Ruses dans les rues
This article examines how Jewish women in Paris during the Holocaust learned to navigate anti-Semitic legislation through gendered readings of risk, visibility, and urban space. Women encountered a regime of exclusion that was legally comprehensive yet unevenly enforced. While German and French ord...
Enregistré dans:
| Auteurs principaux: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Français |
| Publié: |
2026
|
| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | This article examines how Jewish women in Paris during the Holocaust learned to navigate anti-Semitic legislation through gendered readings of risk, visibility, and urban space. Women encountered a regime of exclusion that was legally comprehensive yet unevenly enforced. While German and French ordinances made no formal distinction between men and women, policing practices initially did, producing fleeting but consequential signals that gender, age, and perceived Frenchness could function as informal shields. How did women interpret these signals? How did they translate them into everyday practices of movement, concealment, and presence? And how did their perceptions of risk relate to the dangers they in fact faced?
Organized around successive anti-Semitic laws that barred Jewish access to public space—curfews, transit restrictions, compulsory stars, and exclusions from public venues—the article traces how women repeatedly crossed these legal boundaries in the course of daily life. Drawing on 75 women’s ego documents—diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories—alongside police circulars and arrest records, and using digital mapping as method, the article plots individual trajectories in relation to the evolving geography of prohibition. Mapping does not serve simply to illustrate experience, but to make visible how frequently, and in what ways, women transgressed anti-Semitic ordinances as they went about ordinary tasks and sought moments of normalcy.
The article treats these practices as tactical responses to legal uncertainty and shifting regimes of surveillance. It argues that gender shaped not only outcomes but perceptions of possibility, enabling women to remain present, however precariously, in a city that was legally closed to them yet central to their sense of belonging. |
|---|