ABSTRACT

In September 1939 France and Great Britain declared war on Germany following the Reich’s invasion of Poland. After a stalemate between French and German forces known as the drole de guerre, or phoney war, the German army broke across defensive lines in May 1940 and entered France via Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Women’s bodies came to represent the French nation, oppressed and violated by the German Occupiers, and only by punishing these individuals would the communal body be symbolically cleansed of the “‘stain’ left by the occupying forces”. The armistice, signed on 22 June, divided France into an occupied zone in the north, administered by the Germans, and an unoccupied “free” zone in the south, administered from Vichy by a puppet regime fronted by the popular World War veteran, Marshal Philippe Petain.