About Madeleine

Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939 but Madeleine was determined that her plans to study for a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris would not be disrupted and she sailed from Folkestone on 31 October 1939.

In the Spring of 1940, the German army invaded Belgium and France and Madeleine’s escape route to the channel ports was cut off. She fled to the south of the country together with the thousands of Parisians and finally returned to the capital in July 1940.

In October 1940, she registered at the Sorbonne to continue the second year of her doctoral programme and it was then she began to write her diary which, initially, she writes as a letter to her parents to replace the letters she could no longer send to them.

“I am writing this for you because I can no longer send you letters. What I am writing here is a replacement. The first of October, the date classes begin again, is a suitable date to start but I have been wanting to do this for a long time because it is a way to feel closer to you”.

The Madeleine Blaess diary is unique because it is written by a British student who had French papers and lived freely in occupied France. This is unlike most other British, Commonwealth and American citizens who were rounded up and interned. Although always fearful that she might be arrested, Madeleine was left alone by the authorities. It helped that she had extended family in the Paris region, and spoke and wrote French very well. She was able to assume an identity more ‘French’ than it was in reality.

The diary is the only testimony of everyday life in occupied France written by a British student. It also stands out because the diary is an almost complete set of daily entries written from 1 October 1940 to 17 September 1944. Unusually for a published occupation diary, the entries do not foreground the military and political situation but describe the trivia and banalities of everyday life. Madeleine focuses her diary writing on describing people and events.

The intellectual reflection and self-reflection which characterised other student diaries of the inter-war period were not things she was overly concerned with, saying that writing down what she felt seemed like a pointless duplication. Her focus on description was a deliberate choice. Possibly influenced by the Mass Observation Project which solicited descriptive diaries from the public in the inter-war, possibly by Pepys whom she occasionally cites or quite simply just because she wanted to have a record of life to catch up on with her parents at the war’s end. She noted down the tiniest details.

The diary is a realistic account of what daily life was like for many Parisians. Life was a brutal, ongoing struggle to survive crippling food shortages, bitter cold and illness. For many French people, their everyday life was so onerous that taking an ideological or active stance in opposition to the Nazi and Vichy regime was simply not something they had the will or energy for.

The diary is long. Its 123,000 words trace four years of a young woman who moves from youthful dependence on her family towards a future which she contemplates excitedly and anxiously for what it might hold by way of career and personal happiness. We are given a rare personal insight into the challenges facing young women like Madeleine who wanted a professional career when it was still expected that they should prioritise marriage and family.

We see how young women handled opposition to their scholarly ambitions through the intellectual forums and resources created by women to support one another during the inter-war period and during the occupation. We also see how women pursued their ambitions during wartime when there was greater pressure to abandon their plans and return home to support their families.