Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba will feature on the Radio 2 Fact not Fiction Book Club on Thursday 4 August.
The book was selected with the help of a panel made up of Reading Agency and library staff from across the UK. Find out more about the non-fiction strand of the Radio 2 Book Club.
You can win 10 copies of Les Parisiennes for your reading group – just visit our Noticeboard.
We have an exclusive extract available for you to read as well as some discussion questions for your reading group.
Les Parisiennes
What did it feel like to be a woman living in Paris from 1939 to 1949? These were years of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation and secrets until – finally – renewal and retribution.
But this is not just a book about wartime. In fascinating detail Sebba explores the aftershock of the Second World War and the choices demanded. How did the women who survived to see the Liberation of Paris come to terms with their actions and those of others? Although politics lies at its heart, Les Parisiennes is a fascinating account of the lives of people of the city and, specifically, in this most feminine of cities, its women and young girls.
Selection panel review
Our reading panel from libraries and The Reading Agency loved Les Parisiennes – here are some of their comments:
“I enjoyed the book as it was a social and historical perspective of women. I found out more about the role of women in the Second World War and also the French ‘customs’. I think there is interest in the ways that women are judged for their actions in a way men aren’t and also the fact that decisions are made for very different reasons. Looking today at people’s attitude to immigration and privilege some things never change!”
“This is a good read; it’s very informative about a subject that isn’t very well-known – French women in WWII. The glamour of French women in contrast with the stark realities of Europe at war is quite an intriguing subject. It is an unusual combination, glamour and war. Add in the discrimination of Jews and collaboration with the enemy in an occupied Paris, where the enemy is polite and well-mannered, but also the invaluable contribution of women in the French resistance, and you’ll get a picture of the book. It is really well-researched, based on many witness contributions.”
About the author
Anne Sebba is the author of the best-selling biography That Woman, a life of Wallis Simpson based on her discovery of 15 unpublished letters locked away in an attic trunk. She is also a broadcaster and journalist as well as a lecturer for various institutions in the UK and US such as the British Library, Royal Oak, English Speaking Union and the National Trust as well as lecturing on cruise ships.
She makes regular television appearances and has presented programmes for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 including two about the pianists, Harriet Cohen and Joyce Hatto. She is the author of 9 non-fiction books including biographies of Jennie Churchill, Mother Teresa and Laura Ashley.
A word from Anne
“I wrote this book hoping to challenge the perception of how women are assumed to behave generally in wartime but especially how women in Occupied France behaved. I found a complex range of responses (not just the usual, one dimensional view that all the women were collaborators who slept with Germans and had their heads shaved at the end of the war) but was especially excited to discover that the very first organised resisters in France were librarians and curators, many of them women whose names are barely known to history such as thirty-eight-year-old Yvonne Oddon, a leading French librarian whose father had died when she was a teenager. Oddon was head librarian at the Musée de l’Homme, a newly opened museum of anthropology in Paris. This group were almost all arrested and imprisoned; the men were executed, the women sentenced to hard labour but the German prosecutor remarked to Agnès: ‘Madame, if the French army had been composed of women and not men, we Germans would never have gotten to Paris.’ So I am especially thrilled and deeply touched that my book has been chosen by a group of librarians today.”
Get involved
Tune in to the Radio 2 Arts Show on Thursday 4 August to hear an interview with Anne Sebba and Jonathan Ross talking about her book.
Do you want to read Les Parisiennes? You can share your thoughts with us on Twitter, using #LesParisiennes, or follow author Anne Sebba. You can also see what other readers thought, or add the book to your group’s reading list.
Want to find out more? Take a look at the Radio 2 Book Club Twitter feed or find out more on the Radio 2 Book Club website.
