Book Review of Daughters of Paris by Elisabeth Hobbes

 

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Two young women grow up as France changes

This is a novel about two girls from different social classes growing up together in a time when the French middle classes were still trying to get back to the world they knew before the Great War and many of the social and political changes which took place in Britain and the United States in the twenties and thirties (especially votes for women) simply did not happen. But the author gets it right, rather than right-on, and the characters see things as young women of the the time might have seen them -and this changes throughout the story -and France changes with the young women.

The failure of French government and army in 1940 destroys that world and all hope (or danger) of it ever coming back, and the German occupation of Paris brings the two young women, who had been drifting apart, back together and steadily destroys the social and economic distinctions between them. We see the women coping with the occupiers (surrendered soldiers were sent at once to do forced labour in Germany, followed later by nearly all the young men who had not been soldiers) and the resistance eventually depends on brave young women when brave young men cannot be seen to walk the streets.

This is all well-described, and although the author doesn’t beat the reader over her head with her research she does get a lot of details pleasingly right: a single Lysander flying over a drop-point as if by chance and releasing a single supply cannister rather than drawing attention to any particular spot by landing on a field at night (which needed all sorts of extra skills and preparation) is exactly right for a supply drop to the French Resistance in the early days when everything had to be kept as simple as possible. As an Army Cooperation machine, dropping supply cannisters was designed into the Lysander from the start and was even used to sustain rearguard troops during the battle of France in 1940. The author also shows us that brave young French women were always likely to regard the cannister’s parachute as a resource to equal the cannister’s contents.

The other historically-accurate detail is that the greatest danger to all citizens in Occupied France, whether they were resistance workers or just young mothers desperate to find food for their children, was a denunciation to the Police or Gestapo born completely out of spite over some entirely petty confrontation or vendetta. (There actually was an internal Gestapo memo in 1942 which complained that most of the people they were arresting were completely innocent and had been denounced either for revenge or for rewards.)

This is a pleasing book which gets its messages across in the right sort of way.

“Daughters of Paris” by Elisabeth Hobbes is published in the UK by Harper Collins on the 5^th of August 2022.