She was nicknamed “the Gestap hyena”. Before being in the pay of the Nazis under Vichy France, the French athlete Violette Morris, openly lesbian, multiplied her sporting exploits. A comic book attempts to define this character.
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“To be destroyed by all means.” According to legend, these few words telegraphed from London constituted the death sentence for Violette Morris. The spy died on April 26, 1944, at the age of 51, under the bullets of a group of resistance fighters. Her car was targeted on a small road in Normandy, with a family of collaborators on board whom she was driving to safety. The circumstances of his death remain shrouded in mystery, as does his life story.
Because before becoming the one that the French historian Raymond Ruffin, the first to be interested in her case, disdainfully nicknamed the “Gestap hyena”, Violette Morris was first of all a sports legend.
Necessary distance
The comic strip “Violette Morris, to be brought down by all means”, the first volume of which was published last fall, attempts to shed light on the eventful life of this athlete who became a collaborator in Vichy France. It is based on the rigorous research of historian and lesbian activist Marie-Jo Bonnet, who wrote the fascinating historical file accompanying the comic strip.
The authors, Bertrand Galic and Kris, and the designer Javi Rey had the bright idea of creating a fictional narrator, a former classmate of the sportswoman who became a private detective in the aftermath of the Second World War, a way for them to keep their distance necessary for the main character. His collaboration with the Vichy regime and the Nazis is in fact clearly attested, even if, due to a lack of personal documents, nothing is known about his motivations.