Rieucros and Brens camps 1938-1944: Internment, women and everyday life

Abstract

This thesis presents a study of the only women’s internment camps in France – Rieucros in Lozère and Brens in Tarn – during the years 1939 to 1944, a period which spans Third Republic and Vichy France. Drawing on extensive use of primary archival sources from Lozère and Tarn, as well as on relevant scholarship and literature, the subject is approached from the two perspectives of the administration and the internees. It examines the setting up of the camps against the background of the camp system and analyses their internal administration, paying particular attention to the pivotal role of the camp commander. It demonstrates that the camp structure and demography were not static but constantly evolving to reflect increasingly repressive government policy. It also examines the effect of outside influences to show how
policy could bow before pragmatism.
The study of the complexities involved in the concept of undesirability, encompassing as it did Jews, Gypsies, nomads, politicised (mainly communist) women and ‘foreignness’, provides a prism through which to view the internment of prostitutes, in which German involvement was key. The daily lives of all these ‘undesirables’ under the rod of internment as they battled with cramped conditions, food shortages, sanitary deprivation and emotional suffering is examined through a detailed study of their individual dossiers, summaries of which have been collated into a database. The ‘ghetto-ising’ of the prostitutes in the camp is highlighted as an illustration of the prejudice not only of the administration but also of the other internees, a tragic inversion in which they embrace the exclusionary ideology that has interned them. In contrast, however, the creativity produced by internment as the women embarked on cultural activities, education, writing and even employment, the support they drew from friendship, religion and correspondence with those outside, is celebrated, again drawing on the records of individual dossiers. I argue that the stereotype of victim-hood gives way to women’s agency as their experience of internment unlocks resilience and talent; that although they fall neither into mainstream Holocaust nor resister, refugee nor women’s history, yet they straddle every category and indeed identify a new category of ‘other’; and that in their very ordinariness, not only their suffering but also their courage, their accomplishments and their resistance are worthy of detailed study and memorialisation, pushing back the boundaries of mainstream history and uncovering the effects of a brutal and increasingly arbitrary internment policy.

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