You don’t know anything about me by Julie Héraclès won the Prize for best first novel. The book returns to the Purge symbolized by a photo by Robert Capa showing a woman branded for having collaborated with the Germans.
«Writing about her has never been a way of clearing her customs, but, perhaps, of making her human“: a first novel imagines the life of the “Mown of Chartres», immortalized in a famous photo and branded for having collaborated 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 pretty incredible», Confided, delighted, this novelist, who began her career at 44 years old.
In the beginning, a photo that went around the world. The one taken by Robert Capa on August 16, 1944, in Chartres, which today has become a symbol of the Purge, a savage revenge perpetrated against those who had, during the Occupation, 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. Named the “Mown of 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 unique voice» are the first feelings that crossed her, reveals Constance Trapenard. “I have known this photo forever. I studied her in high school, saw her in the city… she never left me», explains today Julie Héraclès, who grew up and lives in Chartres.
The idea of devoting a novel to her, however, did not immediately impose itself on the novelist, driven by “the desire to write a novel that would take place during the Occupation“. In 2019, while she put down her suitcases thousands of kilometers away, on Reunion Island, she had a “click, obvious». «By chance, I came across Capa’s photo. There, I tell myself that I have my first novel“, she remembers.
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An ambiguous destiny
If she remembers that the first emotion that went through her when she discovered the photo, years before, was “compassion“, she knows that Simone Touseau, “was not just 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 the story of 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 anchored in France in the 1940s, 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 was able to switch and become a collaborator. Having her speak in the first person achieves this goal.», she explains.
So, Julie Héraclès imagined almost everything: the feeling of being downgraded, the first romantic affair 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 has never been a way of exonerating her, but, perhaps, of making her human, terribly human in her complexity.“, she argues. Before concluding: “Yes, I humanized her, she is neither just a victim, nor solely this culprit. I created areas of light and areas of shadow while having no thesis to defend».
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