Incendiary women: Edith Thomas,the Second World War and writing women into history

Abstract

This article examines the wartime writing of French resister and historian Edith Thomas. It argues that Thomas's collection of fictional clandestine short stories, Contes d’Auxois (1943), provides an early social history of the French Resistance. It interprets such wartime writing as offering contemporary insights into women's contributions to the Resistance, key aspects of which would be taken up by later generations of historians. The article then examines how Thomas's personal experiences of the Resistance impacted her post-war work as a social and cultural historian. It reads her choice to write women back into history as one inflected by her resistance activism. The article ends by reading Thomas's Les Pétroleuses (1963) as a collective feminist biography that creates transhistorical connections between the ‘incendiary women’ of the Paris Commune and women's wartime resistance. In so doing, Thomas coopts the maligned women communards of 1870 to a Republican tradition of popular revolt in an act of feminist recuperation and celebration across centuries.