“Writing about her was never a way of exonerating her, but, perhaps, of making her human”: a first novel imagines the life of the “Tondue de Chartres”, immortalized by a famous and branded photo red for collaborating with the Germans. You don’t know anything about me (JC Lattès) by Julie Héraclès has stirred up critics and booksellers since its release at the end of August, and has already won the prize for best first novel of the literary season. A sign of the enthusiasm it arouses, the rights for a cinema adaptation were purchased even before its release in bookstores. “It’s quite incredible,” confided, delighted, this novelist, who began her career at 44.
In the beginning, a photo that went around the world. The one taken by Robert Capa on August 16, 1944, in Chartres, which has today become a symbol of the Purge, a savage vengeance perpetrated against those who, during the Occupation, had actually or allegedly collaborated with the occupying forces.
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In the center of the photo, a woman, shorn and branded, her baby in her arms, booed by the crowd. Called the “Tondue de Chartres”, her name is Simone Touseau. It was with this photo – which Julie Héraclès sent with her manuscript and which now adorns the book – that her editor, Constance Trapenard, discovered this text. “Surprise”, “astonishment”, and the impression of discovering “a singular voice” were the first feelings that crossed her, reveals Constance Trapenard. “I’ve known this photo forever. I studied it in high school, saw it in the city… it never left me,” explains Julie Héraclès today, who grew up and lives in Chartres. The idea of devoting a novel to him, however, did not immediately arise for the novelist, driven by “the desire to write a novel that would take place during the Occupation”. In 2019, while she was packing her bags thousands of kilometers away, on Reunion Island, she had a “click, something obvious”. “By chance, I came across Capa’s photo. There, I tell myself that I have my first novel,” she recalls.
If she remembers that the first emotion that crossed her when she discovered the photo, years before, was “compassion”, she knows that Simone Touseau, “was not only a victim” but a “pro- Nazi who had, among other things, worked for the occupier. From the outset, the novelist is faced with a dilemma. How can we tell a story about a destiny that historians have not entirely managed to reconstruct? Through fiction and imagination, assures Julie Héraclès. Written in the first person singular, in a popular language and rooted in 1940s France, the reader is transported into the psyche of Simone Touseau. Except that Julie Héraclès’ Simone has a different last name. The reason ? “For me, the most important thing was to try to understand how a young woman from this environment and this time could switch and become a collaborator. Making her speak in the first person allows us to achieve this objective,” she explains. So Julie Héraclès imagined almost everything: the feeling of being downgraded, the first sentimental story that goes wrong, an abortion… She also imagines a Jewish friend for him – while describing Simone Touseau as fundamentally anti-Semitic – or even an act of bravery where she helps a resistance fighter. Even if it means making her sympathetic, as some critics write? “Writing about her was never a way to clear her, but, perhaps, to make her human, terribly human in her complexity,” she argues. Before concluding: “Yes, I humanized her, she is neither just a victim, nor only this culprit. I created areas of light and areas of shadow while having no thesis to defend.
