In 1917, politician Louis Barthou delivered a much-reported lecture at the Sorbonne, “L’Effort de la femme française pendant la guerre,” published in full by Le Monde Illustré (28 April 1917) and well worth reading, especially for the way he suggests that women’s activities since 1914 helped to counter the reputation of French women as outrageous coquettes. He also details the various ways women’s work had helped the war effort – he calculates that 375,000 women were then employed in the private sector –  as well as the moral support given by mothers, wives, and sisters as their men put their lives on the line.
Whether directly inspired by the speech or simply channeling the rhetoric of the moment, director Alexandre Devarennes (1887-1971), working in collaboration with René Jeanne, then associated with the Service Cinématographique de l’Armée, made the two-part propaganda film La Femme française pendant la guerre, released in the summer of 1918 (the title could have been lifted from that of Countess Roger de Courson’s 1916 book, which was identical). An initial fictional scene with actors, including Jeanne’s wife Suzanne Bianchetti in her screen debut, directly appeals to the emotions with its brief vignette of a mother crying as her children play around her. From there, the film shifts into actuality territory, showing women in the city and country performing jobs traditionally associated with men: train station porters, tram conductors, chimney sweeps, factory workers, farmhands, etc. The second part details ways women directly help soldiers at the front, whether by knitting clothes, working as nurses and entertainers, or caring for future generations. After comparing women of the time to heroines of the past, Devarennes shows women awarded medals and, to give it a relatively up-to-date feel, hospitalized workers injured in the 30 January 1918 aerial bombardment of Paris.
Each part’s opening intertitles consist of split screens with women engaged in various activities: plowing a field, in a factory, holding a baby. According to the magazine Les Potins de Paris (7 November 1918), La Femme française pendant la guerre was the first film to use this type of animated intertitle and ushered in a new cinema fashion, though the claim is unsubstantiated. Alphonse Gibory, whom Devarennes credited as the film’s cameraman in a 1968 interview, worked with Pathé and Éclair until joining the Service Cinématographique during the War. He collaborated with Devarennes on three films, and after the Armistice worked for the American Red Cross, for whom he filmed the 1919 International Red Cross conference in Cannes.
Barthou significantly underestimated the number of women workers in France. In the agricultural sector alone, 3,200,000 female workers replaced the 3,000,000 farmers called up for service. By 1918, 430,000 women were working in munitions factories, 120,000 were nurses (of whom only 30,000 took a salary), 11,000 were employed in the post office, and 5,000 on the trams. When the War ended, most were quickly laid off.

Jay Weissberg