In August 1944, in a city near Paris, Robert Capa took a photograph of a woman cradling a baby in the middle of a jeering crowd, her head shaved and her forehead marked with a swastika.
A novel released in France this summer has reinvented her once again, this time as a woman scorned.
It’s a reinvention that is a disservice to the complicated truth about Ms. Touseau and her and other Frenchwomen’s deliberate collaboration with the Nazis.
A reality we should contemplate frankly if we’re to have a proper accounting of the history of the war in France.
The photograph, “The Shaved Woman of Chartres,” with the young Ms. Touseau at its center, was understood for a long time as a document of the brutal purges that took place during the liberation of France at the end of World War II.
Persons:
Robert Capa, Simone Touseau, Touseau
Locations:
Paris, France, Chartres, ”