Suzanne Bertillon


Suzanne Bertillon was a prominent French figure before and during World War II, whose various roles included decorator, journalist, lecturer, and resistance fighter. She was a laureate of the Resistance Medal, the Croix de Guerre 1939–1945, the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and the Medal of Freedom with bronze palm.

Early life

Suzanne Marguerite Bertillon was born in Paris, 23 June 1891. She was the granddaughter of Louis Bertillon, physician and statistician. She was one of two daughters of Dr. Jacques Bertillon, also head of the municipal statistics department of Paris, and his wife, also a physician.

Career

From 1919 onwards, she exhibited her painted and decorated fabrics in Paris.
In 1924, along with her sister Jacqueline, a lawyer, Suzanne appeared on an electoral list led by a woman of letters, Mme. Aurel, at a time when women were not yet entitled to vote.
In the company of young men and women from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, she traveled to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, and later recounted her impressions at conferences in France and Switzerland, as well as in the right-wing daily Le Matin, in articles published in 1932 entitled "Anticommunistes du monde entier, unissez-vous!" At the time, she was close to Henri Bourgoin's xenophobic and anti-communist "Association des travailleurs français", opposed to class struggle and Marxism, and spoke at several of its meetings between 1932 and 1934, mentioning in particular her stay in the USSR. In 1932, she made a violent attack on Léon Blum in the association's periodical, in the name of defending France's security against German pretensions. The short-lived association was renamed the "Confédération générale des travailleurs français" in 1934, and Bertillon briefly served as its general secretary.
She traveled to Germany in January and February 1933, when Hitler came to power on January 30, and brought back alarmist impressions and reflections, published in Le Matin. She also gave lectures on her trip.
Bertillon's two August 1933 articles in Le Matin on the plight of the famine-stricken Ukrainian people were the first in France to alert readers to the scale of the famine in this Soviet territory. She gave lectures on the USSR for the Jeunesses Patriotes in the French provinces.
In December 1935 and January 1936, she was the special correspondent in Berlin for another right-wing daily, Le Jour. Le Matin sent Bertillon to Spain after the Popular Front's electoral victory in February 1936. Her anti-communist report was entitled "Spain under the reign of fear". In 1937, she published her reports on Nazi Germany in La Revue hebdomadaire.
In 1936, Bertillon received a 15-day suspended prison sentence for incitement to murder, following violent remarks made against members of the government at a conference in Meurthe-et-Moselle. The following year, on appeal, she received a one-month suspended prison sentence for threatening to kill two Popular Front figures, radical-socialist Édouard Herriot and socialist Joseph Paul-Boncour, during a political conference of the Parti National Populaire in Nice in 1936. A member of the French Popular Party, she took responsibility for her words, and in the party's periodical, accused the Communists and Léon Blum's government of being responsible for her conviction. She then gave lectures for the PPF, and for royalist circles in France and Switzerland. In June 1938, this nationalist called for firmness against Germany over the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia question.

World War II

In 1941, Bertillon wrote the biography of her uncle, the criminologist, Alphonse Bertillon. In that same year, under the German military administration in occupied France during [World War II|Occupation], Bertillon headed the foreign newspaper censorship department at the Ministry of Information, with the support of her uncle René Gillouin. It was in this context that she came into contact with Swiss and American journalists. In particular, she was in contact with Virginia Hall, who, under cover of her status as Vichy correspondent for the New York Post, worked for the British and then American secret services. In 1943, she founded and ran the Hi-Hi resistance network with Louis Marin, a friend of her uncle Alphonse. In the Bouches-du-Rhône region, she turned to her cousins and a friend to organize and recruit in two areas, Marseille and the Rhône delta. Her network was also present in Auvergne and Var. She came into contact with Edmond Locard, who provided her with information between March and October 1943.

Post-war

After World War II, she collaborated with L'Union nationale des femmes. She continued to give conferences, for example, in 1950, in favor of the Marshall Plan.

Death

Suzanne Bertillon died 8 October 1980, in Montgeron.

Awards and honours

After the war, she received the Resistance Medal, the Croix de Guerre 1939–1945 and the Cross of the Legion of Honour. In May 1947, like other resistance fighters, she received the Medal of Freedom with bronze palm, awarded by the United States, for exceptional services rendered to the Office of Strategic Services, April 1943 to July 1944.