was so comprehensive, much more than I expected. ( )