A historian reconstructs the life of a woman shaved and then hidden away for decades
In « La Recluse de Saint-Flour », Grégoire Kauffmann traces what suspicion and slander did to Esther Albouy, a woman publicly shaved at the Liberation and later shut away by her own family into the 1980s.
The historian Grégoire Kauffmann has published an essay devoted to Esther Albouy, a woman subjected to the public head-shaving ritual inflicted on suspected collaborators at the Liberation of France. According to Le Monde's Livres section, Albouy was afterward sequestered by her own family, a confinement that lasted until the 1980s.
Le Monde describes the book, titled « La Recluse de Saint-Flour », as a highly literary piece of writing ("un essai très écrit"), in which Kauffmann reconstructs how suspicion and calumny shaped the course of a single woman's life across decades.
No further detail on the book's length, publisher or release date was given in the available material.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
