Sexing Political Culture in the History of France By Alison M. M ...

torn between the sexual allure of respective French and German feminine erotic bodies—a love triangle between two giant dominant women and a struggling powerless man. Ungerer’s images thus trade on the erotics of nationalist imagery, while invoking an Alsatian liminal identity grounded in a historical consciousness of its place between those two large warring nation states across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²⁸

A number of historians have continued to use the feminine iconography of Marianne and Germania as a shorthand way to refer to Franco-German shared histories, thus perpetuating the gendering and sexualization of the very national identities they hope to historicize.²⁹ Hence Marianne is evoked in the title of the award-winning book Marianne in Chains by the Oxford historian Robert Gildea.³⁰ In this work, however, neither the Marianne icon nor gender in any other sense form central objects of the study; rather, they operate primarily as metaphors in much the same way as in the nationalist belief systems that Gildea implicitly criticizes. In fact, the title choice represents the recovery, implied throughout Gildea’s opus, of a feeble and feminized France in the face of Nazi occupation, which has been overshadowed by a futile and irresponsible resistance. It is a vision of the republic held hostage, passive and helpless—in contrast to the persistent heroic myths both of résistantialisme and Pétainisme that his account problematizes. The dismantling of the Fourth Republic under Pétain was celebrated by antirepublican prisoners of war as the “death of ‘the whore’ (la gueuse),” Gildea tells us, though without any contextualization and without any commentary on that remarkable, and historically particular, verbal utterance.³¹ Elsewhere though, Gildea has indeed discussed gender metaphorics, noting how the Vichy use of Joan of Arc, as a suitably Catholic and virginal ideal that accorded with Pétainist traditionalism, was also carried over into Gaullist symbolism of the nation.³² That such expressions of violence against “the whore” of republicanism (A mort la gueuse!) were evoked at the demise of the Third Republic is a well-recognized fact among historians of World War II,³³