Title: 4 Peace news, May 29, 1953
Author: Gertjan Cobelens
Last saved by: Joseph

André Trocmé and the French, Nonviolent Resistance to the WWII German Occupation

by Peace News

André Trocmé was almost a pacifist when he was called up into the French Army in the 1920’s. He was in a geographical survey unit in which he hoped he would not have to bear arms. On landing in Morocco, where a rebellion was in progress, he was issued with a rifle, which he returned, and he proceeded into the desert unarmed. His action was discovered when an inspection took place several hundred miles from the coast.

After listening to Trocmé’s explanation an officer told him that he should have known sooner that he was obliged to carry a rifle. Now he was an integral part of a group of 25 men who might be called upon to defend themselves with arms. If the group were attacked he would be indicted before a military court as a deserter. Happily the group was not attacked. Trocmé had learned his lesson and became a fully convinced conscientious objector. 

Part of his training for the ministry was undertaken in New York where he met his future wife, Magda Grilli, granddaughter of a Russian Decembrist (officers who revolted against the Czar) exiled in Siberia. Magda completed her training as a teacher after they married. For the following eight years Trocmé worked as a pastor in industrial and mining areas of France, until 1933 when he was transferred to the little Huguenot village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (Provence), in the Haute Loire region of South-East France. In Chambon, along with Edouard Theis, Trocmé founded the College Cévenol, an international secondary school. In the 1930’s the school expanded rapidly until it held 350 pupils and was known outside as well as inside France.

Only now, eight years after the occupation of France, has it become possible to tell one of the most significant stories of the war; a story of French nonviolent Resistance. It has taken so long because it is a different kind of story, about a different kind of resistance. There were no official historians willing to record it. The compilation of this history has been made by ordinary people searching their memories, recovering incidents which at the time were natural and unexceptional, but which the turn of events and the tenor of our time has revealed to be of tremendous importance. They illuminate a pattern of conduct in the face of an intolerable situation, which may yet achieve recognition as a classic experiment in ethics.

Since Gandhi, the cynics of the West have dismissed the arguments of nonviolent resistance which Gandhi made the theme of his life by a contemptuous reference to World War Two. How would you use such a method against people like the Nazis? Yet here is a story of farmers, peasants, pastors, who did in fact use nonviolent resistance against the Nazis and their agents with a measure of success.

In Chambon there were nearly eight thousand Huguenots, who had lived there since the time of the Reformation. They formed a separate world of country folk still loyal to the faith of their fathers. The two pastors of the village were men who interpreted their Christianity as involving the renunciation of violence. From the outset of Hitler’s adventures they proclaimed their conscientious objection to war. After the invasion of Poland public opinion regarded the two men as traitors, accomplices of the Nazis or at least dangerous fanatics. It was a time of complete isolation for them but happily they understood each other.

The Faith of the Pastors

Their faith was grounded in the principle that evil cannot be overcome by evil. To oppose the terror spreading across Europe, they were agreed, one had to use non-terrible means, one had to have confidence in the theme of the Founder of their communion, that fear and the threat of death might be cast out by perfect love. But as yet their flocks, the inhabitants of Chambon, did not comprehend this.

The war, which now involved France, dealt misery wherever it reached. Refugees from the battle-areas began to fall back along the roads leading south. Then came the nightmare of the fire bombing of Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe  in May of 1940, and soon the collapse of France itself. Chambon was packed with fugitives, many of whom had lost members of their families through air-attacks on the way.

Weeks before the refugees arrived Trocmé and Theis had tried to join the International Red Cross. They had felt that their witness to the pacifist cause was sterile unless it included a positive effort to relieve suffering and promote peace interpersonally. The French military authorities refused them permission to serve with the Red Cross. Now instead of their going out to meet distress, distress had come to them.

June 1940 brought the pact between Hitler and Pétain, and the end of the Republic. In a few hours it had become necessary for the French to reject what they had worshipped and to worship what they had rejected. That liberty for which they had fought was presented by the new Government as a cowardly lapse bringing about the defeat of France. The nationalism against which they had fought was depicted as a noble discipline which created the virtues of “work, family and ‘fatherland’. 

The most extraordinary thing was that few Frenchmen noticed the change. Recourse was had to the experience of a few men grouped around the pastors, men who had known Nazism in Germany and who knew that it is impossible to make peace with the powers of darkness. Then it became possible for a few to say No to the new regime. 

Those who had been loudest in their denunciation of the pastors at the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland now proclaimed that those same men were accomplices of England. This was at the time when the British Fleet destroyed the Vichy Navy in the Bay of Oran.

From 1940 to 1941 the Vichy Government made three efforts to bring into line the ex-servicemen, the churches and French youth. It was at this time that collective resistance began to show itself. There were several incidents in Chambon, which revealed the influence of the pacifist pastors and the growing moral and spiritual strength of the people.

Pétain’s Oath Altered

The Legion of War Veterans, which later became Pétain’s party, was set up. With few exceptions, all the men of the district went into it for fear of losing their jobs. Yet, inspired by the two pastors, the Chairman of the Chambon group added to the oath of obedience to the Marshall, these words: “as far as the orders I receive are in conformity with God’s will”. Nothing happened to them. Within a year the local section of the Legion had become useless to the Pétain police for checking on public opinion trends.

The second trick the Government tried was to make compulsory the saluting of the flag in all schools, together with the use of the Fascist salute. In Chambon, a secondary school with a Christian pacifist outlook, the College Cévenol, refused to obey the order. Those staff members who wished went to the nearby state school if they wanted to salute. No saluting was done at Cévenol. At the end of the year the custom was abandoned in all schools in that district.

The next attempt to arouse enthusiasm for Pétain was the order to ring church bells to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the Legion of War Veterans. The two pastors again refused an order. In spite of the violent conduct of some women parishioners who wanted to ring the bells themselves, a small woman caretaker refused them access to the church. These little serio-comic events contributed to the rousing of the spirit of resistance of the Huguenots. 

Saving Jews and Links with the Quakers

For some months alarming news had been reaching Chambon about the frightful living conditions of the Jews interned in camps in the south of France at Gurs and Argeles-sur-Mer.
 
The church was very moved and decided to send one of its pastors with relief to help the social workers who were already at work in the camps. The pastor went and found there a group of American Quakers who were then still active in Marseilles. They proposed that he should take to Chambon any refugee children who might be got out of internment.

Soon “Quespy” was opened, the first house for children at Chambon. In a few months seven other houses to receive the children were opened by various movements. 

This move was taken quite consciously at a time when it was dangerous to shelter Jews. It was an action through which the people of Chambon determined their position. With this fraternal gesture, asserting a constructive reply to the fanaticism of the day, nonviolent resistance to the Hitler-Pétain system was born. Conflict with the authorities, daily expected, broke out in the summer of 1942. It was during this period that the news reached Vichy-France of the savage operations against the Jews in Paris. This was the time chosen by the Minister of Youth, M. Lamiraud, to pay a visit to the young Protestants of Chambon to rally them around the Marshall. 

It was as the congregation was leaving the church after service that a delegation of thirty from the College Cévenol approached the Minister for Youth and the Prefect who was accompanying him, to protest solemnly against the anti-Semitic persecutions and to declare that if similar steps were taken in Chambon they would be resisted through nonviolence.

The Prefect was indignant and while he admitted having received orders, repeated the official theme, “there is no question of persecution but of a re-grouping of the Jews in Poland.’ Then turning towards the pastors he warned them, “Look out, I have received letters from seven informants and I know all about your attitude and your doings.”

That very week the youth groups were called together by the pastors to set up a hiding place for the hundred or so Jews in the village. The storm broke out a fortnight later when Vichy police came and occupied the village. Two big coaches intended to carry off the Jews were parked in the village square. The pastors were called upon to give a list of the Jews in the village.

Jews “Disappear”

On their refusal they were urged to sign a notice calling on the Jews to give themselves up so as not to disturb the public order and not to endanger the families sheltering them. Again the pastors refused. They were then threatened with arrest if the order was not carried out by mid-day the next day, a Sunday. Instead of obeying the order they put into action the same night the plan arranged for the “disappearance” of the Jews. 

The Protestant church was full that Sunday morning, everybody expecting the arrest of the pastors. The village council was in session under threats and had signed the notorious appeal to the Jews. At noon not a single Jew appeared. The pastors were not arrested and forty policemen went through every house in the village in vain. They arrested one Jew and put him into one of the big coaches; the people filed by, loading him with presents!

The police were stupefied, realizing they were far from popular. The next day they had to release the prisoner, whose ancestry was but half Jewish. The policemen remained for three weeks in the village, very zealous at first and naively convinced of the rightness of their action; but they soon lost all enthusiasm. The population was educating them as they went from house to house questioning and searching.

For long months after, the police continued to raid Chambon and the neighboring villages. Many times, on the eve of a search, an unknown voice would telephone to warn of the danger. It undoubtedly belonged to a civil servant who had been converted by the nonviolent resistance of the villagers.

The success of the methods employed at Chambon attracted an increasing flow of Jewish refugees. The Jewish Relief Agency states that more than two thousand of them stayed temporarily in the region, hidden on the farms. That was when “Cimade” came into the picture. It was a youth group composed of members of several youth organizations in the district which took on the job of smuggling Jewish refugees into Switzerland where they were placed in the care of the World Council of Churches. It provided the Jews with false identity papers which were essential to cope with regular police checks, to obtain ration cards and to be able to travel in the company of a girl volunteer as far as the Swiss frontier. 

There were few arrests.

Reference: IISG/WRI Archive Box 148; Folder 1, Subfolder 7.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was first published in Peace News, May 29, 1953; with permission of WRI/London.

Caption
Jewish children sheltered in Chambon-sur-Lignon, 1941; courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Jewish children hidden in Chambon, 1942; courtesy jewishvirtuallibrary.org

André & Magda Trocmé, Chambon, 1941; courtesy plu.edu