Table of Contents for this Episode
Category: French History
[00:00:00]
Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 616, six cent seize.
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 on the podcast: Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion
Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about two women honored in the Panthéon, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, 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. [00:01:00] It’s a hard story, but one worth knowing.
Podcast supporters
Annie: 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 VoiceMap app, and I do day trips around the southwest of France.
Everything is at joinusinfrance.com/boutique. And if you shop on Amazon anyway, starting at joinusinfrance.com/amazon costs you nothing but helps the show.
Magazine segment
Annie: For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Elyse today, I’ll discuss an art exhibition coming up and also pickpockets in Paris.
It’s more dramatic than many of us realize.
Why These Women Matter
Annie: Bonjour, Elyse.
Elyse: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie: We have a topic today that’s going to be a bit difficult because it’s [00:02:00] about two women who we want to honor because they are both in the Panthéon…
Elyse: Mm-hmm.
Annie: … and they 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.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: Our point in doing this episode is to let you know why these women are in the Panthéon 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, okay?
Elyse: Oh, right, but 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 Panthéon in the recent past, and [00:03:00] there aren’t that many women who have been admitted to the Panthéon, 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 not survive World War II.
Annie: That’s right, yes. They came back to tell the tale.
Elyse: They came back to tell the tale.
Annie: And they were very, very good in the way that they shared their experience.
Elyse: Exactly, and also interestingly, I was thinking about this. This is my shower moment, you know.
Every day is, I think about what I’m doing during the day, and I was thinking about the fact that we were doing [00:04:00] 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 Resistance and being sent away to a camp.
Annie: Right.
Meet the Two Heroes
Annie: So the two women are Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion.
Are you going to do separate be-
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: … I mean, they had very separate lives.
Elyse: 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 start 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 [00:05:00] is absolutely fascinating to see.
Annie: Absolutely. All right, so take it away, Elyse.
Geneviève Early Life
Elyse: So, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz was actually the niece of Charles de Gaulle, our great hero really of World War II, and of course 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.
Annie: It was four brothers and one sister.
Elyse: 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 Gard, because that was where he had gotten his first work with a mine.[00:06:00]
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 Saar, 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.
Annie: With German.
Elyse: 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 [00:07:00] 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.
Annie: I don’t remember that.
Elyse: I don’t remember. But she entered– She was very precocious. She was very bright.
Annie: Yeah, the whole de Gaulle family were intellectuals.
Elyse: They were intellectuals.
Annie: And so they really valued education very highly. Her father had done the Mines Polytechnique.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: 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.
Elyse: And what’s interesting to me, too, is that both she, Genevieve, and then Germaine Tillion, were both from families that were really practicing Catholic families, but were also very republican in the sense of a little R, okay?
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: Very much involved [00:08:00] in having a republic and adhering to the laws of the country, and she was fascinated by all of that.
Facing Nazism Early
Elyse: And something happened I find very interesting, that what I read was that when she was in her last year of living in the Saar 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.
Annie: Yep, yep.
Elyse: 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.
Annie: 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 [00:09:00] 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.
Elyse: When she was four and a half.
Annie: Right. And so that was the big trauma of her youth, and her father…
Elyse: He remarried.
Annie: He remarried, but not immediately, I assume.
Elyse: Right. He married five years later, actually.
Annie: 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 [00:10:00] 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.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: 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, « qui méprisait les autres ». How would you say that?
Méprise. How do you say that in English?
Elyse: Mépris is contempt.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Like, blaming all the problems in the world on a whole caste of society that really, that’s not their doing. And so the, 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 [00:11:00] that, and… or the foreigners, right.
Yeah, yeah. That was something that she… that she could not, you know « J’étais révoltée ». She said she was revolted… How would you say that?
Elyse: She was really upset.
She found it all pretty abhorrent, you know?
Annie: Abhorrent.
Elyse: Abhorrent.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: 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.
Annie: And she was not surprised by that at all.
Elyse: And she was not surprised by that, no.
Annie: She says in her interviews that, yeah, she knew that the Saar wanted to be with the Germans.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: And she was appalled at the enthusiasm that she could see in some people in adopting the mentality of Nazism, you know?
She said [00:12:00] 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.
Elyse: And so in 1940, 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. [00:13:00] 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.
Annie: Oh, I missed that.
Elyse: Yes. She decided, I don’t know why, to call herself Germaine Lecomte.
Annie: Nice.
Elyse: Okay. I mean, it’s still a G as a first name. It’s not I don’t know what, I’m not sure that there’s any specific significance to it, you know?
Annie: Well, I think her mother was called Germaine.
Elyse: Ah, maybe.
Annie: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So she was Genevieve, but her mother was Germaine.
Elyse: And so she, this is, you know, 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.
Musée de l’Homme Network
Elyse: And because of her studies, she had enrolled at that point in the Sorbonne [00:14:00] 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 the, what we call in French the Musée de l’Homme.
Annie: Right, the Museum of Man.
Elyse: So is that what… I mean, it sounds silly in English for some reason.
Annie: 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, et cetera.
Elyse: But there was a… there was a place, because I know that they…
Annie: Yes, there was a place. Yes.
Elyse: There was a place.
Annie: Yes.
Elyse: It was actually, it’s connected to the buildings of Chaillot on Trocadéro.
Annie: Right, and it’s a beautiful thing to visit.
Elyse: It’s a beautiful thing to visit.
Annie: There’s one in Toronto [00:15:00] as well that they call the Museum of Man, I think. So, and I would say that the Musée des Confluences in Lyon is also that sort of museum.
Elyse: Okay.
Annie: It’s a museum where they try to understand what makes civilization run.
Elyse: Uh-huh
Annie: And how people come together to make the world that we know.
Yeah. It’s kind of a strange concept.
Elyse: Yeah, it is.
Annie: But there are some museums in the world that… that’s what they specialize in, and they’re always very interesting.
Elyse: Okay. I mean, I 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.
Annie: 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 of, until, like the evolution, you know?
Elyse: [00:16:00] Evolution, okay.
Annie: So it’s, but it’s both evolution physically, but also, like, how these groups come together and thrive and make a civilization together.
Elyse: So it’s really about humans as opposed to a museum of natural history, which is about plants and animals and things like that.
Annie: It’s about humans. Exactly.
It’s about the, the evolution of people and yeah.
Elyse: Okay. So at this time, she’s living with her aunt, Madeleine De Gaulle. And I don’t know actually if her 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 call the Croix de Lorraine.
Annie: Oh, I didn’t realize that.
Elyse: 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, [00:17:00] and they became a symbol of the resistance, and they are, of course, also connected to the history of Charles de Gaulle. … this, the Croix de Lorraine.
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.
Annie: So it’s like a Christian cross, but…
Elyse: But with an extra line in it.
Annie: So the vertical one is the same.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: And then you have a horizontal line like a Christian cross, and then beneath that you have a shorter line, and that makes it a Lorraine cross.
Elyse: Yeah. It’s hard to understand just how much activities that seem so silly practically could get you killed. But this is in fact what happened.
Annie: Yeah, well, the occupier knew that there were people working against them and anybody working against them was, could, should be killed.
Elyse: So, as you mentioned, she joined this group that was this kind of amorphous, [00:18:00] it wasn’t a specific group.
This is one of the things I liked reading when she was talking about it, and she said, " People have to imagine that it was the resistance."
And Germaine Tillion, I think, said the same thing. These were people who were looking for other people who were doing resistant activities and then formed the group. It wasn’t that there was some group that was officially formed like a club, and then people joined it. They wound up finding each other through the Sorbonne and through these other things, and they unofficially were called the Group of the Museum of Man. This is basically the name that they are referred to in history, because in some way they were all connected to the same studies and they found each other out. And among these other people were a group of young men and other young women that were like her.
Betrayal and Arrest
Elyse: What happened was, and this is basically what happened with many of the groups, that there was somebody in the group that basically was actually there but was secretly working for the Nazis.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: And, at some [00:19:00] point she knew that the group was going to be, many of the people in the group were in danger, and she actually went into hiding for a while. But that did not keep her from being stopped one day. And when she was stopped, she was controlled, and this is, of course, what would happen to people all the time, and she had what were basically fake papers on her.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: She did not have the papers that said her real name.
Annie: Right. Right.
Elyse: But what happened was, and I wonder if she really knew that this would make a difference, she probably did somewhere. When the Germans arrested her, she told them that she was in fact Genevieve de Gaulle, and that made all the difference in the world.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: And it actually, of course, is what saved her life all through the rest of the story, because she was arrested, but because she was the niece of Charles de Gaulle, who of course was the man who was running the de facto government in London, they did not treat her the same way they treated other people that were arrested.
Annie: [00:20:00] Right. Right. I mean, they wanted to keep her alive because they could use her as a pawn of negotiation, like, "We have your niece" sort of thing, you know?
Elyse: Exactly.
Annie: Yeah.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Ravensbrück Camp
Elyse: So 1943, she is 21, and like many other of the people who are arrested as part of the resistance, and certainly many of the women, she was sent to a camp. She was sent to the camp of Ravensbrück, which is actually in eastern Germany, north of Berlin, and that is the camp that has been known ever since then as the camp for people who were resistance, and many, many, many women were sent there.
Annie: So not necessarily Jewish?
Elyse: No. No, not Jewish.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: If you were Jewish, you were not sent there.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: You were basically sent off to be killed.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: By 1943, at the beginning, this is not what was happening, but by 1943, there were camps that were extermination camps. Ravensbrück was a work [00:21:00] camp for resistance who were arrested. But of course a work camp is a kind of nice way of putting what they were… what they had to live through. The conditions of life and the work that they were put through, many of them died from the conditions that they were living in. But it is true that it is one of the camps where there were a number who survived.
Annie: Right. And it’s interesting that in her interviews, Genevieve de Gaulle talks about the fact that she was never tortured, she says. Some people were.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: But she was, I mean, she saw a lot of people getting tortured, but she never was. She was just slapped and kicked. And to her, that was not quite as horrible as being tortured, which of course she was correct. But she saw some horrible stuff.
Elyse: And many, you know,they were used as work fodder, let’s put it that way. I mean, this was not an extermination camp as such, but they were simply put to these tasks that many of them died from, from exhaustion and [00:22:00] starvation. I mean, you know.
Annie: Yeah, starvation.
They didn’t feed them very much at all. Yeah.
They didn’t feed them very much, no, no. I think Germaine Tillion, at one point she was 30 kilos.
Elyse: 30 kilos? Wow.
Annie: So a normal, a thin woman is about 50 kilos.
Elyse: 50, that’s already thin.
Annie: That’s a thin woman.
Elyse: That’s thin.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: Yeah, yeah.
Annie: So imagine 30 kilos, it’s like, oh, that’s a skeleton.
Elyse: Yeah.
Friendship with Tillion
Elyse: Talking about Germaine Tillion, it is in the camp that she makes friends with her.
Annie: Aha, yeah.
Elyse: Now, there is a difference of age of 13 years. Germaine is 13 years older.
Annie: Is older, yeah.
Elyse: Is older.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: She was born in 1907, and she is in the camp, in the same camp with her mother, Emilie, who unfortunately is an older woman and is then taken and sent to an extermination camp and is killed.
Annie: Oh, God.
Elyse: But it is part of the group that [00:23:00] was this kind of informal, amorphous group of the Museum of… was, among other people, Germaine Tillion. I don’t know if they actually knew each other before they showed up, both of them in Ravensbrück, but it is there that they actually became good friends and of course had a correspondence for the rest of their lives afterward.
Release and Aftermath
Elyse: Because she was the niece of Charles de Gaulle, what happened was that in 1944, when the Allies were– it was clear that the Allies were actually going to win the war, she was then very, very obviously used as a pawn, and one of the people that tried to use her as a pawn was Himmler.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: Who was in fact the man who is responsible for all the extermination camps.
If there’s a second after Hitler, who is responsible for the horrors of the war, it was certainly him. [00:24:00] And he was, he knew that they were hunting him, and so he made contact with the Allies. I find it amazing that he actually had the nerve to do it, but then again. And he basically said, "You know, we have de Gaulle’s niece here. I am going to…" He mentioned a number of other people as well. "I want to use that as a guarantee against my life." It’s kind of strange to imagine that one of the reasons that she did survive, of course, is the fact that she was de Gaulle’s niece, because what happened was, even though they did not want to make this kind of a deal with him, it turns out that the International Red Cross got involved, and they decided to negotiate to have 300 of these resistant women released at the same time, and she was simply one of them.
She was released in April of 1945.
Annie: Right. She was a bargaining chip.
Elyse: She was a bargaining chip.
Annie: And while she was [00:25:00] in the camp, she had a corneal injury, which meant that she was, she couldn’t keep her eyes open. And one of the treatments that was recommended at the time was to stay in the dark as much as possible to give the eye time to heal, and that’s why she was kept away from some of the more physical work, and that’s why they just put her in a dark, humid cell and see if she would survive. Just horrible, you know. But they did send the doctor of the Gestapo to see her instead of the doctor of the camp, who would have just ordered her killed because he couldn’t treat her. So you know, it, there were some levels of horribleness at all levels. It’s just all of this is just appalling.
Elyse: Yep.
Politics and Anti Poverty
Elyse: Well, Geneviève was released, and she was in convalescence in Switzerland, and one year later, at the age of 24, she met and then married Bernard [00:26:00] Antoniez, who was in fact an art editor. They proceeded to have four children.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: And two of them worked together for quite a few years, connected to the Ministry of Culture. They became very close to a man who was very important in the history of culture in the last part of the 20th century in France, and that is André Malraux.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: Who was a very interesting man. And she became involved in politics.
Annie: Right. Yeah, because André Malraux was a politician, an author, et cetera, a very close friend of de Gaulle as well, of the general. And apparently he was a very intimidating man. He was very intellectual.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: And when he talked, people felt like they didn’t… he went too fast. Like they didn’t know you know, what he was talking about.
Elyse: He’s also, I’ve seen the speeches, you know, the vibrato in his voice when he talked. It’s very strange. This is, you know… like, when he talked. Yeah, this very strange thing.
But [00:27:00] he was extremely important in putting great value on art and on culture in France and post-war, post-World War II to France.
And she really just became very involved. She’s became involved in the politics and in the party that was basically created by her uncle, who was nominated to be president after World War II was over. The party which is considered to be the Gaullist party, it’s very complicated. I have to admit that it’s very hard for me to…
Annie: RPR. It was RPR at the time, yeah.
Elyse: Which is basically center right, basically that’s, I mean, if you want to place the party. But it was very important in post-World War II for putting the nation back on its feet, for giving a certain pride back to the people in France, and for unifying people, and of course, that was one of the things. And she just, she also, because of her experiences in the camps and because of her faith, her Catholic faith, she decided [00:28:00] that it was very important to work to try to eliminate poverty.
Annie: Right. And that was most of, I mean, besides being a resistant the work against poverty is what struck me as the most important, because back then France had ghettos.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: There were entire places that were shanty towns like, you know…
Elyse: Bidonville.
Annie: The bidonville.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: Yes. And with a lot of poverty, and she explains in her interviews that there’s poverty, and then there’s despair.
Elyse: Mm-hmm.
Poverty to Despair
Annie: And that poverty, you can help people in poverty, but once it reaches the point of despair, then it’s terrible, but it’s too late. These people don’t really, they’ve lost the will to live. And all of this, she’s, I think she learned in the camps. She learned the levels of despair, you know, poverty, deprivation,
and despair. She [00:29:00] spent the rest of her life really fighting for people to have enough to not be in abject poverty.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: Because she could link, you know, the fact that you don’t have a safe place to sleep and you don’t know where your next meal is coming from with despair.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: That’s what leads people to despair, and she didn’t think any human should go through that. And she thought it was the role of government to make sure that this doesn’t happen. And of course, there isn’t a government in the world that has solved this problem. Some do better than others, yeah, but even to this day, we have a problem of people living in poverty, but it was a lot worse after the war, yeah.
Elyse: It was a lot worse. There was a huge amount of destruction, first of all, because of World War II. France had not been an extremely industrialized country before World War II. There was a huge amount of peasantry that had suddenly suffered.
Annie: Yeah, farmers, yeah.
Elyse: I mean, I have seen films of what France and the [00:30:00] slums on the outer reaches of Paris looked like. You would think we’re back in the Middle Ages, really. I mean, it was quite amazing.
ATD Fourth World Fight
Elyse: I did not know about this organization. It was because of this priest, Joseph Wresinski, that she joined this organization called ATD Quart Monde, which now apparently, I looked it up, it exists everywhere in the world. I have actually never heard of it before, I have to say. I mean, I’m aware of a lot of other organizations, but this was started by this priest who was working in the slums in north of Paris, and she joined him and helped create a much larger, more important organization. I’m assuming that part of the function was to try and get people to give money, and also she lobbied for laws, and she wound up being the president of this group for 35 years, from 1964 to 1998.
Housing Rights and Families
Annie: One of the laws she wanted passed, and it has never passed and might never be passed, was [00:31:00] that before you evict a family for, because they can’t pay the rent, you need to secure another place for them to live.
Elyse: Okay.
Annie: That was her goal, but it’s never happened because that’s complicated.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: But in her mind, that would solve so many societal problems if you just gave people a roof, especially families. She was adamant…
Elyse: About families.
Annie: … seeing the kids in poverty just broke her heart because she had four children.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: She had four children, and she had been in abject deprivation in the camps herself, and so she really felt for these people.
Against Torture and Barbie Trial
Elyse: Yes, and the other thing she basically
advocated for very strongly, was against, not only against torture, but against mistreatment of women.
And this is interesting to me too, because this is where she really, she and Germaine Tillion, who continued a correspondence after the war, were in [00:32:00] agreement that one of the focuses of both of their works after World War II was about getting rid of torture, eliminating torture as much as possible, and the treatment of women, it became extremely important to her.
I find it interesting, too, that in 1987, she was a witness who testified in the Klaus Barbie trials.
Annie: Mm. Klaus Barbie was a…
Elyse: He was the Butcher of Lyon.
Annie: Yeah.
A Nazi.
Elyse: He was the head of the SS, and he was the man responsible for the worst of all the tortures and the sending, the killing of many people, and the sending of enormous numbers of people, to their death in the camps. She really spent the rest of her life working on trying to help people, helping people both actively as a member of a political party, but also as part of these associations, the Carmons Association, working with groups to pass laws about torture, about poverty. [00:33:00] And as you say, it is very difficult.
Evictions and Winter Truce
Elyse: Now, I have no idea. I know there is a law in France that says that in the wintertime, you cannot be expelled from a house, no matter how much you haven’t paid back rent and things like that. I do not know when that law was put in. I don’t know if she was one of the people responsible for it.
Annie: I think it’s more recent than that.
Elyse: It’s more recent than that?
Annie: It’s kind of a, there’s a la trêve hivernale is what it’s called.
Elyse: Yeah, exactly.
Annie: So, you can’t cut off people’s electricity or water or evict them in the winter months.
Elyse: In the winter months, yeah.
Annie: And it’s difficult to do it the rest of the year as well, and honestly, in my opinion, that’s okay. We’re a rich country. And I know some people will say, "Oh, they take advantage of that." Fine, I don’t care. It doesn’t make me happy to have someone not have electricity in their home. It’s actually miserable for me to think that there are people, they cut off their electricity because they can’t [00:34:00] pay. I don’t think people who don’t pay are people who are secretly have a fortune that they could spend, you know?
No, I think they don’t pay because they are in circumstances where they can’t, you know? And there might be a couple who take advantage, but honestly, like who cares? Anyway, that’s me.
Elyse: No, I’m just… No, that’s why you’re my friend.
Legacy and Shantytowns
Elyse: Okay, so 2002. She died at the age of 81 and was buried in a small, small cemetery in the town, Bossy, which is in the Alps, where she was living in the Haute-Savoie. And I believe that one of her daughters actually carried on a lot of her work.
Annie: I’m going to have to look up the Carmon because I’ve heard the expression.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: But I don’t think we hear about them that much.
Elyse: No.
Annie: But you say they still exist, so…
Elyse: They do exist, yes.
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: And from what I gathered, because I went onto their site, it isn’t, seems to be more now other places than here in [00:35:00] France, but I’m, I may be mistaken. But you’re right. We hear about lots of different groups, Abbé Pierre and all of that, but I don’t know.
Annie: Look, growing up, we used to go on vacation near Valras-Plage a lot, and in that whole area, Valras-Plage, Sérignan, Sauvian, places like that, there were shanty towns, lean tos sort of things all along the rivers. And I remember when I was very young that my parents talked about these places being demolished to force the people out.
And I hope that they found them other places. I don’t know. I was too young, but it was happening even in my lifetime, and I’m about to turn 61, so it’s not that long ago.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: You know? And I saw it. I saw that they cleared out all of this along the river. All of these lean tos were gone, and this is where people used to live. And where’d they go? I don’t know. And we have the same thing today with, you [00:36:00] know, like people who live in tents and whatever.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: It still happens. And I, you know, if I had a magic wand, that’s the first thing I would do, is get rid of, like help these people. Do whatever it takes, just do it.
Elyse: Just to end about Geneviève. She wrote quite a lot, actually. It’s very interesting. She wrote several books. She wrote a book called La Traversée de la nuit, which she wrote 53 years after her experience of the camps.
Annie: So that’s like going through the night or something?
Elyse: It’s, yeah, it’s…
Annie: Or surviving through the night, living through the night.
Elyse: La Traversée would be crossing the night, I guess you’d say.
But it, I don’t, I like the, I couldn’t figure out how to translate it, and I like traversée in French, so I just left it like that.
Annie: No, it’s good. It’s good.
It might have been translated into English. I’ll look it up.
If I find it, I’ll put it on the website.
Elyse: It’s really about description of the lives and the conditions that they lived in, in the camps, but I find it really interesting. She had the [00:37:00] notes, but she didn’t write it until 53 years later.
Annie: Right, and she talked about the difficulty in sharing about the war and the camps with her own children.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: You know, she talked about the fact that you want to protect your children from everything bad that could happen to them, and putting these images in their heads, to her, felt like something she didn’t want to do. She says, "With my own children, I was very careful what I told them," but then she had to witness to the rest of the… You know, you have to witness what you saw.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: You just have to talk about it.
Elyse: Yeah. She wrote several other things.
She wrote a letter about her faith, which she actually called A Letter to a Friend, which is interesting. I don’t really, I didn’t read any of the excerpts from it.
But she also, there was a book published by her daughter that was a book of the correspondence that she had with Germaine Tillion.
Annie: Mm.
Panthéon Honor and Warning
Elyse: And that was published in 2015, the year that the two of them were [00:38:00] admitted to the Panthéon.
Now, both Geneviève and Germaine, who we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes, in fact, they are not in the Panthéon. Neither of their families wanted them to be taken out of the cemeteries where they were buried and brought, their bodies brought there. And this is, of course, this also true recently with Robert Badinter.
So interestingly enough, what they did was they took some soil from the cemeteries where they were both, each of them buried, not in the same one, and that was put into an urn and taken to the Panthéon as a symbol of their presence in the Panthéon. Their plaque is there, and the urn is there.
Annie: Right, so they were honored.
Elyse: They were honored, right.
Annie: And that’s what matters really.
Elyse: I just want to, this is a quote from her that she, it’s one of the quotes that she actually, it’s from an interview with France Inter in 1997, which means it’s already a number of years ago.
I mean, well, she did die in 2002, but I find this [00:39:00] very prophetic, unfortunately.
This is a quote. This says, "This century has known two totalitarianisms, Nazism and communism. A third is in the process of happening, and that is the totalitarianism of money."
Annie: Mm.
Elyse: How’s that for prophecy?
Annie: Yeah. Yeah, that’s very profound.
Meet Germaine Tillion
Elyse: So, the other woman that was brought to the Panthéon, and who was indeed someone who became a friend of Geneviève de Gaulle’s, is Germaine… Now do you say Tillion or Tillion?
Annie: Well, I think it’s Tillion. I think it-
Elyse: I think it’s Tillion. I think.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: It’s Tillion. Tillion-
Elyse: It’s probably not. Yeah, doesn’t, doesn’t sound right.
She was born in 1907, so she was actually born a bit before Geneviève De Gaulle.
And remarkable as it may seem, she died in 2008, three weeks before her 101st [00:40:00] birthday.
Annie: Right. Right.
Elyse: And she is famous for being a great intellectual who not only was a resistant and followed basically, some of the details we’ll just talk about, but basically almost the same trajectory in terms of being a kind of resistant that Geneviève was. But she is considered to be the mother of modern ethnology, which is a study of people and how they live and the cultures that they live in and the way that they function. And she has a very similar, strangely enough, very similar background to Geneviève. She was born into a family of intellectuals. Her father was a magistrate. Her mother was an art historian. They were both Catholic and at the same time, very liberal and Republican, and she was brought up basically in this very open-minded atmosphere, but with a very, very intellectual bent to it.
Annie: Right. Right, and well, you hear it when she [00:41:00] speaks, she has this vibrato. A little bit. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Elyse: And so she was apparently a brilliant student. She just had one sister, but she was really brilliant. Her sister was born two years after she was, and she apparently very early on, and somehow this really, I really could identify with this because I can remember what it was like when I was in high school. She could not decide what she wanted to study, but every single thing that interested her had to do with human activity. So the list, just to make it short, because it includes absolutely so many things, she was interested in becoming an archeologist, then a sociologist, then an Egyptologist, then a prehistorian, and being a folklorist, and basically every single thing that you can imagine that is a testimony to how humans behave and the culture that they live in. And I put in as a note, the only thing she was not interested in was becoming a painter. So there you are. She was interested in looking at other people’s paintings [00:42:00] and talking about how that shows what their society was like. She was not going to be a painter.
Well, I was pretty much on that list, except I didn’t do folklore, but I went for the painting itself, yeah.
Annie: Well, she said folklore is, in one of her interviews, she says folklore is when you study your own country.
Elyse: Uh-huh.
Annie: Because the interviewer asked her if she looked at France the same way she looked at Algeria.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: And she said, "Well, yeah, but in that case, it would be more like folklore to me…
Elyse: Oh, interesting!
Annie: … Because it’s like, that’s my culture. That’s my soup, you know?"
Elyse: I mean, it’s funny because, I mean, I don’t know how tall she was, but of course the only pictures I have seen of her in the films are of her as an older woman. The word folklore made me imagine her getting up and doing a dance, you know, one of these folklore dances that people do in the different parts of the country.
Ethnology and Algeria Fieldwork
Elyse: But in any event, she enrolled in the École du Louvre, which is really for art history and for art and for everything connected to culture, and of course is [00:43:00] very prestigious and it’s very hard to get into. And she also enrolled at the same time in the School of Ethnology, which was created by someone that I know about because I did study some of his work when I was in my undergraduate studies, and that is a man named Marcel Mauss.
Annie: Who is literally the man who invented the discipline of ethnology, as opposed to sociology. I mean, ethnology is really when you talk about the customs, you describe the people’s food, the dynamics inside a family. I mean, it really is this very detailed way of describing a society and what happens inside it.
Elyse: And she was enrolled at the Sorbonne, at the École du Louvre at the same time. I mean, she was just what the French call a grosse tête, you know?
Annie: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Elyse: I mean, she really was. She was really amazing. And he was so impressed by her, and by her ability to synthesize everything, and her interest in everything, that he became her mentor.
In 1932, she had [00:44:00] a three-month stay in Prussia. Well, actually, just northern Germany. And like Geneviève, whose contact with Nazism came through her experience of living in part of what became Germany with her family in the 1930s, she was shocked by everything that she saw. She was shocked by the attitude of the students. She was shocked by the election of Hitler. She spent a few months in 1932, and then in 1934 in Germany for her studies. She was at the university in Königsberg, but she said that she could not even stomach what she saw around her.
Annie: Right, because everybody was enthusiastically adopting this new way of looking at people that they didn’t like.
Elyse: Yeah. It’s really quite amazing, but both of them immediately had the same kind of reaction. So when she finished her diploma at the École du Louvre, Marcel Mauss [00:45:00] proposed that she go on a mission to the Aurès Mountains, which are in northeastern Algeria, for her PhD, that this would be the subject of her studies for her PhD. And so she went off to Algeria for the first of what became many, many, many times in her life.
Annie: And she said she was a bit disappointed because she would have preferred to be sent somewhere much further away.
Elyse: Oh.
Annie: Like, she would have liked to go to South America, somewhere exotic.
Elyse: Oh.
Annie: Algeria was like, "Oh, that’s, like, around the corner."
Elyse: Yeah, around the corner, but I suspect that it wound up being extremely exotic. What I found fascinating is that… Now, for those of you out there who know nothing about it, and of course Annie comes from a family that actually was living in Algeria, and I have other reasons also for being interested in that area.In Algeria, you have those people who are basically of Arab origin, and then you have the Berber. And the Berber are a part of what were the original inhabitants of the mountains in [00:46:00] Algeria, and a little bit also in northern Morocco, and they have a different language. There are actually two or three different languages, and totally totally different customs, and their language actually even has an alphabet, and it’s very pretty to look at, but certainly not impossible, very hard to understand. It looks like hieroglyphics.
But she learned, because she knew that where she was going was part of what is the country of these tribes of Berber, she learned the language before she went.
Annie: Right. She said she started learning and then she had help from, there were some people assisting her in talking to the people. She said, "It took me long time to get to where I could hold a complete interview myself." Took her some time, but she got there. She got there.
Elyse: I mean, I guess, for me, what it shows is her interest in humans, basically, you know? And how she wanted to be able to communicate with different people, and of course she became very aware of, and very sensitive to, and this is not yet in relation to the [00:47:00] resistance in World War II, very much aware of the condition of women in these societies, how they were treated, and also the treatment of these groups by the French.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: Which of course is, it became…
Annie: Which included de Gaulle, by the way.
Elyse: Which of course included everybody pretty much, you know, so.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Resistance Arrest and Camps
Elyse: And so coming back to Paris, she, like Geneviève, very quickly became aware of what was happening, first of all, because she was very concerned about what’s happening with the Nazism. But she, one of her trips, she arrived back in Paris on June 9th of 1940.
Annie: And she says in her interviews that she did not know what had happened.
Elyse: She did not know.
Annie: She did not know. She was just, " What?"
Elyse: Wow.
Annie: And her immediate reaction was, " We have to resist."
Elyse: "We have to resist."
Annie: [00:48:00] "We cannot go along with this."
Elyse: Right, Yeah, I mean, it must have been quite amazing to simply arrive and suddenly have the capitulation of France and, but she said she, I saw an interview where she said listening to the speech by Marshall Pétain made her sick to her stomach.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: Basically. So she wound up, through various people that she knew, hooking up with some of the people that belonged to the same group of the Museum of Man as Geneviève de Gaulle.
And I do not know if they actually met each other at that time, because she was very involved with those people who were really connected to the work of Ethnology and sociology and everything else, but they were doing like-minded things. They were making leaflets. But she immediately joined a group that was a lot more daring in that she immediately joined a group that was helping prisoners escape.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: She was something else. I would’ve loved to have met her. I mean, I have to say. And she became [00:49:00] part of this chain of information that was sending information to the Allies. At some point or another, her mother joined the resistance with her. Her mother, Emilie. And she and her mother gave their papers to a Jewish family, and that family managed to sit out the war in France without having to go into hiding because they had the papers of Genevieve’s family.
And in 1941, all of the members of the subgroup, if you want to call it that, that she was involved with were arrested except for her.
Annie: Hmm.
Elyse: And she became the de facto leader of this group that, of course, was this… You know, they had no official name. They weren’t part of any official resistance group.
Between 1941 and 1942, she contacted two other resistant groups. One was called Combat Zone North, and the other was the Gloria Network. And she became the official liaison with these groups at a [00:50:00] time when De Gaulle was really actively trying to create a national resistance movement.
And so there were these groups forming that were kind of what you would call official, but her group was simply a nebulous of these people who were doing different activities.
But it was because of her contacts with the Gloria Group that she wound up getting arrested, and she was, in fact, betrayed by a priest.
Annie: Yeah. Yeah, she talks about that in the interviews. She names him. This woman, she took notes and named names. She was not afraid of anything.
Elyse: She was not afraid.
Annie: No.
Elyse: Well, the priest who actually betrayed her actually, you know, was executed after the war.
Annie: Yes, he was that horrible, yeah.
Elyse: He actually was secretly working for the SS. It’s hard to imagine, but there you are.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: So she was arrested at the Gare de Lyon. She was interrogated four times. I don’t know if in the interview she mentions whether she was beaten or not. I [00:51:00] don’t know.
Annie: I don’t remember.
Elyse: She was taken to the prison of Fresnes, which is still a prison in France, but which at the time was a kind of halfway house for those people who were being arrested and eventually being sent off to camps in Germany, and she was there that she learned that her mother had also been arrested. And the two of them were then sent to the camp of Ravensbrück.
She was sent with a group of 24 other people, but she was considered to be so dangerous that she was part of this group that was called Nacht und Nebel, which means night and fog, and they were considered to be the most dangerous of the resistance.
Annie: Well, because they were doing things physically, but they were also convincing others to join. Her whole point was to try and give French people… She understood why not everybody immediately espoused the resistance. She got it. You know, she’s a sociologist, [00:52:00] and she knew human nature. But she really wanted to encourage as many people as possible to see that you don’t have to go along with this. You have a choice in this matter. And so that’s why she was very dangerous, because she had the ability to convince others.
Notes Operetta and Survival
Elyse: What I find absolutely astounding, too, is, and we were talking about it before we started, is that she kept notes the entire time she was in the camp. She wrote an operetta that was making fun of what was going on in the camp.
I don’t know how you manage to have that much distance from what is actually happening around you to do something like that. It was not produced until 2007, but it was actually produced afterwards. She actually was able to smuggle out the notes when she was finally released. She kept notes of the names of everybody. She managed, apparently, to have photos. I don’t know how she managed to do [00:53:00] that, but she was so much an ethnologist and a documentalist of what was going around her, and I suspect that that’s a way of keeping yourself alive, that you can create a distance from what you see and what is happening to you, and you objectify everything. Like, "Today this happened," you know? I can just see that that would be a way of helping you get the strength to survive a situation like that.
Annie: Yeah, she talks about how it’s so important to do the normal things, like, for the men to shave, for the women to wash, or even the men, to try and do as much of the normal things. And this operetta, they just took famous tunes and just added lyrics to it, changed the lyric to make it more interesting. And as far as keeping names, she knew that writing down the names of the people who were torturing them would be a problem, so she would hide it in, like recipes. So she would make notes like it was a recipe.
If the name was Hans [00:54:00] whatever, she would put Haricot, so haricot vert, which starts with an H. And then she needed an A, so she would use another ingredient that started with an A and so forth and so on.
And so she had a list that looked like a recipe, but it was really to not forget the name of the guy who, you know, she was taking names.
Elyse: She was really, I mean, absolutely amazing, and I suspect that she helped the morale, if you can consider that as a possibility in this, for the other women in the camp with her. She also unfortunately did learn that her mother was taken away to Mauthausen, where she was killed. She was considered to be so dangerous because she was part of this group, Nacht und Nebel, that she was on a list of those to be sent to Mauthausen to be executed.
But, thanks to a Swedish diplomat, named Folke Bernadotte, who I looked up and happened to be the nephew [00:55:00] of the King of Sweden, she was included in a group that was negotiated for release by the International Red Cross, and it was literally just before, because she had been put on a list of those to be sent away to be executed, that she was finally taken and released.
She was sent, because she was in this camp, she was sent through Denmark and then finally released in Sweden, where she was put into a hospital to see how she was and then took time to recuperate.
Algeria Independence and Peace
Elyse: The thing that makes her remarkable as well is that like Geneviève, who spent her life after the war working with the poor, she went back to Algeria and basically, besides being a member of College of France and a major historian, she spent the rest of her life defending poor women, defending people who were put in prison against torture and working with the Algerians.
She was very involved [00:56:00] in the War of Independence in Algeria, and she was considered to be an emissary who could go talk to the members of the FLN, which is the organization for independence. And she made friends with a man who actually wound up being saved by her negotiation, a man named Yasif Saadi, who was by her side when she died in 2008.
Elyse: And he was a man who had actually been one of the leaders of the fight for independence in Algeria, and it was thanks to her negotiation with the government that his life was saved. He was imprisoned for a while, and then he was released. But she spent the rest of her life writing about groups and working for peace, basically, and for the absence of torture and mistreatment everywhere, really.
Annie: Yeah. She was an extraordinary woman. And it’s interesting because she wrote some books about the situation, and she was– this [00:57:00] interviewer asked her if she thought that it was a problem that muslim women covered their hair, she didn’t see a problem with it because she said, " It’s only when they go into the city. When they’re in their village where they know everybody, they don’t. It’s just when they go into the city and they don’t know the people, then they cover up." And I don’t know if that’s still the case or not, but at the time, she didn’t think it was a particular problem. I wish French politicians would consider that now.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: Yeah.
Vigilance and Farewell
Elyse: I’d like to add just as a finishing note, a quote from her, just like with Geneviève. She said, "During my life, I have come to realize how fragile and malleable humans are. Nothing is a given. Our duty is to be vigilant. Evil can reappear at any time. It is in waiting, and we must react wherever it is found. We must react before it is too [00:58:00] late."
Annie: Yeah. So a couple of extraordinary women, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion. We’re very lucky to be able to talk about these people that, I mean, we didn’t know them personally.
Elyse: No.
Annie: But, they kind of inspire us to have a, you know, a better outlook on life, to be… We can be optimistic about things. We just have to not take it lying down, you know?
Elyse: And I think it’s also, they’re two women who give a lesson in bravery in general.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: Really. Taking care of others is also part of being a human being.
Annie: Yeah. Thank you so much, Elyse.
Elyse: Thank you, Annie.
Annie: Au revoir.
Elyse: Au revoir.
Patreon Support
Annie: Again, I want to thank my patrons for giving back and supporting this show. Patrons get several exclusive rewards for doing that. You can see them at [00:59:00] patreon.com/joinus.
Would you join them too? You can do it for as little as $3 a month, but if you can afford it, I would love to have you pledge more so you can have access to more of the rewards.
And to support Elyse, go to patreon.com/elysart.
Calder Festival Overview
Annie: The Centre Pompidou has teamed up with the region Centre-Val de Loire, the Calder Foundation, and Fondation Louis Vuitton to put together a region-wide exhibition built around the American sculptor Alexander Calder, the man who invented the mobile, the hanging kind, not the phone kind.
The festival is called Ar (t]Chipel. And this year it’s built entirely around Calder because 2026 marks 100 years [01:00:00] since he just arrived in France. Here’s what makes it different from a normal museum show.
Venues and Dates
Annie: Instead of putting everything in one building, they’ve spread Calder’s work around roughly 15 venues around the region, Château de Chambord, Château d’Azay le Rideau, Château Royal de Blois, the fine art museums in Tours, Orléans, and Chartres, and several contemporary art centers.
There’s also a stop that means more than the others, the village of Saché, near Tours, where Calder actually lived and had his studio starting in the 1950s.
That is where his large welded stabiles were built. The dates vary by venue. Some exhibitions started as early as July. Most run from mid-October through the end of the year, and a few stretch into January 2027.
So look them up if you’re going to be in the Loire Valley. I think this is [01:01:00] a fantastic opportunity to see his work. And thank you, David Palachek, for alerting me about this.
Pickpocket Trial
Annie: Let’s talk about pickpockets in Paris because it’s more dramatic than many of us realize. There’s a trial that opened in Paris this past week. It explains something a lot of visitors run into and don’t understand.
Starting Tuesday, September 15th, six members of a Bosnian family go on trial in Paris, accused of running a child trafficking ring built around pickpocketing. Their targets, tourists at Disneyland Paris, the RER platforms out at Marne-la-Vallée, that’s where you get off when you’re going to Disneyland, and Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport.
How the Ring Worked
Annie: Here’s how investigators say it worked. Groups of six to nine children, mostly girls under 13, worked together. One would flag a target, sometimes [01:02:00] tagged by nationality, Dubai, Chinese, Japanese, American, et cetera. Another moved in with a bag while the rest kept watch. They hit crowds hard during the evening parade at Disneyland in particular.
The kids brought the money back to Paris, where the adults running the network took it all. The investigators say the ring pulled an average of 25,000 euros a day.
Now, here’s the part that matters. These are not independent kid pickpockets making their own choices. They’re under 13, which in France means that they can’t be criminally prosecuted at all.
A sociologist who studies this told the AFP, so that’s Agence France-Presse, that these children get moved from hotel to hotel and are forced to hit a daily quota or face beatings, burns, and in some cases, sexual violence. [01:03:00] His exact words: "This isn’t delinquency, it’s genuinely human trafficking."
So if you’ve ever had a strange encounter with a group of kids in a crowd at Disneyland, on the RER, or at Roissy Charles de Gaulle, this is likely what you ran into.
Safety Advice
Annie: My advice, keep your bags zipped and where you can see it in these spots. Don’t chase or confront anyone yourself, and if you notice a group of children clearly working a crowd, flag it to security or a police officer.
The kids are victims in this. The adults running them are the ones actually on trial through September 23rd.
Newsletter and Credits
Annie: I send out a short weekly newsletter, what I’ve been up to, a peek into that week’s episode, and a question I’d like you to take on.
It’s free at joinusinfrance.com/newsletter.[01:04:00]
My thanks to podcast editors Anne and Christian Cotovan who produced the transcripts.
Next Episode Teaser
Annie: Next week on the podcast, a very fun episode about a recent camping trip that Jennifer Gruenke took in Brittany. She hiked a lot and took regional buses and saw some beautiful vistas.
Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you join me next time so we can look around France together. Au revoir.
Copyright
Annie Sargent: The join us in France Travel Podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and copyright 2026 by Addicted to France. It is released under a Creative Comments, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.[01:05:00] [01:06:00]
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Episode PageCategory: French History