Chapter 1“Something Must Be Done”When World War II erupted in September 1939, it didn’t mean much to Germaine Tillion, who at that moment was living in a cave on the side of a cliff overlooking the Sahara. For the previous five years, the young French anthropologist, following in the tradition of her American counterpart Margaret Mead, had been studying seminomadic Berber tribes in the Atlas Mountains in northeast Algeria.
One of only a handful of female anthropologists in France, the petite, dark-haired Tillion was a protégée of Marcel Mauss, who, like Franz Boas, Mead’s mentor, was regarded as one of the world’s preeminent authorities in cultural and social anthropology. Also like Boas, Mauss encouraged his students to travel across the globe, searching out remote, primitive places and collecting information about their inhabitants’ behavior, society, and culture.
Mauss and Boas were alike in another important way: They emphasized the similarities among peoples rather than their differences. While both accepted the idea that humanity was divided into different races, they rejected the idea that some races were superior to others. To his students, Mauss repeatedly stated his fundamental principle: “There is no such thing as an uncivilized people.”
Fascinated by anthropology’s broad sweep, Germaine Tillion, from the beginning of her career, was “impatient to decipher the riddles of the world,” according to her biographer Jean Lacouture. At first glance, such grand ambitions seemed far-fetched for anyone, let alone a young woman who’d been brought up in a small village tucked away in the Auvergne, a rural province in south central France. Today the Auvergne is considered “peasant France,” filled with farms and little villages, famous for its cheese and charcuterie. Its landscape and history, though, belie the mundane nature of its everyday life.
The Auvergne is part of the Massif Central, a spectacularly beautiful mountainous region noted for its volcanic peaks, yawning canyons, deep green valleys, and rocky, windswept plateaus. It got its name from the Arverni, a warlike tribe best known for its fierce resistance to the conquest of ancient Gaul by Julius Caesar and his Roman legions, five decades before the birth of Christ. Almost two thousand years later, the region would again become a stronghold of French resistance, this time against the Nazis.
But when Germaine Tillion was growing up in the early years of the twentieth century, life in the village of Allègre was undramatic, slow-moving, and mired in tradition. Her parents had been born into prosperous, well-connected families from the area, many of whose members had been lawyers and public officials for generations. Men on her mother’s side had served as the hereditary mayors of their ancestral town since the reign of Louis XVI.
But Tillion’s father, Lucien, who was a magistrate, and his lively, outgoing wife, Émilie, an art historian, had always set their sights beyond Allègre. Cultured and well read, the couple wrote several volumes of Les Guides Bleus, the venerable travel book series issued by the French publisher Hachette, focusing on the history and cultural heritage of France and other European countries. In the early 1920s, they and their two daughters—Germaine and her younger sister, Françoise—moved to Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, a leafy, affluent suburb of Paris.
In 1925, when Germaine was eighteen, Lucien Tillion died suddenly of pneumonia. His wife continued working on the Guides Bleus, writing four more volumes with Marcel Monmarché, the creator of the series. Known for her erudition and sparkling sense of humor, Émilie also delivered lectures, wrote articles for art publications, and became a leading figure in a circle of intellectually and culturally minded women in Paris.
From the time her daughters were little, Émilie encouraged them to go to college and pursue careers of their own—a rare attitude in patriarchal France. Françoise studied at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, one of the country’s most prestigious, selective institutions of higher education, where women were still very much in the minority. Germaine, for her part, took her time deciding which path she should follow. In her quest to “decipher the riddles of the world,” she studied psychology for a while, then archaeology, before discovering Marcel Mauss and anthropology. In 1933, after three years of coursework at the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, and other schools, she was awarded her first fieldwork mission.
Germaine, now twenty-six, had hoped to get as far away from France as possible—Tibet or Tierra del Fuego, perhaps—but instead was assigned to the North African country of Algeria, which the French had colonized a century earlier. Yet even though Algeria was only a few hours from Paris by plane, the desolate, mountainous territory of Aurès was as wild and remote as any place she could have wished for. Lacking trade and roads, it was populated by fierce Berber tribes whose members, according to French colonial officials, were thieves and murderers with low intelligence who’d never had any contact with Europeans, much less a young European woman. The idea of Germaine’s trying to insert herself into this virile, violent Muslim society, they declared, was sheer madness. She paid no attention to their warnings. In fact, she later said, their racist comments only added to “my initial sympathy for the population in question.”
She settled in the most inaccessible spot she could find—on the side of a mountain with a stunning panoramic view of the Sahara. The closest town with the rudiments of civilization—a doctor, a store, a school—was a fourteen-hour horseback ride away. Once she’d pitched her tent and set up camp in a cave, she began to learn the dialect of the first tribe she’d decided to investigate—a grouping of about sixty families in the Chaouia tribe, who eked out a living in a terrain as dry and rocky as the surface of the moon.
Germaine was extremely careful in the way she approached this insular society. She began by inviting the old men of the tribe to her cave, where over cups of coffee and with the help of an interpreter she invited them to tell stories of their people—their history, rituals, and religious beliefs—and in turn told them about her own. The elders, whom she called les grands vieux, entered into the dialogue with gusto, spinning “tales of travel, of ghosts, of battle.” Devout Muslims, “they were very sorry at the thought that I, whom they considered a good person, was doomed to hell as a Christian,” she later said. “But I pointed out that their beliefs were not that different from those expressed in the Old and New Testaments.”
Having won the trust of les grands vieux, Germaine turned her attention to the rest of the tribe, leaving her cave at dawn and traveling by horseback to their encampment, where she got to know the younger men, as well as the women and children. “If nature had given me a Cyclops eye in the middle of my forehead or a dog’s muzzle, I would have astonished them less than with my jodhpurs, camping gear, and endless scribbling,” she later told an interviewer. “Once recovered from their amazement, however, they realized I was harmless.”
Germaine’s respectful, restrained approach impressed the tribe members, as did her attempts to make herself useful, helping out when someone was sick or writing letters to government authorities on their behalf. Before long, they were opening up to her, happy to teach her everything she wanted to know about their community.
Over the six years Germaine Tillion spent with the Chaouia, she was “accepted wholeheartedly” and “received everywhere like someone from the family,” she said. “I had no problem being a woman in this extremely manly society. Even though the men had more or less locked up their wives, keeping them on the sidelines, they saw me as a person of authority. In cultures like these, when a woman by chance does have authority, it sometimes gives her more influence than a man.”
Germaine felt equally at home with the tribes; indeed, their members’ behavior, traditions, and customs reminded her of those of the peasants in the Auvergne. The Berbers, she declared, were neither “narrow-minded nor thieves, and no more fierce” than their contemporaries in rural, out-of-the-way places in France.
During her stint in Algeria, Germaine took several long breaks in Paris, spending time with her mother, to whom she was very close, and consulting with Marcel Mauss and her other mentors. When she was on her mountaintop, though, she led a solitary, isolated existence, with no radio or newspapers to keep her abreast of what was going on in the rest of the world.
In the spring of 1940, she finally completed her mission, having filled a multitude of notebooks and written reams of field reports about the Chaouia’s family structure, as well as their economic, cultural, and social organization. In Paris, she would begin writing her doctoral thesis and present her findings to Mauss and other prominent members of France’s anthropology circles.
Copyright © 2025 by Lynne Olson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
