How has art been a form of protest? The story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore

Amy Lee Lillard
Dec 16, 2025
10 min read

Can art be a form of protest? Does art really work as resistance? And how can you make protest art?

In times like these, it's natural to wonder if art is really important. If writing, music, performance, and other creative work really matters.

I find hope and inspiration from looking at stories of artists using their work to resist the status quo. The story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore is a super powerful example to show the way.

Listen to this story!

To many on the island, the two women were middle-aged spinsters. They were harmless.

In the midst of a Nazi occupation, that was enough to ignore the two artists in the farmhouse outside of town.

Then things started appearing around the island. White crosses with blood-red lettering. Banners in church. Small publications that claimed to be the voice of internal dissent. And it drove the Gestapo crazy.

There’s the argument that art does nothing. That true resistance is only through organization, protests in the street, and all the visible means of dissent.

But Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore knew art is never not political. Art is inherently resistance. And in the 1940s on the UK’s Jersey Island off the coast of France, during a five-year occupation that caused fear, hunger, and the breakdown of sanity, they used art as their way to encourage resistance (and to stay true to their own).

How did small, anonymous art and writing make a dent in the Nazi machine? How did playing on our assumptions about what older women do help them resist for years? And what can we learn from the surrealists on Jersey island about how to make art as resistance today and tomorrow?

From Rebel Yell Creative, this is The Art of Resistance, a podcast about channeling our rage into creation, and using writing, music, and all kinds of art to resist the status quo.

I’m your host and producer Amy Lee Lillard, and I’m an author, podcaster, and middle-aged invisible woman who’s been obsessing over artists who resisted since I was a kid. And today, I’m looking to make all the weird art, and help others do the same.

PART 1: CLAUDE AND MARCEL

Claude Cahun chose that name at age 25. It was their real name, they said. When asked about gender, their response: “Masculine? Feminine? Depends on the situation.”

Claude was a photographer, a writer, a performer. They were known for using their own androgynous image in their work, making haunting images and stories. This was the 1920s, and they were often considered part of the surrealist movement.

But surrealism, as most art movements that are now considered canon, was heavily male. Even aggressively misogynistic.

Claude had known Marcel Moore since they were young kids taking vacations on Jersey Island. At an early age, they loved each other, and they became lifelong partners. Funnily enough, their widowed parents married each other, and they also became step-sisters, an important fact later in life.

In the midst of the wild 1920s, that partnership wasn’t much remarked upon; queerness was just a fact of life… especially in Paris.

But as the 1930s evolved, things changed.

Claude was born Jewish. The both of them were queer, and defied the norms of gender in clothes and behavior. And when Hitler was elected in Germany, and laws targeted Jews and queer people, among others, Claude and Marcel made a decision.

In 1937 they moved from Paris to the island of their childhood vacations. They bought a farmhouse.

And they figured they were safe. They made art. They adopted cats and took them on walks. They wore gender-neutral clothes. Sometimes people would catch a glimpse into the garden and see the two wandering around naked. They didn’t necessarily lie about their partnership, but they were legally step-sisters. So that’s how they were known.

PART 2: OCCUPATION

World War II officially started in 1939. By mid 1940, Germany and its allies were winning; they’d taken over most of Europe, including France. And they were threatening the Channel Islands.

The British government evacuated its citizens from Jersey Island, and the remaining people surrendered to the Germans. Claude and Marcel were among them.

The Nazis then set up permanent occupation for the next five years. The island became a five mile long, nine-mile wide prison.

Because they were cut off from the rest of the world, there were fuel shortages. Materials shortages. Not enough food. Cold and damp winters. So disease and hunger spread.

The Nazis made a long list of things that were now punishable by death. Owning a radio. Not registering as Jewish. Owning a camera. Publishing.

The registered Jews were deported to the mainland, and moved to the camps.

POWS from the war in Europe and North Africa were brought to the island for slave labor. Sneaking these starving workers any food was also punishable by death.

PART 3: THE SOLDIER WITH NO NAME

The German soldiers lived out of a requisitioned hotel for the most part, and they claimed a nearby church as their own. The hotel and the church were not far from Claude and Marcel’s farmhouse.

When the occupation started, Claude and Marcel chose to start dressing like the other wives on the island – wellies and scarfs, longer hair. Claude didn’t register as Jewish, and Marcel didn’t admit that she knew German. So they looked and sounded like nobodies, the kind of older woman that can disappear into the background.

But then, strange things started appearing.

In the cemetery near the German’s church, there were routinely fresh graves. And white crosses would appear on them with white lettering: Fur sie ist der krieg – for them, the war is over. Blood-red paint splattered across them.

In the church, a banner appeared on Sunday morning: Jesus is great but Hitler is greater; Jesus died for us but he must die for Hitler.

At the local amusement park, stray coins were left around the carousel and other spots that said Nieder Mit Krieg – Down with war.

It was all Claude and Marcel. It started as almost a dare – could they get away with plastering anti-war sentiment right in front of the Germans?

Then it shifted. Claude remembered a phrase they’d read back in the early 1930s as many Germans watched in horror at Hitler’s ascent. Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als Schrecken onhe Ende: Better an end with terror than terror without end.

They shortened the phrase to Without End. And Claude and Marcel plastered it everywhere – from walls and buildings, to empty cigarette packs left around the island.

Right from the start, Claude believed that not all the German soldiers stationed on the island were actually Nazis. How could they be? They were just boys, just working class kids indoctrinated and paid, and now outside the echo chamber of Germany. And they were as cut off as everyone else – no news of the war was coming in, even for them. They were hungry too. They were worn down by the grind of the never-ending occupation.

So Claude and Marcel started making small publications, slipped into uniform pockets and left where soldiers could find them. Flyers, zines, poems, cartoons, collages: all of it made in the voice of fake dissenting soldiers. They were signed der Soldat ohne Namen – the Soldier with No Name.

Claude and Marcel had kept a radio – punishable by death – and they listened to the BBC for news of the war.

Marcel translated it into German, and would include bits in the publications. They didn’t have to make anything up, because the tide of the war was soon shifting against Germany.

So they wrote out their paper bullets, went to town, and passed them to other Jersey islanders in secret. They put them in German letter boxes, inside German magazines, and on the windshields of German cars.

The Gestapo was enraged. For years, they hunted down this network. Because they believed it was an actual resistance network of hundreds of people, led by a mole in the German army.

Meanwhile, Claude and Marcel kept at it. Even when some soldiers moved into their house in 1941 and started eating their food.

The two of them made nearly 3000 publications over four years. Hiding in plain sight.

Image 1: A sinking ship drawing parodying Hitler as a siren, not with beautiful song but ranting and screaming. “I believe in the end the waves devoured both sailor and boat, and that was brought about by Adolf Hitler with his screaming.”

Image 2: “Hitler leads us, Goebbels speaks for us, Goring eats for us, Ley drinks for us, Himmler? Himmler murders for us. But nobody dies for us.”

Image 3: “Who has the right to sacrifice a people in order to save a government? And the longer the war, the longer and more confused the inescapable revolution, the worse the sorrows of our women and children. Thus says the soldier with no name.”

Image 4: “The cowardly police bureaucrats who thrive on lies and shameful cruelty will be destroyed by the soldiers with no name."

PART 4: THE REAL SOLDIERS

When the Nazis set up their laws at the start, they also encouraged islanders to inform on their neighbors. Anyone who turned in someone breaking the laws were rewarded. And in the midst of desperate, hungry times, there were many informers.

One of them reported Claude and Marcel. It might have been the lady at the stationary shop, where they got the paper for their tracts.

The Gestapo didn’t believe it at first. There was no way these two old ladies could be behind the resistance network… that they could actually be the network… that they had played a massive trick on the German army.

They were arrested in 1944. On the way out of their house, Marcel grabbed a handful of pills. The two of them swallowed the pills on the way to prison, hoping it was enough for suicide. It wasn’t, but it put them in a coma. Long enough to miss the last ship of Jews and other deported folks going to the death camps.

They recovered, went to trial, and were sentenced to death. They were in prison for months waiting for their sentence.

And while they were there, they met other prisoners. Some of whom were German soldiers. One of them had found Claude and Marcel’s publications. He had read them. And he agreed with them. He found the courage to desert the army, even though they were on an island, with nowhere to run.

And he wasn’t the only one. The soldier told Claude and Marcel that the majority of the army on the island, and probably elsewhere, were done. They wanted to run. They were just waiting for their moment.

In May, 1945 – island liberated. Claude and Marcel were free.

PART 5: IMPACT

Like I said at the beginning of this episode, there’s the argument that art does nothing. That true resistance is done by collective action, big groups, loud protests.

But Claude knew the lie of that argument. Their mere existence was resistance.

Just being a queer person at the time was a political act of resistance. Being a woman and being a surrealist was resistance. Being a person who wore men’s clothing was resistance. Being a Jewish woman who hid in plain sight was resistance.

Claude and Marcel’s art didn’t end the war. It didn’t cause an uprising on Jersey Island. It didn’t turn history in a massive way.

So how do you measure the impact of their art? For that German soldier, and others they didn’t meet, maybe reading those publications made them realize they weren’t crazy, that their natural empathy wasn’t something to destroy as the Nazis said. Maybe those soldiers took that lesson back to their homes after the war. Maybe they remembered it for the rest of their lives, and passed it down to their families, breaking intergenerational stories wide open.

But even if they hadn’t met that German soldier in prison, and learned that their work did indeed reach people who needed to read it, the act of making it saved their lives.

After the war, Claude wrote that, even though their actions could have killed them, making their publications and other art on Jersey was a means of staying sane in insane times. “The only thing that made me happy,” they wrote, “was my papers, my madman’s project…I was taking action; It was an open door, a hope, at the same time it was an obsession.”

That’s one of the beautiful things about art as resistance. It helps you save yourself in the midst of moments that try to destroy you.

CONCLUSION:

What can we learn from Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore? What can we do as creative people in this fucked-up world?

Because we are all creative. We can all finds ways to resist.

Claude and Marcel did all this on their own. They didn’t have a handbook on how to resist. They didn’t even have enough to eat.

But they did it anyway. They banked on human empathy, on the fact that wars are fought by idealogues and autocrats, but many times the people underneath them are just trying to survive.

Sociologist James C. Scott talks about a category of resistance that is anonymous and barely seen. He says it’s foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander and sabotage. He says: “Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines….vital territory is being won and lost here too….thousand upon thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef.”

For me, the lesson from Claude and Marcel is that. There’s no such thing as too small when it comes to art and resistance. There’s no such thing as pointless art. Art is resistance, and survival.

So here’s what we do from here:

We lean in to the things we think are drawbacks. I’m a 48-year-old woman, and increasingly I’m invisible. As Claude and Marcel showed, that can be a superpower.
We understand the power of using our voice and making our art for our own survival.
And don’t think of this as short term. Even if we get a new administration in 2028, even if we miraculously come out of this terrifying, tyrannical moment, there is so much to fight against and for. This is a long-term commitment to making art for a better world.

The Art of Resistance is a podcast from Rebel Yell Creative.

This episode is presented by the Des Moines Pride Center, the largest LGBTQ library in the state of Iowa. We offer unique community events and learning opportunities, along with a fascinating look at our queer history.

At the Des Moines Pride Center, our library and archives are always growing, and you can be part of it. We host library cataloging socials on the second and fourth Sundays of each month, along with author talks, history presentations, and community events that bring people together to learn and connect. Visit us as desmoinespridecenter.org to explore Iowa’s largest LGBTQ library and archives to discover ways to get involved.

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