French Singularity,the Resistance and the Vichy Syndrome: Lucie Aubrac to the Rescue

Abstract

Historian Claire Andrieu remarks that the stories of resister heroines like Lucie Aubrac are compatible with Mona Ozouf’s ‘French singularity’ model of women in the public sphere. Aubrac was of modest origins. She had little sympathy for the bourgeois feminism of the inter-war period, but found in the Resistance a movement that allowed her to participate fully in the national polity. To counter Vichy Syndrome denigration of the importance of the Resistance during the Fifth Republic, Aubrac presented the Resistance in terms consonant with ‘French singularity’, while reiterating her wartime contention that women had played a central role in the Resistance and that only recognition of this could reveal the true nature and extent of the Resistance. Aubrac came to express sympathy for the women’s movement in the Fifth Republic, recognizing that her own experience of ‘French singularity’ may have prevented her from fully comprehending the situation of women in France.