Jeanne Gaillard (23 December 1909 – 19 September 1983) was a French historian and a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War.
Biography
She was born at La Rochelle. Her father, a career officer, having been killed during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915, she grew up at Béziers and received a scholarship to enable her to study history at Montpellier. After graduating in 1930, she became a teacher, holding positions at Guéret and Toulouse and, in 1936, at the Lycée Jules-Ferry in Paris, where she continued until 1950. In 1937, she met her husband Pol, and they were married in 1941.[1] They had five children: Anne, Manuelle, Pierre, Luc and Roland.
Gaillard became a militant Communist. In 1940, she offered refuge to the Jewish physicist Jacques Solomon, a fellow teacher and editor of an underground magazine, L'Université libre, at her Paris home. Solomon was later arrested and executed by the occupying forces.[2] Jeanne and her husband continued to participate in the production and distribution of the magazine.
After the war, she was a regular contributor to the multidisciplinary publication La Pensée. In 1950, she took up a teaching post at the Lycée Molière [fr], but she was forced to leave in 1955, her health weakened by an earlier bout of tuberculosis. From 1964 to 1976, she worked as a "Maître-assistante" at the Paris Nanterre University, where she published many articles and obtained her doctorate in history;[3] her thesis, Paris, la ville, accepted in 1975, is extensively quoted in historical research.[4] Adrian Rifkin calls it "a long and complex chef d'oeuvre of urban demography", but criticises Gaillard's use of history to support the Marxist economic theories of Guy Debord.[5] Parallels have been drawn between Gaillard's work and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.[6]
Jeanne died in 1983 from an allergic reaction to a wasp bite.[citation needed]
