Women in the Panthéon episode: Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion

Join Us in France Travel Podcast

Annie Sargent and Elyseb Rivin discuss the extraordinary lives of Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion, two women honored in the Panthéon for

Key takeaways

• Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz was the niece of Charles de Gaulle and survived deportation to Ravensbrück.
• Germaine Tillion is recognized as a pioneer of modern ethnology, having studied Berber cultures in Algeria.

Main topics

• French Resistance heroes
• The Panthéon honors

Notable quotes

This century has known two totalitarianisms, Nazism and communism. A third is in the process of happening, and that is the totalitarianism of money.

Conclusion

The episode provides a moving tribute to women who turned wartime trau

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) Amazon Great Indian Festival is here. Amazon Speaker 1 (0:06) Great Speaker 5 (0:27) Indian Festival is Speaker 4 (0:45) here. Speaker 6 (0:45) This is Join Us in France, episode 616. Bonjour, I'm Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France. Today, I bring you a conversation with Elise Riven of Toulouse Guided Walks about two women honored in the Pantheon. Geneviève de Gaulle-Antonioz, who was the niece of Charles de Gaulle, the president, and ethnologist Germaine Tillion. Both were arrested as resistance fighters, survived deportation to Ravensbrück, and spent the rest of their lives fighting poverty, torture, and injustice. It's a hard story, but one worth knowing. Before we start, this show runs on listener support. If you want to work with me directly, I do itinerary consults. I also have tours of Paris on the Voice Map app, and I do day trips around the southwest of France. Everything is at joinusinfrance.com forward slash boutique. And if you shop on Amazon anyway, starting at joinusinfrance.com forward slash Amazon costs you nothing but helps the show. For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Elise today, I'll discuss an art exhibition coming up and also pickpockets in Paris. It's more dramatic than many of us realize. Speaker 5 (2:22) Bonjour, Elise. Bonjour, Annie. Speaker 6 (2:24) We have a topic today that's going to be a bit difficult because it's about two women who we want to honor because they are both in the Pantheon and Speaker 4 (2:35) they Speaker 6 (2:36) are heroes of the resistance. But of course, the things they went through were very, very difficult. And we didn't necessarily know all that much about them when we got started listening. I listened to a lot of the France Culture interviews with these women and you listened to a variety of sources, I'm sure. Right. Our point in doing this episode is to let you know why these women are in the Pantheon and why it matters. But we're not historians that did, you know, deep research into this. It's always the caveat to this, you know, we're more tour guide than historian. Speaker 5 (3:16) Yes, and interested in the people. I think one of the things about doing this, it is, of course, it was something that you suggested, because these are two women that have been admitted to the Pantheon in the recent past, and there aren't that many women who have been admitted to the Pantheon. And so it's interesting to know why, why these people, how they got chosen, and in fact, what... made their lives so special. And it is a fact that both of them led extremely fascinating, interesting lives. And this is not a spoiler, but it is in a sense, it's to know that they survived World War II, which is extremely important because they were able to be witness and explain and write about what they had lived through and what they had seen. And of course, many, many people who were resistance did Speaker 6 (4:07) not survive World War II. That's right. Yes. They came back to tell the tale. They came back to tell the tale. And they were very, very good in the way that they shared their experience. Speaker 5 (4:20) Exactly. And also, interestingly, I was thinking about this. This is my shower moment. You know, every day I think about what I'm doing during the day. And I was thinking about the fact that we were doing the podcast and thinking how it transformed each of their lives and made everything they did afterward. significant and connected to their actual experiences, being resistant and being sent away to a camp. Speaker 6 (4:45) Right. So the two women are Geneviève de Gaulle-Antonioz and Germaine Tillon. Are you going to do separate? I mean, they have very separate lives. Speaker 5 (4:55) Yeah, they had very separate lives. They had very separate lives that intersect, which is what makes them so fascinating, too, that they each separately and individually. is a fascinating woman. And it turns out that they had lives that definitely did intersect both during the war and in a way afterwards as well. But maybe it's easier to just do one after the other, just as a way of trying to keep track of them, because this is not that easy. And even for us, especially for me, I didn't really know that much about them before we started doing the research on it. But it is absolutely fascinating to see. Absolutely. Speaker 6 (5:33) All right. So take it away, Elise. So Speaker 5 (5:34) Geneviève de Gaulle-Antonioz was actually the niece of Charles de Gaulle, our great hero, really, of World War II and the first president of France. She was the daughter of his oldest or older brother. I don't know if he had more than one. He had a sister as well. It was four brothers and one sister. There were four brothers. Yeah. I think so. Xavier was the oldest, I think, you know. She was born in 1920, and she lived to be 81, died in 2002. And very interesting, both of these women came from really interesting families. She was born in the south of France because her father was actually a mining engineer, and his first post was in the south, in the region of the Department of the Gare, because that was where he had gotten his first work with a mine. And then... Interestingly enough, and it did make a difference because of what happened to her later, the family was sent up to the area called the Sars, which in the 1930s was actually still considered to be part of France. This is confusing, but, you know, there's a whole section. I think many of you know that Alsace-Lorraine is the northeastern part of France. And for a long, long time, it was... battered back and forth between Germany and France. And the Saar is a region that was extremely industrial and had a lot of mines. So they went up there. That's basically where she lived until she was just a little past the age of 15 and, interestingly, became pretty much bilingual because it was that kind of an area. With German. With German, yeah, sorry. Of course, with German. Interestingly, then afterwards, the family moved to Rennes, which, of course, is in Brittany. And that's where she decided to, she started her studies and she became very interested in, I think it was law. I think that was what she decided to study. I'm not even sure anymore. Speaker 6 (7:37) I don't remember that. I don't remember. But she entered, she was very precocious. She was very bright. Yeah, the whole de Gaulle family were intellectuals. They were intellectuals. And so they really valued education very highly. Her father had done Les Mines, Polytechnique. I mean, they all went to the most prestigious French learning institutions. So, and they read a lot and they were, you know, like not necessarily super wealthy, but super well-educated, all of them. And Speaker 5 (8:12) what's interesting to me, too, is that both she, Geneviève, and then Germaine, Tillon, were both from families that were really... practicing Catholic families, but were also very Republican in the sense of a little r, okay? Yeah, Speaker 6 (8:28) yeah, yeah. Speaker 5 (8:28) Very much involved in having a republic and adhering to the laws of the country. And she was fascinated by all of that. And something happened I found very interesting. What I read was that when she was in her last year of living in the Tsar area, her father, who was very upset about was aware of what was happening with Nazism in Germany, actually gave her a copy of Mein Kampf to read. Yep, yep. And since she could read in German, she was very sensitive to and very aware very early on of the dangers of Nazism. It's interesting to me that someone that age would be so socially conscious, actually. Speaker 6 (9:12) Right, because what happened is that, well, what she said in her interviews, is that what shocked her the most was what was the most horrible thing about the Nazi program is the dehumanizing of other people. So they would always other, you know, so the gypsies, the Jews, they were not like us. They are not real people. They cannot be considered as humans, really. And you have to dehumanize them. The whole program was to turn them into almost animals. And she noticed that very, very early on. And probably it has also something to do with the fact that she lost her mother at a very young age. So her mother died in childbirth when she was four and a half. When Speaker 5 (10:01) she was four and a half. Speaker 6 (10:02) Right. And so that was the big trauma of her youth. And her father... He remarried. He remarried, but not immediately, I assume. He married five years later, actually. Right. And it was a really hard time for her. And she always had a lot of empathy for the suffering of others. She really spent a lot of time seeing that. And in these mining communities, you would see a lot of suffering. Like there were accidents, there were difficult living situations. And so she always had a lot of empathy and could not. think of people as not being human, like the dehumanizing she could not take. So I wouldn't say that she was like strictly, you know, egalitarian, we're all the same, blah, blah, blah. No, because, I mean, she was from a higher class herself, but it was not a higher class that... How would you say that? How do you say that in English? Yeah, yeah. Like... Blaming all the problems in the world on a whole cast of society that really, it's not their doing. And so the whole plan of the Nazis was to blame everything on specific groups. All the problems in the world had to do with the Jews or with the gypsies or with the handicapped or people like that. Or Speaker 5 (11:30) the foreigners. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 6 (11:32) That was something that she could not, you know. Speaker 6 (11:39) She said she was revolted. How would you say that? She was Speaker 5 (11:45) really upset. She found it all pretty Speaker 6 (11:47) abhorrent. Abhorrent. Abhorrent, yeah. Speaker 5 (11:49) She also, I mean, you have to be a certain mindset to be that aware at that age and made two or three other trips into what became eventually, of course, the Saar turned out to be, they voted to go become part of Germany again, which is why they, one of the reasons that they actually left. And she was not Speaker 6 (12:07) surprised by that at all. And she was not surprised by that, no. She says in her interviews that, yeah, she knew that the Saar wanted to be with the Germans. And she was appalled at the enthusiasm that she could see in some people in adopting the mentality of Nazism. You know, she said immediately people were completely supportive of this new program of... objectification of others. And it's human nature. There are always some people who are going to find it best to not be open-minded. And so in 1940, Speaker 5 (12:47) with the capitulation of France, she was already a university student and she decided that she was immediately going to join whatever resistant groups. And it's interesting because having done an enormous amount of research about resistant groups here in the Toulouse area. This is something that I really know a lot about, specifically around here. It is a fact that 17-, 18-, 19-year-olds were the first resistance, and it was this age group that did things that you would think are relatively innocuous. They would make leaflets that they would throw out onto the streets. They would rip off posters that were put up on the walls. These are not violent acts. These are simply acts of protesting against what they see around them. And yet, of course, many of these people were sent away to prison and some of them were even killed for doing something like that. And she was well aware of that. And yet at the same time had the courage to actually join a student-resistant group immediately. She took a nom de guerre. Speaker 6 (13:50) Oh, I missed that. Yes. She decided, I don't know why, to call herself Germaine Lecomte. Nice. Speaker 5 (13:57) Okay. I mean, it's still a G as the first name. It's not, I don't know what, I'm not sure that there's any specific significance to it, you know. Speaker 6 (14:06) Well, I think her mother was called Germaine. Ah, Speaker 5 (14:09) maybe. Speaker 6 (14:10) Yeah, I think so. So she was Geneviève, but her mother was Speaker 5 (14:14) Germaine. And so she, it's very romantic. I mean, it sounds like something out of a movie, but of course there was an enormous amount of danger in this. Because of her studies, she had enrolled at that point in the Sorbonne in Paris. She got very involved with a group of young resistance. And through them, she was introduced to people who were connected to the museum of what we call in French the Musée de l'Homme. Right, the Museum of Man. So is that what happened? I mean, it sounds silly in English for some reason. Speaker 6 (14:48) So actually, Germaine Tillion coined the phrase. It is a museum of how human groups develop. It's not really a museum. It's an observation of how groups of people interact and how they develop and what they produce as a result, their music, their art, their crafts, etc. But Speaker 5 (15:12) there was a place because I know that they... Yes, there was a place. Yes. There was a place. Yes. It was Speaker 6 (15:18) actually, it's on, it's connected to the... The buildings of Chaillot, Speaker 5 (15:22) Trocadero. Speaker 6 (15:23) Right. And it's a beautiful thing to visit. It's a beautiful thing to visit. There's one in Toronto as well that they call the Museum of Man, I think. And I would say that the Musée des Confluences in Lyon is also that sort of museum. Okay. It's a museum where they try to understand what makes civilization run and how people... come together to make the world that we know. Yeah. It's kind of a strange concept. Yeah, it is. But there are some museums in the world that that's what they specialize in. And they're always very interesting. OK. I mean, I Speaker 5 (16:02) don't even know if, honestly, I've been to Chaillot so many times. I'm trying to remember if I've ever actually visited any of these buildings, but I don't know. Speaker 6 (16:11) Oh, I have. I have. So the Musée de l'Homme, you have the one thing that's strikingly visually is. You have like people from the earliest smaller sort of bones and structures that we know about until like the evolution, you know. Evolution. Okay. So it's, but it's both evolution physically, but also like how these groups come together and thrive and. make a civilization together. So it's Speaker 5 (16:43) really about humans as opposed to a museum of natural history, which is about plants and animals and things like that. Speaker 6 (16:49) It's about humans. Exactly. It's about the evolution of people and yeah. Okay. So at this time Speaker 5 (16:57) she's living with her aunt, Madeleine de Gaulle. And I don't know actually if her aunt was or aunt was actually aware of her activities. It's very interesting. I have absolutely no idea. She decided to become one of the people who would make what they called the Croix de Lorraine. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah, and besides making, writing these leaflets and trying to distribute them and going out at night and hopefully when nobody could see them and ripping off these things put up by the Germans during the occupation, she produced these and they became a symbol of the resistance. And they are, of course, also connected to the history of Charles de Gaulle. the quadrille. Why? Because he had decided that he wanted to use that as an emblem. That is her uncle. I don't know if there was another significance to that, you know, I mean. Speaker 6