Vianne is the elder daughter of Julien and Madeleine Rossignol, the wife of Antoine Mauriac, and the mother of Sophie and Julien. She is roughly 10 years older than her sister, Isabelle, and is married with an 8-year-old daughter, Sophie, when WWII begins. Vianne is nervous and shy by nature, and a string of early misfortunes in life—her mother’s death when Vianne was 14, her father’s subsequent abandonment of his daughters, a teenage pregnancy followed by several miscarriages, etc.—have led her to idolize her husband as a kind of savior without whom she can’t survive. When Antoine is conscripted and subsequently captured, Vianne is devastated. Because she witnessed the effects WWI had on her father, her worries for Antoine are compounded, and her relatively traditional ideas about gender roles make her feel even less certain of her ability to hold the household together in his absence.

Vianne is initially reluctant to challenge the German occupation; in fact, she aids the Nazis on at least one occasion, providing them with a list of fellow teachers who are either Jewish or communists. She also scolds Isabelle repeatedly for endangering the family’s safety by resisting Nazi rule, although some of this anger stems from longstanding guilt.