From 1919 onwards, she exhibited her painted and decorated fabrics (clothing and upholstery) in Paris. In 1924, along with her sister Jacqueline, a lawyer, Suzanne appeared on an electoral list led by a woman of letters, Mme.
Aurel, at a time when women were not yet entitled to vote. In the company of young men and women from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, she traveled to the
Soviet Union in the early 1930s, and later recounted her impressions at conferences in France and Switzerland, as well as in the
right-wing daily Le Matin, in articles published in 1932 entitled "Anticommunistes du monde entier, unissez-vous!" At the time, she was close to Henri Bourgoin's
xenophobic and
anti-communist "Association des travailleurs français", opposed to
class struggle and
Marxism, and spoke at several of its meetings between 1932 and 1934, mentioning in particular her stay in the USSR. In 1932, she made a violent attack on
Léon Blum in the association's periodical, in the name of defending France's security against German pretensions. The short-lived association was renamed the "Confédération générale des travailleurs français" in 1934, and Bertillon briefly served as its general secretary. She traveled to Germany in January and February 1933, when Hitler came to power on January 30, and brought back alarmist impressions and reflections, published in
Le Matin. She also gave lectures on her trip. Bertillon's two August 1933 articles in
Le Matin on the plight of the
famine-stricken Ukrainian people were the first in France to alert readers to the scale of the famine in this Soviet territory. She gave lectures on the USSR for the
Jeunesses Patriotes in the French provinces. In December 1935 and January 1936, she was the special correspondent in Berlin for another right-wing daily,
Le Jour.
Le Matin sent Bertillon to Spain after the
Popular Front's electoral victory in February 1936. Her anti-communist report was entitled "Spain under the reign of fear". In 1937, she published her reports on
Nazi Germany in
La Revue hebdomadaire. In 1936, Bertillon received a 15-day
suspended prison sentence for
incitement to murder, following violent remarks made against members of the government at a conference in
Meurthe-et-Moselle. The following year, on
appeal, she received a one-month suspended prison sentence for threatening to kill two Popular Front figures,
radical-socialist Édouard Herriot and
socialist Joseph Paul-Boncour, during a political conference of the Parti National Populaire (the new name for the
JP) in
Nice in 1936. A member of the
French Popular Party (PPF), she took responsibility for her words, and in the party's periodical, accused the Communists and Léon Blum's government of being responsible for her conviction. She then gave lectures for the PPF, and for royalist circles in France and Switzerland. In June 1938, this nationalist called for firmness against Germany over the
Sudetenland and
Czechoslovakia question.
World War II In 1941, Bertillon wrote the biography of her uncle, the criminologist,
Alphonse Bertillon. In that same year, under the
Occupation, Bertillon headed the foreign newspaper censorship department at the
Ministry of Information, with the support of her uncle
René Gillouin. It was in this context that she came into contact with Swiss and American journalists. In particular, she was in contact with
Virginia Hall, who, under cover of her status as
Vichy correspondent for the
New York Post, worked for the British and then American secret services. with
Louis Marin, a friend of her uncle Alphonse. In the
Bouches-du-Rhône region, she turned to her cousins and a friend to organize and recruit in two areas,
Marseille and the
Rhône delta. Her network was also present in
Auvergne (
Puy-de-Dôme,
Allier, and
Haute-Loire) and
Var. She came into contact with
Edmond Locard, who provided her with information between March and October 1943.
Post-war After World War II, she collaborated with ''
L'Union nationale des femmes''. She continued to give conferences, for example, in 1950, in favor of the
Marshall Plan. ==Death==