On April 23, 2009, during the National Commemoration of the Days of Remembrance dedicated to the Holocaust, President Barack Obama expressed the need to “bear witness to the human capacity to destroy . . . but also [to] pay tribute to the human impulse to save.” To do so, he chose to evoke the story of Le Chambon:
in the moral accounting of the Holocaust, as we reckon with numbers like 6 million . . . we also remember the number 5,000—the number of Jews rescued by the villagers of Le Chambon, France; one life saved for each of its 5,000 residents. Not a single Jew who came there was turned away, or turned in. But it was not until decades later that the villagers spoke of what they had done, and even then, only reluctantly. The author of a book on the rescue found that those he interviewed were baffled by his interest. “How could you call us good?” they said. “We were doing what had to be done.”Footnote 1
By pointing to the community of Le Chambon as a representative of the Righteous, that is, of Gentiles who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, President Obama followed a well-established tradition. Le Chambon features prominently in the permanent exhibit of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and in the gardens of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.Footnote 2 The small town has become a central icon of civilian resistance to Nazism and a prime example of successful rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.
Two authors in particular have contributed to the reputation of this community in the United States: Philip Hallie, a Jewish ethicist deeply marked by his experience of World War II, and Pierre Sauvage, a Jewish filmmaker who was born in Le Chambon, where his parents had found shelter.Footnote 3 They tell a fairly similar story that has become the standard narrative in the United States, perhaps in part because a famous college text, Introductory Readings in Ethics, included excerpts of Hallie's work.Footnote 4 Hallie and Sauvage both stressed the exceptional nature of the rescue in a nation that widely supported the racist policies of the Vichy Regime, the centrality of the small town of Le Chambon in the rescue, the role of the local Protestant identity and belief system, the hospitality of the local inhabitants as the surest expression of their goodness, and the profound respect rescuers showed for the freedom of conscience of their guests. Hallie's and Sauvage's works have generated significant controversies in France. During a 1990 conference on the rescue, deep disagreements arose among witnesses and scholars over the exact scope of the rescue, the motivations of the rescuers, and the lessons, if any, that need to be drawn from these acts of courage. To a large extent, however, both scholars and witnesses have agreed that the Protestant faith and identity of many villagers explained their willingness to shelter persecuted Jews.Footnote 5
On the national scale, French Protestants' involvement in the rescue has generated strong interest among historians. Their action took several forms, from public statements denouncing antisemitism or relief work in the internment camps to civil resistance involving the manufacture and distribution of false papers. The interventions of Marc Boegner, the French Protestant Federation president, on behalf of the French Jews, and the involvement of pastors are by now well known. They publicized their opposition to the Vichy regime's policies on October 4, 1942, when a summary of the Pomeyrol Theses denouncing antisemitism was read in all but eight of the French Protestant parishes.Footnote 6 Protestants involved in relief work quickly moved into active resistance when the need arose. Thus, the Cimade workers initially provided aid to prisoners but went on to help them escape from the camps and to direct them toward safe shelters.Footnote 7 Among the regions welcoming Jews, the village of Dieulefit in the Cévennes as well as Le Chambon have become emblematic of the Protestant rescue.Footnote 8
While Protestant action in favor of the Jews is familiar, studies focused on their indifference or passivity remain limited.Footnote 9 An examination of the evolution of French Protestant opinion between 1940 and 1944 confirms that Protestants were overall more impervious to the Vichy Regime's antisemitism. But it also raises significant questions about the role of location in shaping Protestant attitudes (urban or rural, occupied or free zone). The author concludes by asking, “to what extent the few tens of thousands of Protestants of the Mountain represent faithfully 800,000 French Protestants?”Footnote 10 Despite the dangers of extrapolation, historians often assume that exemplary communities stand for all Protestants. The Musée Virtuel du Protestantisme Français, for instance, describes Le Chambon as a “haven of hospitality and rescue for a large number of war victims . . . the very symbol of Protestants’ opposition to Nazism and antisemitism.”Footnote 11 Some are convinced that “only religious factors, and their cultural and political implications, can explain this exception;”Footnote 12 French Protestants, they argue, differed from Catholics in their attitude toward Jews and shared specific affinities with them that fostered positive relationships between the two groups.Footnote 13 As a result, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon now stands as a “Judeo-Protestant site of memory.”Footnote 14
By considering more closely this “French Protestant exceptionalism,” this article seeks to bring greater complexity to the history of the rescue in Le Chambon and to weave together recent French studies, interviews with survivors, and archival research.Footnote 15 It seems that in France as in the United States, the scholarship's emphasis on belief and morality has obscured a range of other factors; it has privileged cognitive factors over situational factors, and at times transformed situational factors into character traits. This emphasis is largely the product of the ways in which the memory of the events has been built since 1945, and of the fact that a few vocal actors have framed the events. In other words, the confusion between history, commemoration, and the desire to preserve the “sanctity” of the events has significantly shaped the analysis of the roots of the rescue.
The rescue on the Plateau resulted from a unique convergence of means, individual and institutional convictions, and cultural habits. To restore this complexity, we will first examine the claim that the rescue was primarily a Protestant, uncoordinated, and local phenomenon. These three characteristics are, as we shall see, interdependent. Second, French Protestant exceptionalism becomes less clear if one considers that, in a country where Protestants accounted for less than two-percent of the population, eighty-percent of French Jewish children survived the Holocaust. This relatively high rate is connected to factors that have little to do with religious denomination.Footnote 16 On the Plateau, the spiritual dimension of the rescue needs to be examined alongside the more traditional economic functions of the region. Third, the diversity of Protestants in the region influenced the rationale of rescuers, so that no particular theological position (and perhaps Christian pacifism in particular) can single-handedly claim to have grounded the movement. Finally, despite the potential affinities between Jews and Protestants in the French context, discordant voices arose among Jewish survivors that lead us to draw further distinctions among Protestants in the region. In probing the exact role of religious commitments and culture during World War II, a more complex and dynamic picture emerges, and what becomes apparent challenges traditional visions of Huguenots as constant and unequivocal supporters of their Jewish neighbors.
I. Local Protestant Exceptionalism Reexamined
At first glance, the rescue in Le Chambon looks like an eminently Protestant enterprise. To start with, the vast majority of the Chambonnais was Protestant (95%), whereas Protestants represented only two-percent of the French population.Footnote 17 Although André Trocmé, the senior pastor of Le Chambon, remains the most familiar leader of the movement, all thirteen pastors of the region came to participate in the rescue efforts. Furthermore, French Protestants seemed well suited organizationally to engage in the rescue. As a very small minority of the national population, they had built over the years a fairly tight knit network of “connaissances” (acquaintances). This extensive network played a considerable role in the rescue, by providing connections and venues for meetings and by securing trust between people. Locally, the pastorale, the monthly meeting of the pastors, allowed preachers to exchange news and share information about the refugees.Footnote 18 Bible study groups also educated the faithful on their responsibility toward the refugees.Footnote 19 In the parishes, weekly preaching spread messages of resistance. Furthermore, youth organizations, such as the Boy Scouts (Camps des Éclaireurs Unionistes that gathered both Jewish and Protestant boys) provided a setting for education on the rescue.Footnote 20 Locally, Protestants were particularly well represented among public school personnel, a profession strategically situated to offer help to children, for instance by concealing their pupils’ identity.Footnote 21
The Plateau also benefited from networks that extended far beyond the region and French borders. The YMCA, the American Friends Service Committee, the Secours Suisse, the Quakers, and the Cimade were all Protestant organizations that contributed to the effort in the region.Footnote 22 Some of their members smuggled Jews (often children) from internment camps, guided them to safety, and gathered financial support for their housing and education.Footnote 23 The historical connections between French Protestants and Switzerland also facilitated the transfer of information, of funds and, when it became necessary, of people between the two countries.Footnote 24 The activities of this extensive network indicate that, while Protestants in the region lived in a rather remote area, they by no means worked as a segregated community or even as isolated individuals. Certainly, individual convictions and courage did play an indispensable part, but the role of organizations invites careful consideration of the conjunction between individual decisions and structural, cultural, and sociological factors. It is perhaps helpful to think of the Plateau not so much as a unique and isolated “place of goodness” than as part of a complex network involving several organizations and communities. In that sense, the rescue of Jews was no local affair.
The extension of the geographical scope of the rescue also challenges the centrality afforded to both Le Chambon and Protestants in the movement. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to consider Le Chambon's action during World War II apart from the support of the region. The rescue efforts depended heavily on the help of surrounding villages or isolated farms in all parishes of the area. To challenge the prominence afforded to Le Chambon in American memory—sometimes referred to as “Chambonization” by French scholars—has considerable implications for our understanding of the role of Protestantism. Footnote 25 The percentage of Protestants on the Plateau, while far above the national average, is much lower than that in Le Chambon, and since thirty-eight percent of the Plateau's inhabitants were Protestants, the remaining sixty-two percent had to keep quiet; but, there is plenty of evidence that they did more than simply observe the situation.Footnote 26 As word of mouth spread, and the needs became more pressing, non-Protestants organizations and individuals coordinated their actions with the inhabitants of the Plateau, either by channeling refugees to the area or by welcoming them as they moved away from the Mountain.Footnote 27
Locally, the success of the rescue depended on the cooperation, the tacit agreement or, at least, the passivity of the entire population on the Mountain, including civil servants who, like the gendarmes, warned the inhabitants of upcoming arrests:
when the gendarmes de Tence received an order to arrest [Jews], they got into the habit of slowly walking up the hill, of stopping at the café before they got to the steepest part of the hill, and saying loudly that they were coming to arrest ‘one of those dirty Jews.’Footnote 28
The gendarmes’ attitude was not entirely uniform, as the searches and arrests in l’Abric, La Guespy, and Le Côteau Fleuri demonstrate.Footnote 29 But the region also benefited from the support of its préfet, Footnote 30 the Protestant Bach, whose involvement constituted, in the Vivarais as in other French regions, a crucial factor in ensuring the success of the rescue.Footnote 31
Individuals of all convictions, including Catholics and non-believers, sheltered refugees in their homes or hotels. Some refugees were told to seek help indiscriminately from priests or pastors. Some children within the same family attended both Catholic and Protestant schools, while others could not quite tell the difference between the two confessions. Mireille Benvéniste remembered that “in a village still marked by the wars of religion, the two communities helped us equally. . . . My sister attended the Catholic nuns’ school and I was singing in the Protestant choir, [while my brothers were students at the Collège Cévenol].”Footnote 32 A Jewish survivor hosted in Le Chambon remarked that “the Barraud couple, though not very religious had the same attitude as the most fervent Protestants of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.”Footnote 33
Many children came to the Mountain by way of other villages and were led by workers from diverse organizations. For instance, Lydia Jablonski arrived from Chabannes, and Fanny Ben-Ami from the Château de Chaumont.Footnote 34 Chabannes and Chaumont, however, were not Protestant shelters, but children's homes established by the O.S.E., (Organisation de Secours aux Enfants), a Jewish organization that sought shelter for children on the Plateau.Footnote 35 Until her arrest and deportation in November 1943, Madeleine Dreyfus, the local leader of the O.S.E., identified safe hosts for Jewish youth, convinced farmers to take them in, and provided them with false papers, food cards, and a small financial compensation.Footnote 36 Along with the O.S.E., the Éclaireurs Israélites and the Service André included mostly Jewish men and women.Footnote 37 Generally speaking, Jews were not simply passive victims of the German and French authorities, but joined the efforts in various ways, as forgers of official documents, like Oscar Rosowsky, or as resistance fighters.Footnote 38
For all the emphasis placed on individual decisions, and despite recurrent claims that the resistance movement in the region stemmed from unique local roots, organized institutions exterior to the Plateau constituted essential actors.Footnote 39 In short, the rescue of Jews in the region was more than a local Protestant affair, and its success depended on the involvement of three sets of people, apart from the local Huguenots: fellow believers active in national and international organizations, Jewish and Catholic groups and individuals in the nation, and local non-Protestants. If the diversity of the participants challenges the thesis of Protestant exceptionalism, was there still something specifically Protestant in the ways the local population welcomed the refugees? The Plateau's response first needs to be considered in its chronological evolution. Were the Mountain's inhabitants particularly prompt in identifying the Jews' vulnerability? Were they eager to provide them with shelter? In other words, was the rescue exceptional because of its precociousness and spontaneity? Was it, in short, the peculiar hospitality of the Chambonnais that made the rescue exceptional?
II. Protestant Hospitality: Chronology and Context
Much moral ink has been spilled over the ethical value of the Chambonnais's hospitality. Long before Hallie praised the Chambonnais for their ability to welcome the stranger, local political leaders and advertisements for the region heralded their “spirit of hospitality.” Footnote 40 Local historians have claimed that the hospitality was grounded in the Biblical principles of the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. Some rescuers certainly did connect their action to Christ's call to welcome the stranger. But the history of the local population's response to the “Other's presence in their midst” follows a rather complicated chronology. What is more, other factors, the importance of tourism in particular, also explain the magnitude of the movement.
Of the seventeen villages on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, only three had more than 2,500 inhabitants: Le Chambon, Tence, and Saint-Agrève.Footnote 41 These relatively isolated communities consisted primarily of poor farmers who lived very simply, raising cattle or sheep. For the seventy-percent of the population who lived off farming, summers provided additional forms of revenue, as children from industrial towns swarmed to the area. Since the nineteenth century, charities had encouraged and supported this seasonal exodus of children to better and greener pastures to improve their health.Footnote 42 Initially, individual farmers provided lodging for the youth, but by the end of the century, specialized infrastructure had developed to meet the demand. Between 1940 and 1944, a single charity program, L'Oeuvre des Enfants à la Montagne, placed over six thousand children in families or pensions in the area.Footnote 43 A 1943 report from the Chef de Gendarmerie, the local police official, provides a sense of this significant seasonal influx of people: “[Le Chambon] includes 900 inhabitants in the winter, 6,000 in the summer, and 4,000 in September.”Footnote 44
In the late nineteenth century, the region drew a more upscale set of seasonal visitors, including wealthy Protestant families from large cities, such as Lyon and Saint-Étienne, who built second homes on the Plateau.Footnote 45 During World War II, the region also fulfilled a “nourishing function,” as it attracted an increasing number of consumers who sought to purchase food on the black market when supplies dried up in the cities. In February 1943, Trocmé deplored the ridiculous rise in prices generated by the refugees' presence in Le Chambon and the financial benefits local peasants drew from this commerce.Footnote 46 A short 1943 Protestant publication printed in Le Chambon, entitled The Face and the Soul of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, did not shy away from speaking of “tourism” to describe “the most important source of wealth” in the small town.Footnote 47
The economic and cultural roles of the region facilitated the sheltering of Jews during the war in at least three ways. First, they provided ready-made infrastructures to welcome refugees, since by 1939, 42 hotels (9 in Le Chambon), 50 pensions (38 in Le Chambon) and 12 youth hostels (9 in Le Chambon) had been established on the Plateau.Footnote 48 Second, they helped engrain certain habits among the inhabitants who, by 1940, were used to providing housing to outsiders. Trocmé himself remarked in his Souvenirs that the people of the countryside initially “confused refugees with tourists.”Footnote 49 Third, they made the search for Jews more difficult in that they could fit within a larger population that sought refuge on the Plateau for a whole variety of reasons. For instance, a Jewish chaplain visiting the Côteau Fleuri in Le Chambon in 1942 noted that, of the sixty refugees hosted there, only seven or eight were Jewish.Footnote 50 Most of the 1940s documents on the Plateau speak generally of “refugees,” without specifying their religious affiliation, making it difficult to decipher who exactly was hosted in the region. Were the refugees mostly Jews, children, economic, or political refugees?Footnote 51 Without a reliable account and a more complete record, it is hard to tell, and the distinction between hosting and rescuing remains difficult to establish.Footnote 52
In the last twenty years, local historians and political leaders have conflated this tourism with a “tradition of hospitality” that they connected, not only to the local culture, but to Christianity and to Protestantism in particular.Footnote 53 These authors often minimize the economic components of this activity and tend to be uncomfortable with the term “tourism” because it seems to call into question the spiritual motivations of the rescuers. Furthermore, Yad Vashem, the Israeli Center for research and commemoration of the Holocaust, does not recognize as “Righteous among the Nations” anyone who received monetary compensation for their act of rescue. In other words, this institution understands money and rescue to be incompatible. Some rescuers (none of them willing to be quoted) have begrudgingly acknowledged that they failed to mention the money they received for their services. But, more importantly, Yad Vashem's understanding of what counts for “real rescue” seems to have imposed itself on the region and on the formation of memory.
Perhaps the regional memory, as some scholars have argued, has sublimated tourism into hospitality and transformed an economic activity into a more morally compelling action.Footnote 54 However, in the 1940s local leaders were aware that the region's tourism could play against its “higher calling” as a refugee town. They wrote in 1943: “one can hope that the local businesses and all the strength of the Protestant anthill will be devoted to the sacred cause of children. Tourism might suffer as a result, but Le Chambon will have fulfilled the mission that God clearly gave to the town by providing it with so many privileges.” In other words, in 1943, well into the Holocaust, leaders felt like the move from tourism to rescue had not been quite as successful as they had hoped.
Acknowledging the economic importance of tourism makes the seemingly inherent relationship between hospitality and Protestantism a bit murky. A brief chronological survey of the region's activities points to the complexity of the inhabitants' motivations. Nevertheless, the touristic activities of the region are not intrinsically incompatible with the moral courage of the population, and tourism, while it certainly supplied some of the means to host Jews, may not have provided the rationale for keeping them. Considered in their chronological context, it seems that habits developed initially in the context of economic activities became essential assets for the rescue and took on a different meaning as circumstances changed—particularly as the consequences of hiding Jews worsened.
To trace the local population's reaction to the fate of the Jews, it is helpful to distinguish between at least two groups of Protestants. The local Protestant elite's involvement seems beyond dispute, but its exact timing is less clear.Footnote 55 When one considers the “spiritual leaders” of the region (mostly pastors, educators or doctors, and their wives), there is little indication that the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy regime of October 1940 and June 1941 provoked a specific reaction.Footnote 56 Pastors initially seemed attracted to the moral and educational agenda of the Vichy regime, and their preaching did not shift to the issue of the Jews' fate until the summer of 1942, when large numbers of French Jews were rounded up to be deported.Footnote 57 As was true for the rest of France, the spiritual resistance on the Plateau did not enter into full swing until after the “raffle du Vel d'Hiv,” the massive arrests of Jews in Paris on July 16 and 17, 1942.Footnote 58 In other words, religious culture may have played a part in the rescue, but it did not, by and large, initiate a broad movement of resistance to antisemitic policies among local Protestants.
If the Plateau's leaders did not focus on Jews, this does not imply that they did nothing for refugees and for prisoners in the French camps, many of them Jewish. While public statements were few and far between, pastors were engaged in raising funds and supporting various homes set up on the mountain as early as 1940 to host children, Jewish or not, in need of a safe place to stay.Footnote 59 The Swiss Aid homes in Le Chambon welcomed orphans, war refugees, as well as city children who enjoyed the peace of the Plateau, far from air raids and food shortages: “Jewish children blended in with the rest, and no one talked about it.”Footnote 60 But we know that, of the children sheltered at the pension “Tante Soly,” eighty-percent were Jewish, while the Maison des Roches, that is known for the tragic arrest of its Jewish students, did not include any Jews when it first opened in 1942.Footnote 61
Within the Protestant population in general, attitudes were mixed. A Jewish resistance fighter hosted in the area noticed an initial reluctance: “the community of French Protestants did not seem, at first, particularly amicable toward Jews, nor entirely exempt from social prejudices. It was still the case in 1941, in Protestant circles as in others (even among Jews) that the . . . defeat was connected to moral faults and the existence of a problem of immigration of a large number of foreigners, Jews or not.”Footnote 62 Indeed, when refugees fled from the violence of the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939, they were met with significant indifference on the Mountain. In 1936 in Tence, homeowners, hotel managers, and the town authorities all refused to accommodate Spanish refugees. In 1939 in Le Chambon, the Spaniards who threatened to take the more lucrative place of the affluent visitors in the summer were asked to leave once the tourist season started. Despite the efforts of some private charities, the region's famous “spirit of hospitality” fell and rose seasonally, as tourists came and went on the Plateau.Footnote 63 Furthermore, the first Jewish refugees in the region found it rather inhospitable. In the spring of 1940, German and Austrian opponents to the Nazi regime, most of them Jewish, were imprisoned in the Tence camp of the Papeterie, eight kilometers away from Le Chambon.Footnote 64 Some of them managed to escape, with the complicity of the camp's commander and guards, but the gendarmes dutifully caught and brought back forty-three of them. In October 1940, the camp emptied and its inmates sent to the infamous Gurs facilities where conditions claimed many lives.Footnote 65 There is little indication that the Plateau's leaders got involved in this situation, except perhaps for the pastor of Tence, Roland Leenhardt.Footnote 66 To be sure, the circumstances were far from ideal to generate a quick reaction: defeated French soldiers were either in German hands or on their way back home. Furthermore, at the time, few people understood the vulnerability of the Jewish population. Indeed it would be anachronistic to think that most could envision the deportations and extermination to come.Footnote 67
In short, before 1942, the inhabitants of the region provided shelter for refugees and drew few distinctions between refugees in general and Jewish refugees in particular. Rescue organizations, however, better understood the need of Jewish children after 1941, when the president of the O.S.E. finally convinced them that “the best way to save children consist[ed] in getting them out of the camps.”Footnote 68 For the population at large, the particular vulnerability of the Jewish refugees did not become clear until much later, and even in 1943 pastors complained of the population's indifference.Footnote 69 By then, however, the influx of Jewish refugees made it clear that the whole region needed to be involved.Footnote 70 This chronological review, though incomplete, has several implications. In their early support of the Vichy Regime's agenda, the majority of the Plateau's Protestants was not exceptional, but followed trends that were broadly shared by the rest of the French population.Footnote 71 Nor were they exceptional in the timing of their response to the persecution of Jews. But the religious leaders' and organizations' early involvement with refugees (as opposed to their public declarations concerning Jews) stood out in the French national context.
Why is it then that the memory of the events highlights the particularity of the Plateau as a place hospitable to Jews? It could be that in hindsight, after the scale and nature of the Holocaust were revealed, the witnesses came to see the Jews as the primary victims of the war in a way that they had not at the time. The sense of Protestant exceptionalism in Le Chambon resulted also from the fact that the early memory of the events relied heavily on the testimony of its main pastor, André Trocmé. André Trocmé's impact on the memory of the events in the United States sheds light on recent debates over the ideological and theological roots of the rescue.
III. Protestant Divisions: Theology, Strategy and Class
A. Theology: Le Chambon as Icon for Non-violent Resistance
Already in 1945, Trocmé toured American churches to raise funds for the Collège Cévenol, a local Protestant school he had founded in 1938. Translating the experience of the war for the purposes of fundraising required radical simplification (the focus on one clearly identifiable location, and, given the audience, the emphasis on the Protestant identity of the rescuers). Hallie perpetuated this memory in the 1970s because he relied heavily on Trocmé's writings and on his wife's testimony. As a result, the ethicist took for granted the centrality of non-violent resistance and understood it to be one of the primary modes of operation in the region. Magda Trocmé's decision to donate the Trocmé papers, and therefore part of Le Chambon's memory, to the Swarthmore Peace Library only reinforced the connection between the rescue and non-violent resistance in the United States.Footnote 72 French scholars and witnesses have taken issue with this American memory, which they have found too hagiographic and narrow. During the 1990 conference held on the Plateau, historians and witnesses spent considerable time addressing issues related to the spiritual resistance and attempted to restore the variety of movements at work on Le Plateau, including the armed resistance in the region.Footnote 73
Although a number of individuals and associations held pacifist convictions, non-violence represented only one conviction in the region.Footnote 74 Pastors André Morel and Daniel Curtet were Barthians and anti-fascists, and workers of the Cimade felt much closer to the confessing church than to the pacifism of Edouard Theis and Trocmé.Footnote 75 In the state of emergency created by the influx of refugees, Christians committed to different ideologies seem to have collaborated to save lives.Footnote 76 But, in 1942, Trocmé's pacifist methods created tensions, especially as his young theology students joined the armed resistance.Footnote 77 The conflict remained latent through the war but resurfaced with a vengeance after the publication of Hallie's book.Footnote 78
B. Theology and Strategy: Divided Leadership
Hallie's focus on Trocmé as the central leader of the rescue raised other concerns. The ethicist depicted the pastor as a lonely anti-institutional and hierarchy-defiant figure who, as “a rebel for years within the Reformed Church of France . . . refused compromise with authority when it came to matters of life and death.”Footnote 79 This strong stance stemmed directly from André's Souvenirs, which put other actors at best in his shadow, and at worst in a disparaging and inaccurate light. Trocmé intimated that Marc Boegner, the French Reformed Church President, ordered him to cease his rescue activities in 1943.Footnote 80 This claim alarmed central witnesses such as Madeleine Barot, the Cimade director during the war and a close collaborator of Boegner, given the President's expressions of solidarity with the Jewish community and given his intervention to have Trocmé, Theis, and Darcissac released from prison in 1943. Indeed, despite Boegner's initial support of Maréchal Pétain, his stance against the Vichy regime's antisemitic policies seemed just as bold as that of the leaders on the Plateau.Footnote 81
Why, then, did Trocmé denounce the lack of public protest on the part of the Protestant leader? Boegner and Trocmé had had differences before the war, both on account of Trocmé's pacifist convictions and in relation to the Collège Cévenol. Trocmé's and Theis's non-violent commitment was an oddity in the French Calvinist Church, and Boegner himself considered non-violence to be a “grave error of interpretation of the Holy Scripture and Christian doctrine.”Footnote 82 After the war, Trocmé noted resentfully (and incorrectly) that:
in 1946, during the General Assembly of French Protestantism, M. Boegner read a long report on the French Protestant Resistance during the war, he talked about his appeals to the Maréchal [Pétain], congratulated the Cimade . . . [and] listed several parishes that showed courage. On this list, Le Chambon was missing . . . . But isn't it true that Le Chambon, with its novel ideas, its non-violence, its tragedies had been a good example for other parishes? That is obvious!Footnote 83
Trocmé's indignation seems to result from his later work as a world leader in the pacifist movement, which shifted his focus almost single mindedly to the issue of non-violence. It is helpful here to remember that both Trocmé and Boegner, along with the pastors on the Plateau, found Pétainisme as well as some of the Vichy regime's proposals attractive, particularly as they dealt with moral renewal and, for Trocmé, with religious education.Footnote 84 Both men came to distrust the regime early, but in different ways: while Boegner trusted Pétain, but consistently protested the Vichy Regime's treatment of Jews, Trocmé was wary of its totalitarian tendencies, but his papers show little evidence of protest against antisemitism. Where they clearly differed was on questions of strategy.Footnote 85 According to Trocmé, it was during the national synod of Alès in May 1941 that he confronted Boegner on the “vagueness” of his personal interventions in favor of the Jews: “we would like for the whole church to risk itself . . . We have to call on the whole Protestant people to start to protect Jews.”Footnote 86 It is not clear that Trocmé remembered well the series of exchanges that happened during the synod, since there is no clear record of his own early call to protect the Jews. Furthermore, he most likely had little sense at the time of the breadth of Boegner's work and protest behind the scenes, of his strong ties with the YMCA, and of his deep support of the clandestine work of the Cimade.
Finally, Boegner and Trocmé had very different personalities and distinct spiritualities. Trocmé understood his function to be more prophetic and did not shy away from considering martyrdom as a Christian calling.Footnote 87 Boegner was far more reserved in his understanding of his own role, but no less strategic, and more in line with a traditional Reformed understanding of his function than his ebullient colleague. The two pastors also differed on the strategy to adopt because they held positions that entailed different responsibilities. Boegner was well aware of the divisions of the church on this issue: some wished for a more forceful public confrontation with Vichy policies, while others felt at ease with the treatment of Jews. After the second “status of Jews” was adopted on June 2, 1941, sixteen representatives of the Church put together the Pomeyrol Theses. In this document, they stated the limits of obedience to the state, argued for the need to respect fundamental freedoms, and condemned antisemitism and collaboration.Footnote 88 In response, royalist and nationalist Protestants composed their own theses, the Sully Theses, arguing that the “punishment of Israël [was] intended to save it . . . and to bring it back to faithfulness.”Footnote 89 Confronted with these radically different factions, Boegner privileged direct dialogue and intervention with the Vichy officials and adopted a “policy of presence . . . characterized by its discretion, its patience, but also its firmness, and when circumstances required it, by its great authority.”Footnote 90 Yet, in the population at large, the exact influence of these different theologies is difficult to gauge.
C. Popular Theology and Ethics
Overall, while French scholars have brought to the public's attention the variety of learned theological positions on the Plateau, their understanding of popular theology and spirituality continues to raise methodological issues. First, they confronted contradictory evidence, since moral evaluations of the Plateau's parishioners varied considerably: on the one hand, even after 1942, pastors kept deploring the individualism and apathy of their flock, and when food restrictions worsened, so too did its religious indifference.Footnote 91 On the other hand, many witnesses have attested to the moral fortitude and quiet piety of the local Huguenots. Hindsight and memory could have embellished the moral standing of local Huguenots whose religious fervor did not always match pastoral expectations. According to François Boulet, the spiritual life on the Plateau evolved in the winter of 1943, and greater fervor (indicated by levels of attendance and pastoral reports) came about a year after the rescue movement started. No one so far has provided an adequate explanation for the phenomenon, and the nature of the sources makes it unlikely that one will emerge.Footnote 92
Second, the theology of the more common people in the region raises methodological issues about the relationship between the popular and educated theologies. In the absence of statistical data concerning the involvement of different classes in the rescue, historians tend to rely on printed materials that privilege the testimony and actions of the upper class and therefore their understanding. Studies on the pastors' preaching or on Trocmé's notes for Bible study groups may not provide the best insight into common Protestant spirituality in a region where most people earned their living through farming. For instance, Trocmé claimed that Bible study groups successfully countered peasants' resentment of Jewish refugees because they stressed the role of the Bible in their lives and presented strategies for sheltering refugees. But Trocmé saw the situation as a pastor with a strong sense of prophetic vocation, and as we have seen, ideological positions on the Plateau, far from being uniform, were diverse and evolved over time.Footnote 93 In 1943, for instance, in Le Visage et l'Âme du Chambon, one could read that “[if you start a conversation on] the news, you will receive enlightened responses, well thought-out judgments, that are coming from an inspired conscience and the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.”Footnote 94 Rescuers, however, when they invoked theological arguments, tended to be far more concise and to refer to the imperative to love one's neighbor or to the story of the Good Samaritan. Their testimonies remind us of the fact that theology does not rest solely in the hands of the educated elite, but is adopted, discarded, interpreted, internalized, or transformed by people who are not trained theologians.Footnote 95 One of the most relevant religious motivations for the peasants in the area could be summed up in terms of the moral imperatives of love and compassion.Footnote 96 In other words, when it was articulated, theology consisted of straightforward moral precepts, rather than of complex political or philosophical ideas.
More surprising still is the rescuers' great reluctance to articulate reasons for their behavior. Indeed, in Emma and Henri Héritier's case, rescuers resorted more commonly to silence than to clear rationalization. Emma, when asked why she and her husband hid Jews in their home during World War II, had surprisingly little to say: “I don't know; because we were used to it.”Footnote 97 This terse rationale could frustrate historians and ethicists in search of elaborate arguments to explain their remarkable behavior. It does not imply that they had no rationale for what they did, but leads us to draw an important distinction between articulated and unarticulated commitment. Repeatedly, scholars and participants alike invoke silence as a feature of both testimonies and resistance in the region. It suited the ethical principles of decency and modesty among people who did not wish to cast too much light on themselves or their “good behavior.”Footnote 98 Daniel Besson explained in 1992: “the silence that the historian encounters . . . is the disciple's silence that one cannot explain by shyness, failing memory, or difficulty to express oneself. It is connected to a conscience of sorts. In the name of these silent people, I ask that you understand the ones who cannot show off what they have done.”Footnote 99 But the silence of witnesses is also connected to the necessary discretion of war times, as pastor Marc Donadille expressed well:
we were people who had work to do, and work that grabbed you by the guts. And what we attempted to do, mostly, was to forget what we knew; and this is where we understand that we are a bother for historians who want to know specific things; and sometimes, we cannot give them what they'd need to write serious history. But we knew that if, under torture, we spoke of what we had lived, many peoples' lives would be in danger. That is why we were trying not to remember. I think that people who cannot remember are perhaps the best of witnesses.Footnote 100
In the war era, silence served several functions. In part, it was the necessary corollary of clandestine resistance activities. Curtet, the pastor of Fay, underlined that “discretion . . . was very real in our parish; the proof is that we never really discussed refugees in our presbyter's meetings . . . We also never told parishioners that they were hosting Jews . . . We had two reasons: first, to help the Jews who had become “non-Jews” with their new identification papers; then, to cover the parishioners, so that, if they were hiding someone and were caught, they could always sincerely say: “I did not know that he was Jewish.'”Footnote 101 Gladys Maber, then teacher at the Collège Cévenol, confirms the extent of this discretion: “nobody talked about what was going on in Le Chambon, and we ignored entirely what was happening. I did not know at all that a colleague with a strong accent who taught Latin and Greek was a rabbi; I did not know that he had done a Jewish burial in the village.”Footnote 102 Discretion allowed for those who did not engage in the rescue or continued to support the Vichy regime to pretend that they did not know what was going on under their noses.Footnote 103 In other words, silence allowed for security, integrity and the preservation of both dignity and communal relationships.
Indeed, survivors sometimes speak of a common “attitude” or “mindset” regardless of their hosts' religious affiliation. Catholics hosted Jews in keeping with “activities that were also their way of life and bespeak of a culture of tact and reserve specific to people of the Mountain.”Footnote 104 It seems that the people of the Plateau, regardless of their theological stance, shared in a common culture of pragmatism and discretion typical of, but not unique to, Protestant culture.Footnote 105 Silence, therefore, could be explained by religious and ethical considerations as well as by pragmatic requirements and cultural habits.
To conclude, what was lost when Trocmé became the main focus of observation and the model resister is the multiplicity of theologies and worldviews at work among Protestants. This focus in particular obscured the fact that theological rationales were also at work among the indispensable intermediaries between the Plateau and the camps, notably among the workers of the Cimade who did not subscribe to non-violent resistance. It also rendered incomprehensible the differences between Trocmé and Boegner concerning appropriate strategies for resistance. Finally, it undermined the fact that the majority of the population of the Plateau expressed their theological rationales either very simply or not at all and shared in a culture of discretion at odds with the later publicity afforded to their story.
Film director Pierre Sauvage acknowledged some of this simplicity when he stated that two main elements of French Protestantism had been critical to the region's “fight against intolerance”: the simple biblical command to “love one another” and the particular conviction that Jews were “the people of God.”Footnote 106 The latter deserves some more scrutiny.
IV. Affinities
Sauvage is not alone in invoking French Protestants' respect for Jews. According to Patrick Cabanel, Protestants' memory of the persecutions they faced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, together with their minority status in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, constituted a powerful arsenal that ensured not only their compassion toward all refugees, but more particularly their solidarity with the Jews.Footnote 107 For Cabanel, the Huguenots' experience of ostracism ran parallel to the fate of French Jews. French Protestants went through their own “Judaizing experience” so that, by the 1930s, Hebraic culture and Protestants' memory were closely connected.Footnote 108 There are some merits to Cabanel's argument. But it also undermines the diversity of Protestant behavior and attitudes, as well as the variety of Jewish refugees' experiences in the region. Protestantism on the Plateau was far from monolithic, and Jewish witnesses far from univocal.
A. Religious, Cultural, and Political Affinities
Religiously and culturally, French Protestants could relate to Jews in that they were, more than Catholics, regular readers of the Old Testament, and of its Psalms in particular. They also used Old Testament terminology, for instance in naming their children or in referring to their churches as “temples.”Footnote 109 Combined with their memory of persecution, these religious commonalities made some Protestants particularly receptive to the plight of Jews during the Vichy Regime. Boegner, for instance, wrote in his letter to the Grand Rabbi of France on March 26, 1941:
our Church, that endured persecutions in the past, feels a deep sympathy for your communities whose freedom of worship is already, in some places, compromised and whose members have been so abruptly thrown into misfortune . . . Between your communities and the Churches of the Reformation, there is a link that men cannot break: the Bible of Patriarchs, of Prophets and Psalmists, the Old Testament that nourished Jesus Christ's soul and thought and where all His disciples, throughout the centuries, hear the word of God.Footnote 110
On the Plateau, Boegner's sensitivities found expression in 1942 and throughout 1943 in L'Écho de la Montagne's printing of Old Testament passages as arguments for the sheltering of Jewish refugees.Footnote 111 Religious leaders also invoked affinities between Protestants and Jews as oppressed minorities and “people of the Book” more explicitly after 1942.Footnote 112 They viewed the massive waves of arrests as a new Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre; Protestant and Jewish scouts played a “Camisard game” that consisted in Psalm singing, as well as representations of scenes associated with the traditional history of Huguenots.Footnote 113 It is significant that the references were part of Protestant, and not Jewish, history. Local pastors intentionally used the memory of persecution to generate support for the Jewish refugees, and if a common set of references was shared, it was Protestant. One wonders to what extent the affinities heralded by Protestant scholars were reciprocal. Furthermore, these publications, if they speak of the pedagogical intentions of the writers, fail to indicate the level of agreement among their readers. Did Protestants wholeheartedly embrace these images? Did the parishioners on the Plateau, even when they helped, identify with the Jews as a result?
Historians and witnesses alike agree that the Protestant memory of persecution played a part in the rescue, but what they understand this to mean varies. The pastor of Fay-sur-Lignon, Curtet, observed that his parishioners were “better Protestants than the [Swiss] from the Canton de Vaux because they had suffered from persecutions and therefore still had convictions they were trying to defend. They knew why they were Christians.”Footnote 114 For him, persecution deepened their Christian commitment, and heightened in particular their moral duty to the persecuted. Indeed, French Protestant history could be read as a long series of afflictions, from the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre in the sixteenth century and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the seventeenth century to the incarceration of the faithful Huguenot women in the Tower of Constance in the eighteenth century. Although Protestants gained citizenship during the Revolution, the strength of the Catholic Church continued to impact their treatment in the nineteenth century.Footnote 115 Some parishioners on the Plateau moved easily from the history of persecution to that of the Camisard rebellion and compared their defiance toward the Vichy regime to the resistance of their Camisards ancestors.Footnote 116 The hosting of Jews, as an act of resistance, fits in this historical continuum. For instance, when asked why she took in refugees, Marie Brottes said:
what they were asking us to do was very much like what Protestants have done in France ever since the Reformation. Pastors were hidden here in Le Chambon from the sixteenth century through the period of the “desert” [following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes] . . . . What we did was le reste, the traces of what was being done here for centuries.Footnote 117
In other words, some Protestants could find inspiration for civil disobedience in their own history and described it as a habitus of sorts. Joseph Bass, the leader of an important local Jewish rescue organization, traced this propensity to resist governments to both Jews' and Protestants' deep loyalty to their religious group: “what unites Protestants in this region and Jews is the power of community, the unwritten law and the moral law that overrode the official power and the law of the government.”Footnote 118 Many scholars have echoed the argument since then.Footnote 119 However, Protestant opposition to the Vichy government also stemmed from a deep anticlericalism that perceived “the antisemitic laws of Vichy first and foremost . . . as the repetition of the clerical laws of the nineteenth century,” as the Préfet Bach observed in 1940.Footnote 120 Resistance then spoke of a Protestant commitment to the values of the Third Republic, and in particular to a certain form of secularism (laïcité) that called for the privatization of religious affiliation, the secularization of schooling, and the utmost respect for the individual's religious conscience.Footnote 121 In other words, Protestant opposition to Vichy was for some (and for Trocmé in particular) a challenge to the totalitarian state triggered by religious convictions, while for others it also involved a reaction to the regime's clericalism.
However, Curtet noted that, within the general population, one of the most difficult issues to address was precisely that of obedience to authorities: “there was a big political problem: may one disobey the state? That was the problem that troubled people; it was not the problem of charity, it was the problem of obedience or disobedience . . . but I never needed to appeal to the moral sense [of my parishioners].”Footnote 122 In other words, the connection between moral commitment and civil resistance was not intrinsically part of the cultural makeup of local Protestants. It would seem that many needed at least some convincing to oppose the government. Nevertheless, in their commitment to the Republic, and in their fear of Catholic clericalism, these French Protestants found common ground with Jews. Pierre Vidal Naquet has argued that “sociologically, the two minorities shared common traits, . . . [such as] a devotion to republican values to which they both owed their freedom.”Footnote 123
Commitment to laïcité should have led Protestants to respect the freedom of conscience of their guests. Yet, far from Sauvage's conclusion that the only conversions that ever occurred on the Plateau were from Christianity to Judaism, a 1942 document indicates that Jews did indeed convert to Protestantism. In a July 1942 report to the Jewish general chaplaincy, Rabbi Schonberg, after visiting four homes in Le Chambon, concluded that “these charities, as worthy as they are, constituted only a means to an end; the goal is religious propaganda and proselytism.” The rabbi was particularly concerned by conversions, either completed or in process, and expressed the concern of Jews who “were worried of living in a home that did not belong to their confession.”Footnote 124
Schonberg may have been overly concerned: in comparison with some other religious communities that made baptism a condition for shelter, the Protestant community of Le Chambon seems to have been very respectful, and many witnesses confirmed that they did not feel any pressure to convert, particularly when speaking with Trocmé.Footnote 125 However, Jews were often invited, or as children, brought into Protestant religious services and, given the vulnerability of Jewish refugees, especially children, Christians would have had to be particularly cautious not to influence their guests. The power differential between refugees and rescuers, most evidently expressed by Joseph Atlas, deserves some close examination to understand more fully the relationship between Protestants and Jews on the Plateau.
B. Affinities reconsidered
Trocmé's Souvenirs provide some insights on this issue:
when resistance to Vichy, as well as civil resistance to the racial laws, became indispensable, parishioners got scared. The first peasants who accepted to take Jews in were the Darbystes, who don't belong to our denomination, and whose doctrine commands them not to engage in any political activity. Our “counselors” (conseillers) followed them, first hesitantly, then, gradually, with more conviction.Footnote 126
In Le Chambon itself, out of 2,400 Protestants, there were 1,000 Darbystes and Evangelicals.Footnote 127 Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the Darbystes had established assemblies in Riou and Saint-Agrève, and their settlements had provoked deep conflicts within the Protestant church.Footnote 128 The Darbystes were particularly open to providing shelter to Jews because they understood them to be, in a way that Reformed Protestants did not always, “the people of God.”Footnote 129
However, Darbystes' perspectives on Jews were not representative of all Protestant attitudes. While some Reformed Protestants also used the language of the “Book” to refer to Jewish refugees, their attitudes toward Jews in general varied. The exaltation of Protestant righteousness has obscured the fact that judeophobia was present on the Plateau. While Le Chambon itself was affected little by antisemitism, parts of the Plateau, notably in the region of Ardèche, remained hostile to Jews. Indeed, the mayor of Saint Agrève, on April 1942, proposed to the Préfet that “tourists of Jewish race” be prohibited to stay in his town. He accused Jews of contributing to the rise of prices on the black market.Footnote 130 Nonetheless, Jews continued to be hosted in Saint-Agrève. If judeophobes rescued Jews in Ardèche, they would not be likely, after the war, to step out and proclaim their ambivalent feelings toward their guests. Yet this behavior would not be unprecedented or unique to the region; it was well attested during the Holocaust in Poland, and hospitality and hostility coexisted in the rescue during the Rwandan genocide.Footnote 131 Currently, however, the possible combination of judeophobia and rescue remains unthinkable, despite the well-documented ambivalence of the Ardéchois toward Jews.Footnote 132
C. Jewish Experiences
Where Protestants were better disposed toward Jews, historians have argued that their relationships were facilitated by other commonalities that account for the “symbiosis” between the two groups. The nature and success of this “symbiosis” seem to vary according to each group's cultural and social background as well as the nature of their religious commitment. Beside their religious and political ties, some Jews and Protestants shared a certain intellectual and social elitism.Footnote 133 For instance, the emphasis Calvinists placed on reading has led some historians to conclude that literacy and commitment to educational excellence constituted a commonality between Jews and Protestants. In a context of persecution, reading the Old Testament in particular became an act of resistance and provided hope and strength to Jews.Footnote 134 While some witnesses mention reading the Old Testament with Protestants, their reaction to it varied according to their own background. Monsieur Kleman, who spent several years in hiding in the region as a child, declared: “I am not sure that at the time, I knew I was Jewish, but . . . I know I wanted to become Protestant.” In Kleman's case, identification with Protestants came first, and it was only later in life that he connected his reading of the Old Testament in Le Chambon with his Jewish identity.Footnote 135 For secular Jews like Vidal Naquet, identification with Protestantism did not necessarily imply belief: “if we had had to define ourselves religiously, I think many among us would have declared themselves agnostic, and the others Protestant of an odd species.”Footnote 136
However, a closer consideration of Jewish accounts reveals the complexity of their experiences on the Plateau, which the emphasis on affinities has eclipsed. This complexity challenges Sauvage's positive rendering of Jewish life in the region. Interestingly, Protestant judeophilia did not always translate into good communication with Jews. Ely Ben-Gal, who was hidden in Le Chambon and studied Jewish testimonies at Yad Vashem, argues that:
there is a profound difference between the two populations that met half a century ago . . . in that, beyond the gratitude, the friendship even, there wasn't, and perhaps there could not be . . . a true mutual comprehension. Urban Jews from France and other places and the Plateau's Protestants met in 1942, they lived together for two or three years without having the means of a true reciprocity, a true understanding . . . [Jews encountered] . . . Huguenots that came directly from the 17th century . . . full of peasant naïveté and purity.Footnote 137
For all the claims of common ground between Protestants and Jews, when urban secular Jews encountered poor, rural Protestants, especially Darbystes, culture clash was not uncommon. Indeed, the degree of affinity between Jews and Protestants also depended on the particular cultural background and self-understanding of the Jewish population, a part of the story largely neglected by historians. For young, middle-class Jewish children, the move to a harsh rural environment could be traumatizing, even if they could recognize later that hard labor was expected of all children, and not simply of young refugees.Footnote 138 Children's and teenager's experiences ranged in quality: Simon Liwerant, who was 14 years old at the time, spoke in an interview of the “primitive people” who hosted him and his two-and-a-half year old brother, not far from Le Chambon. After he reported their lack of concern to Madame Dreyfus, the boys were moved to another home.Footnote 139 Less dramatically, perhaps, Jack Hamburg expressed his deep appreciation for his Protestant rescuer André Chazel, as well as a realistic assessment of his motivations: “he made money . . . he saved our lives. . . . Chazel wanted to help us . . . he was afraid . . . but the work had to be done . . . [he got us Jewish boys] because he could not get anybody else.”Footnote 140
Some witnesses also challenged a traditional picture of common attachment to books and reading: Renée Kahn remarked that “there [were] no books there, only the Bible,” and Jacques Stul remembered that “[his hosts] never read a book, nor a newspaper . . . They said they were Protestants, but they knew nothing of Protestantism. They did not go to the temple, barely knew their pastor, had never read the Bible, did not even know what it contained.”Footnote 141 Among the Christian rescuers, Marc Donadille understood the limits and challenges of communication between the two groups. While readings of the Old Testament could provide a bridge between neighbors, Donadille also remarked on how precarious the bridge was: “it was difficult. So we tried to read passages from the Old Testament, we read the Psalms.”Footnote 142 In some cases, in Tence in particular, a genuine Jewish religious life took root, but revival of religious practice was hardly the most common Jewish experience.
D. Memory Formation
If the symbiosis between the two communities was not as successful as it is claimed to be, why is this idea so entrenched in the memory of the region? What do we make for instance of the claims that Jews and Protestants read the Bible together? Since the 1970s both rescuers and victims have highlighted their affinities, because it was precisely what interviewers and researchers were eager to find. Protestant historians had obvious reasons for supporting the idea. Jewish filmmakers, including Sauvage and Josy Eisenberg wished to acknowledge the Protestant community, soon after Yad Vashem had honored the Plateau for its particular role in the rescue. The context was not favorable to the expression of eventual grievances on the part of Jewish survivors, and it affected both the victims' and the rescuers' testimonies.
Scholars and journalists encouraged rescuers to consider Jews as the main beneficiaries of their hospitality. In Eisenberg's 1980 documentary, both victims and rescuers were invited to reflect respectively on their Jewish and Protestant identities, and Huguenots were specifically led to spell out their religious rationale. Interestingly, the interviewer was not always successful in his attempts, and unexpected economic rationales slipped into the conversations. When Eisenberg asked Protestant Emma Rousset why she “kept [the Jewish family] in her house,” the Jewish mother of this family Emma hosted, Madame Kleman, jumped in and said: “it was because of the deal we offered them. They answered ‘yes.’” The journalist interrupted her and insisted on getting Emma's answer. Although he prompted her to think about the role of the Bible in the hospitality she extended, Emma never really answered the question in terms other than: “it was natural.”Footnote 143
Nevertheless, after the release of Weapons of the Spirit, a narrative spread among Jews hosted in the region that affected the witnesses interviewed into the 1990s. Once they became familiar with the documentary, some survivors emphasized the affinities between the two communities, the freedom granted Jews to worship in the region, and the total absence of conversions to Christianity. Indeed, their testimonies sometimes repeat word for word that of Sauvage's documentary.Footnote 144 To conclude, Jews hosted in the region most commonly refer to the respect they felt, but this respect came in the form of silence, in a desire not to point out any differences, rather than in an attempt either to convert them or to find common ground. “We did not talk about it,” occurs repeatedly in the testimonies.Footnote 145 It is tempting to substitute one's own wish list to silence, to imagine nightly readings of the Old Testament—and these readings did happen in some cases. But affinities remained for the most part unspoken, as Protestants' ability to keep their neighbors' religious convictions private was the surest way to protect them.
V. Conclusion
French Protestantism can be connected to a web of factors that helped foster the rescue of Jews: as a social network, it provided a community of trust that could bring Jewish refugees from the internment camps to the Plateau, and eventually to Switzerland. Huguenots' experiences as a religious minority helped sustain a memory that combined suspicion toward political authorities with a keen identification with the persecuted. These religious and cultural characteristics made some of them particularly receptive to the plight of Jews during the Vichy Regime. Politically, Protestants' commitment to the Republic sometimes lessened their reluctance to challenge the authoritarian and anti-republican Vichy regime. Finally, the pastors and leaders on the Plateau provided the local population with a perspective that drew from their international experience (and their experience with Fascism in particular) and theological commitments.
However, a careful analysis of these factors raises significant questions about the exact role each one may have played given the religious diversity of the population on the Plateau, as well as the social and cultural variety among Protestants. Were all features attributed to Protestants specifically connected to their culture and their belief system? Serious doubts could be raised about the legendary “spirit of hospitality” that local historians have linked to biblical injunctions to welcome the stranger. The existence of a whole network of hotels, youth pensions, and schools made the villagers' open door advantageous to both rescuers and Jews. Additionally, the discretion of the local peasants did not seem to set Catholics and Protestants apart. This discretion seems to have been a regional, rather than a specifically denominational characteristic. Furthermore, the theology invoked by rescuers ranged from Barthian convictions to a strong pacifism, when it was articulated at all. Regardless of its belief systems, the majority of the Plateau's population did not respond any sooner to the Vichy Regime's antisemitic policies than the rest of the French population. The Plateau was not so much exceptional, as the claim has been for so long, as exemplary, in that it provides a large-scale illustration of behaviors observable throughout France, but unacknowledged until fairly recently. Finally, the blanket claim that Jews and Protestants shared strong affinities obscures the social diversity of the populations on the Plateau. As they were confronted with this Protestant diversity, Jewish refugees, who themselves brought mixed socio-cultural experiences, related in various ways to their hosts. One cannot assume, for instance, that the Hebraic features of Protestant culture rang familiar to all Jewish ears. Weighing the role of affinities in the rescue requires us to consider the power differential inherent to the relationship between hosts and guests.
Many of the factors considered help to explain the rescuers' difficulty to articulate their particular choices. The fact that hospitality had become a habitual behavior could account for their insistence that what they did “came naturally.” But their hesitancy may also betray, perhaps better than scholars have typically acknowledged, the chronological changes that affected their motivations for hosting refugees and Jews:
Jewish rescue occurred within networks . . . carefully woven webs of associates whose involvement started out gradually and then, before they realized what was happening, metamorphosed into major commitments. Social psychologists call it the “foot in the door” effect, the dynamic process of one favor leading to another in an escalating hierarchy of good deeds.Footnote 146
To determine the initial factor in the rescue, the first “foot in the door,” is risky because it is far from clear that all rescuers put the same foot forward. While no single factor can entirely explain the magnitude of the rescue, deciphering primary from secondary motivations and incentives from means in the region is an arduous task. Historians have certainly stressed the role of infrastructures that provided a means to host several thousand people, children in particular. Was this the foot in the door? Some inhabitants did not, at first, understand the distinction between refugees and tourists, and hosted people “as they used to” without fully understanding the danger they were in.Footnote 147 Others did step in because their particular convictions called them to do so. This unusual conjunction of habitus on the one hand and clearly articulated political, ethical, and theological positions on the other allowed for the success of the rescue.
Given the variety of convictions at work, the most striking element of the rescue resided perhaps in its collective nature. The fact that an entire community participated (or watched and said nothing) is remarkable indeed. The silence observed by the population of the Plateau was an important condition for its success, not simply because it sheltered Jews from external threats, but also because it minimized internal dissent. To refrain from talking meant that one would not shame one's neighbor for his lack of participation; it also meant that different rationales for behavior would not conflict with another, be they commitment to pacifism, nationalism, Christian charity, or judeophilia. Silence did not necessarily imply that everyone implicitly agreed on the reasons for hiding Jews, but rather that most people came to agree that something ought to be done.
Once the deed was done, most participants had no particular desire to talk about it, as they had had little to say in the midst of the war. The questions raised by this silence deserve careful consideration. Scholars and filmmakers who substituted a coherent and well articulated rationale for this silence have generated painful controversies. Much like any attempt to rank motivations, their enterprise has privileged particular witnesses, be they articulate Protestant leaders or Jewish survivors who maintained cordial relationships with the local population. Yet a critical reading of interviews with survivors points to a more complex relationship between Jews and Protestants. Why, then, has the claim that they shared special affinities become the norm in public discourse and scholarly literature? How can we reconcile the complexity drawn from the evidence with the dominant narrative of Protestant exceptionalism and philosemitism?
For the past thirty years, the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, and the town of Le Chambon in particular, have grown into a central Protestant site of memory. The region has come to stand for all French Protestantism, and the rescue efforts implicitly seem representative of all French Protestant behavior. Symbols of resistance, courage, and constancy, the eighteenth century women imprisoned in the Tower of Constance and the Protestant Righteous came to stand for what is best in the Huguenot spirit.Footnote 148 The comparison between the two movements creates parallels that are far more commemorative than they are historical. This comparison does not allow the complexity of rescuers' motives to emerge, but sustains at least some French Protestants' self-perceptions (or some Americans' perceptions of the French Protestants) as early resisters and exceptional rescuers. Interestingly, this perception receives little echo in the words of the participants who, like Magda Trocmé, understood themselves in far more nuanced terms: “you know, good and evil are always mixed up. Nowhere is it ever all the way black or all the way white. Here [on the Plateau], it was something like an acceptable grey.”Footnote 149
