Les Parisiennes Audiobook By Anne Sebba cover art

Les Parisiennes

How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s

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Les Parisiennes

By: Anne Sebba
Narrated by: Charlotte Strevens
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About this listen

What did it feel like to be a woman living in Paris during the years 1939 to 1949? These were years of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation and secrets until, finally, there was renewal and retribution. Even at the darkest moments, dogs and cats might be abandoned howling on the street, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner, but glamour was ever present. French women wore lipstick. Why?

By looking at a wide range of individuals, from collaborators to resisters; actresses and prostitutes to teachers and writers; native Parisian women and those living in Paris temporarily, including American women and Nazi wives; muses and mothers; housewives and mistresses; fashion and jewellery designers; and nurses, journalists and spies, Anne Sebba reveals truths about basic human instincts and desires.

It was women more than men who came face-to-face with the German conquerors on a daily basis as waitresses, shop assistants, or prostitutes or merely on the Metro, where a German soldier had priority when it came to seats. Parisian women mostly did whatever they needed to do to survive. Many of them faced life-and-death decisions every day.

But this is not just an audiobook about war. Les Parisiennes is an audiobook book about the effects of war and, for those who survived, how they came to terms with their own behaviour and that of others. The second half of the decade can be understood only by examining the catastrophic shock of the first. Although politics lies at its heart, Les Parisiennes is an account of the lives of the people of the city and specifically, in this most feminine of cities, its women and young girls - including thousands who grew up fatherless.

2017, Franco-British Society Book Prize, Joint winner

©2016 Anne Sebba (P)2016 Orion Publishing Group Limited
20th Century France Women World War II
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Critic reviews

Wonderfully researched, this is an important retelling of Les Années Noires in Paris which puts women's stories, and the complications of their lives under Occupation, centre stage. Sebba reminds us that we should listen and put ourselves in their shoes, before leaping immediately to judgement, and backs this up with testimonies from many women whose voices have remained unheard (Kate Mosse, author of LABYRINTH and CITADEL)
'Anne Sebba's fascinating and beautifully written study gives voice to a myriad of narratives belonging to the Parisian women who resisted, collaborated, flourished, suffered, died or survived through a mixture of defiance and compromise . . . Sebba skilfully weaves the history of 1940s Paris through the remarkable stories of women from all walks of life' (Clare Mulley)
This is a fascinating book I couldn't stop reading. Anne Sebba knows everything about Paris during the war and she relates the end of all the whispered stories I've been hearing all my life. She understands everything about the chic, loathsome collaborators and the Holocaust victims, and their stories are told in an irresistible narrative flood (Edmund White, author of THE FLÂNEUR)
'As Anne Sebba shows, life for a Parisian woman was a deeply ambiguous affair. Their experiences, like a kaleidoscope can be 'turned any number of ways to produce a different image'. Sebba's book, with its phenomenal amount of detailed research and its vast cast of characters, is rich in stories about the tricks of life under Occupation, the heroism of those who carried out acts of defiance, the slipperiness of collusion and the vast profits made by fixers, contacts, middlemen and entrepreneurs. She is particularly good on the fashion world and the scheming, equivocating social luminaries' (Caroline Moorehead)
Anne Sebba has the nearly miraculous gift of combining the vivid intimacy of the lives of women during the Occupation with the history of the time. This is a remarkable book (Edmund de Waal, author of THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES)
As Anne Sebba makes clear in her fascinating book Les Parisiennes, there was no Hollywood clarity about life in the City of Light . . . there were very many reasons not to resist ... Sebba has interviewed women who, remarkably, are talking about their experiences for the first time. This is a valuable book . . . Although Sebba salutes the bravery of Les Parisiennes, she is careful not to condemn the ones who chose simply to survive . . . To read this book is to admire female bravery and resilience, but also to understand why the scars left by the Second World War still run so deep (Daisy Goodwin)
'This is an elegant, enthralling and richly illustrated account of how the female residents of the French capital survived the Second World War and its aftermath with Parisian panache' (Caroline Sanderson)

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