On Mother's Day, May 31, 1942, an altercation broke out in the 6th arrondissement of occupied Paris. Shoppers, mostly women, stood in line outside the Eco supermarket in the rue de Buci, hoping at the very least for a tin of sardines, which were on sale. Suddenly, a voice started singing La Marseillaise. A woman shopper barged into the store, grabbed some tins, and tossed them to the waiting customers, shouting “Housewives, serve yourselves!” A fracas followed; a couple of women were manhandled, some men intervened, a shopworker was punched in the face. As the scuffle tumbled into the street, more people got involved, police—uniformed, plain-clothed, and off-duty—arrived, and gunshots rang out. The crowds scattered. Two police officers lay dead. Forty arrests would follow, with at least ten death sentences handed down, one of which was commuted. Ten people were deported to concentration camps; one was deported and killed at Auschwitz; others were incarcerated in France (16–37).
This event, minutes long, is the heart of Paula Schwartz's excellent book. Known variously as the Buci affair and the “women's demonstration on the rue de Buci” (1), this incident had wider significance in real terms and emerges as an analytically productive portal into the German occupation and the Vichy years. Schwartz draws on forty-plus years of her own research to turn this “presumed footnote” (12) into a compelling narrative. The story is immersive, bringing remarkable insight into the motivations, definitions, orchestration, and repression of urban resistance activity; the value of gender as a lens to explore and explain these phenomena; and the complexities of remembering, evaluating, and recognizing resistance across time. The latter processes are cut through, too, with gendered problematics, as Schwartz pointed out in her seminal article “Partisanes and gender politics in Vichy France” (French Historical Studies 16:1 [1989]: 126–151). In using the rue de Buci protest as a microhistorical study, Schwartz “explod[es] the event [with] a kaleidoscopic effect, enabling us to view it from many different angles” in order to “tell stories larger than the stories themselves” (11).
The first chapter describes the way the “women's demonstration” (1) (protest, riot, or act of war: definitions mattered) unfolded. The reader is oriented in place, introduced to characters and to their undoing. The demonstration did not end well for the members of the Communist resistance who, it turned out, had orchestrated this event; errors led to “massive waves” of repression; the book illustrates well the risks resisters faced, and the terrible “human costs” (27) of capture. The second chapter provides an overview of the food politics of occupied France, much of which is not unfamiliar. “Hunger and fear,” Schwartz writes, “dogged everyone, although not equally” (43). This unequal distribution was used by the Communist resistance to mobilize citizens, particularly women, against occupiers and Vichy. Chapter three uses various archives to trace the networks which drew together the visible women who were the face of the protest, the invisible men acting as their security agents, and the “shadow crowd” (62) of sympathizers planted outside, voicing approval, and distributing—verbally and by tract—the lessons to be drawn from this propaganda stunt. Schwartz insists on the “careful orchestration of both men's and women's parts” (12). The fourth chapter follows the aftermath of the arrests, demonstrating the wide range of punishments but also the mechanisms and infrastructures of investigation, interrogation, and prosecution. The author notes the “ripple effects” (95) of the initial gender division that styled women as protesters and men as their (sometimes armed) protectors: women's sentences were mostly lighter.
Chapter five drills into two participants' trajectories. Communist party activist Madeleine Marzin was the ringleader. She was arrested, sentenced to death, had her sentence commuted, and managed, miraculously, to escape. Pierre Benoit was a seventeen-year-old new recruit to direct action, already wanted in connection to a political demonstration at his high school, the Lycée Buffon. He went underground and perpetrated other anti-German acts. Benoit, along with four young comrades, was executed by a German firing squad in February 1943. Schwartz gives ample evidence of gender's influence on their fates. Gender continues to shape the story into the postwar era, chapter six explains. Despite a legendary reputation that exposed women as “dangerous political agents on a par with men” (129) and a significant political career, only in 2006 did Madeleine Marzin have a street named after her. Pierre Benoit, on the other hand, is among the “most widely commemorated” (177) of the protest participants, although it is for the high school demonstration and their youthful martyrdom that the “five students of the Lycée Buffon” are known. Schwartz also notes that the three male protest participants guillotined by the French authorities with no German intervention have received scant commemoration; their deaths were less valuable in the competitive commemorative economy of postwar France. As an epilogue, Schwartz draws wider significance from the Buci affair, linking it back to the Paris Commune of 1871 and forwards to 1970, when young Maoist activists smashed and grabbed luxury food products from a high-end Paris shop to “redistribute” in working-class districts. Thus, she inscribes the rue de Buci protest into a lineage “that stretches from bread to sardines, from sardines to smoked salmon” (203).
Today Sardines Are Not for Sale is methodologically interesting. Refreshingly, there is no literature review and not one historian is mentioned by name in the main body of the text. The premise is inspiring: exploding the event provides not only an engaging demonstration of erudition, but it is also a pleasure to read. What we get here is a story, told in clear prose, almost filmic in detail, characterization, emotion, and drama. Faits divers are always parts of bigger wholes. As Schwartz writes, and as I and others such as David Lees have shown elsewhere, everyday life is not “a mere backdrop against which events played out” (182). It is the stuff that lives were and are made of. Daily life makes political action, and political action is embedded in daily life: hunger, sardines, queues, shopkeepers, a discarded cape, a dropped pocketbook, high school friends, newspapers, a garage, a co-worker or lover – such everyday realities are the fabric of the resistance activity described in this book. Ordinariness sits alongside the extraordinary guns, hide-outs, smuggled money, secretive cells, illicit tracts, arrests, torture, and deportation.
Schwartz deals dynamically with her sources, noting that “archival access [to documents] alone does not guarantee the production of new historical knowledge” (181). Research, she writes, is always about context. Hers took place at a particular moment when access to archives was (grudgingly) being granted and historical actors were still alive. She notes interesting errors in oral testimony, such as an eyewitness who claimed that the demonstrators were local people. They were not: anonymity was important but also made them vulnerable as they did not recognize the plainclothes police. Oral testimony has been central. Madeleine Marzin recounted later that names (including her own) were only extracted from co-protestor Marguerite Bronner under emotional torture. None of this is documented in Bronner's interrogation, but Schwartz emphasizes that “it completely changes the story” (115, her italics). Bronner bore a huge responsibility, having accidentally dropped her pocketbook at the Eco supermarket. Without Marzin's testimony, her “wrenching dilemma” would not be known (115). Schwartz writes movingly about voids in the interrogation records; torture is not documented on paper. Yet the documents still betray their makers' inhumanity. “Signing” his statements extracted under torture, young Pierre Benoit's “mangled autograph” is “the last trace of a seventeen-year-old body in agony” (117). Schwartz situates herself honestly in her own research. She recognizes, for example, her investment in this story, and remarks on the “act of self-censorship” (183) which made her “forget” the two other dead men: the policemen shot at the scene.
This book reveals how resistance was done: how it was planned, what resources were needed, who was involved, how recruitment functioned, and how tasks were allocated. It reveals how prosecution was done: which agencies were involved, from local police to the Brigades spéciales, the Ministries of Justice and the Interior, different courts, and German interventions. It reveals processes of interrogation through Schwartz's close attention to the reporting of suspects' statements. It reveals how remembering was and has been done, showing the importance of when it happened, what was at stake, and contrasts between official and personal memory. It reveals gender as central to our understanding: men's and women's lives function through their roles and expectations as men and women. It recreates the textures of historical actors' worlds, in particular the impact of small errors. Resisters were not gods. They were ordinary people, some with remarkable capacities for organization, probity, morality, bravery, single-mindedness, and secrecy; others less so. They muddled through, and sometimes they got it wrong.
Undergraduates might struggle to “extract” information from this book because it needs reading across its narrative. It is probably not one to dip in and out of. That said, it is accessible and well-paced, and some repetition between chapters helps prop up the story when it threatens to get too involved with itself. This book both is a good read and has plenty to say about French history specifically, and about history, memory, and gender more generally.
