3.1 Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich

The MBF, headed from October 1940 to February 1942 by General Otto von Stülpnagel (1878–1948), was the most substantial German presence in Paris. It was headquartered in the Hotel Majestic, near the Arc de Triomphe. It consisted of a security division and an administrative division, the Verwaltungstab. The Verwaltungstab, consisting of 22,000 people in German military uniforms, was charged with overseeing the French governmental bureaucracy. Its senior staff, numbering about 1,500, were mostly professionals detailed to Paris from various German government agencies, companies, and professional organizations. It was divided into three large sections, a section responsible for coordination and personnel, an immense section responsible for economic matters, and a section responsible for other administrative matters, the Verwaltungsabteilung.

In 1941, the Verwaltungsabteilung was headed by Werner Best (1903–1989), a prominent member of the SS. It was organized into more than ten groups, charged with supervising domains of the French bureaucracy ranging from the police to the veterinary service. We will be interested mainly in Group 4, responsible for schools and culture (Schule und Kultur). In the discussion of the arrest of the four academicians, this group was represented by war administration adviser (Kriegsverwaltungsrat) Dr. Dahnke.Footnote ³

Group 4 did not order the arrest of the four academicians, but it played a role in their release, and its archives are our most substantial source of information. When the Allies arrived in Paris, they found that most German archives had been burned or removed. Group 4's archives were an exception (see Nielen Reference Nielen and Beaujouan2002, 11–39), and they are among the archives now preserved in the AJ/40 series at CARAN.

The MBF's primary assignment was to put the French economy to work for the German war effort as effectively as possible, with a minimal expenditure of German manpower. It achieved this through its control of the French governmental bureaucracy, by directing the allocation of raw materials and requiring French companies to fill orders for the German military. The armistice agreement Marshall Philippe Pétain signed on 22 June 1940 gave the Germans the right to require payment for the cost of the Occupation, and as they controlled the amount of this payment, they could pay French companies with money from the French treasury.

The armistice agreement authorized Pétain to move his government to Paris, but the Germans never allowed this. Pétain remained isolated at Vichy, in the southern zone. He was represented in Paris by the Délégué général du Gouvernement Français dans les Territoires Occupés (DGTO), through which all French government communication with the Germans had to be directed. During the period we are studying, this office was headed by Fernand de Brinon. The southern zone was not occupied by the Germans during this period, and even after November 1942 when it was occupied, German permission was required for travel between the two zones. The MBF required that Pétain obtain its approval in advance for sensitive legislation and appointments, and it supervised the French bureaucracy, in Paris and in the prefectures, to make sure measures it cared about were implemented to its liking.

3.2 Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador

A second center of power in Paris was the German embassy on Rue de Lille on the left bank. Otto Abetz (1903–1958) held the rank of Ambassador and represented the German ministry of foreign affairs. In theory, Pétain's government was still at war with Germany, and the two countries did not have diplomatic relations. In practice, Abetz was responsible for German relations with Vichy, overseeing Pétain's supposed authority to legislate for France and appoint the ministers in charge of the bureaucracy in Paris. Abetz was charged by Hitler to manage the politics of France. He received his instructions directly from Hitler at the beginning of August 1940, when he was summoned to Hitler's summer home in Berghof. Germany's immediate goals, Hitler explained to him, were to keep France weak and isolated from its neighbors. It should have an authoritarian government, because this would help isolate it from England and the United States. But there should be no real support for völkisch and nationalist forces. Abetz should support both the left and the right in French politics, leaning at any time whichever way would maximize division. The communists should not be wiped out, but they should not be allowed to become too strong, and in the immediate future the socialists should be supported as a counterweight to them. Abetz shared these instructions with Werner Best, who passed them on to his lieutenants.Footnote ⁴ Abetz and Best, both long-time Nazis, considered the military leadership of the MBF too conservative and too soft on the French.

Abetz was an accomplished student of French history and literature, and he saw the conflict between Germany and France in intellectual terms. French culture should be purged of its degenerate elements, just as the Nazis had purged German culture, and the French needed to renounce their own claims to universalism and recognize the leadership role of German culture.Footnote ⁵ Abetz's ideas for improving France were never embraced by Hitler, who valued propaganda but was skeptical about changing the French and thought it better for Germany that France should continue to degenerate.

Abetz's organization in Paris had two main branches, a propaganda section and a cultural section. The propaganda section organized and funded collaborationist groups, competing with and sometimes coming into conflict with Goebbels’ Propaganda-Abteilung. It funded and largely controlled the French press and radio in the occupied zone. The cultural section, which was involved in Borel's detention, was headed by Karl Epting, whom Abetz had also put in charge of the German Institute at the Sagan Hotel, also on the left bank.

Following Hitler's instructions, Abetz supported collaborationist groups in Paris with roots on the left as well as ones with roots on the right, and he used these groups to put pressure on Pétain as the need arose. He was especially supportive of Pierre Laval. Laval had limited interest in Pétain's national revolution but sought to convince the Germans that France had a future as a subservient junior partner. He made unilateral concessions to the Germans while serving as Pétain's minister of state during the first six months of the Vichy regime, and Pétain dismissed him in December 1940, replacing him with Admiral François Darlan. While Borel and his colleagues were under arrest, in October and November 1941, Laval was in Paris under Abetz's protection. When Laval returned to Vichy as Pétain's prime minister in April 1942, he further aligned the regime with Germany.

3.3 The SS (Schutzstaffel)

At the outset of the Occupation, the German military hoped that the SS, headed by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich in Berlin, would not play an important role in France, and so they included a small secret police unit within the MBF itself, in Section Ic. But Himmler and Heydrich quickly found ways to convince Hitler that their agents were needed in France. In June 1940, Himmler dispatched a small commando to Paris, under the command of Helmut Knochen (1910–2003). This group's archives were probably destroyed, but documents in the MBF archives show that the group was involved in the investigation of French academics in 1940 and 1941. Andreas Biederbick (born 1909) represented Knochen's group in the deliberations concerning the four academicians. Both Knochen and Biederbick had doctoral degrees, Knochen in English literature and Biederbick in history.

The SS was an organ of the Nazi party, not of the German state, and individuals could be deployed anywhere in the state bureaucracy while remaining SS officers; Werner Best is an example. But by the time of the war, the German state police was fully integrated into the SS. The intelligence service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) and the secret police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo) were just two of its many units.

In October 1941, Knochen's unit was still small, and it was supposedly subordinate to the MBF, but it was increasingly coming into conflict with von Stülpnagel. On the night of 2 to 3 October, a right-wing French group led by Eugène Deloncle used explosives supplied by Knochen to blow up seven Paris synagogues, wounding two German soldiers in the process. This incident, and the fact that Knochen hid the SS's involvement from him, enraged von Stülpnagel and brought him into conflict with Heydrich (see Burrin Reference Burrin1995, 96–97, and Polioakov Reference Poliakov1954).

Von Stülpnagel was also brought into conflict with Berlin by his concern that the French population was being alienated by the increasing harshness of the Occupation. Attacks on German soldiers by French communists began after Hitler broke with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and Hitler ordered mass executions in retaliation. A German officer was killed in Paris in late August 1941, and in early September the Germans killed more than twenty people in retaliation. Hitler thought this too moderate; he demanded that at least a hundred French be killed for every German. This added to the terror of the arrest of the four academicians on 10 and 11 October. On 20 October, while they were still under arrest, a German officer was assassinated in Nantes; on 22 and 24 October, the Germans killed nearly a hundred French political prisoners, many of them selected from the prison where the academicians were held. Revulsion over these murders was important in shifting French public opinion towards de Gaulle and the Resistance.

Von Stülpnagel and Abetz, keenly aware of the negative impact of the killings, wanted the French public to perceive them as being directed towards communists and Jews, not towards the French population in general. For this reason, the MBF mobilized its staff in September 1941 to identify potential victims who could be identified as communists. When Dahnke returned to his office in Group 4 of the Verwaltungsabteilung in late October, after an absence of five weeks, he found a circular dated 18 September from his colleagues in Group 8, responsible for German oversight of the French courts, asking for names to be added to the hostage lists. Students and professors were among the groups that were to be considered. In his report for the week of 20–26 October (in CARAN AJ/40/568), Dahnke conceded that many French natural scientists were radical leftists and could be held responsible for inspiring communist subversion. But, he pointed out, if the Germans shot one of them as a hostage, the act would be held against them in the university community for a very long time.

Von Stülpnagel's reluctance to alienate the French more than necessary did not carry the day with Hitler. In early 1942, von Stülpnagel resigned as military commander in Paris, and the authority of the MBF was reduced while that of the SS was strengthened. Carl-Albrecht Oberg was named top SS commander (Höherer SS-und Polizeiführer) in Paris, and von Stülpnagel's cousin, Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, took over the now reduced role of military commander.Footnote ⁶ This reorganization marked a turning point towards repression for both the German forces and the Vichy government. It was followed by Laval's return to power, the appointment of René Bousquet as general secretary of the French police, and intense negotiations between Oberg and Bousquet concerning what the French police would have to do in order to avoid being brought under direct German command. The Verwaltungsabteilung was shrunk, leaving the MBF even more focused on the economy. Werner Best was sent to oversee the government of occupied Denmark (see Thalmann Reference Thalmann, Martens and Vaïsse2000, 611).

3.4 The Alst

Borel and his colleagues were arrested by the Abwehr, the branch of the German military responsible for espionage and counterespionage. The Abwehr had been created in 1921, and it was headed from 1935 to 1944 by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. During the war, the Abwehr's headquarters in Paris, the Abwehrleitstelle (Central Office of Military Intelligence), was located at the Hotel Lutetia on the left bank. It was headed by Colonel Friedrich Rudolf, and its counterespionage section was headed by Lieutenant Colonel Reile. In German documents, Abwehrleitstelle is often abbreviated to Alst.

In 1941, the Abwehr was still relatively independent of the SS, which had long coveted its operations, even though Hitler was already disaffected with Canaris. For arrests and police actions, the Abwehr relied on the military secret police, the Geheime Feldpolizei, which was also independent of the SS. In May 1942, after the arrival of Oberg in Paris, the Geheime Feldpolizei in France were put under the authority of the SS, and the Alst lost much of its authority. In February 1944 Hitler dismissed Canaris and integrated most of the Abwehr's operations into the SS. Canaris was shot by the Nazis on 9 April 1945, after a lengthy imprisonment.

After several years in Allied prisons following the war, Lieutenant Colonel Reile worked in West German intelligence and then, starting in the 1960s, wrote extensively about the Abwehr. In his books on the Abwehr's operations in France during the war (Reile Reference Reile1962, idem 1973), he explains that the Abwehr cooperated with the SS but that the goals of the two agencies sometimes conflicted. Whereas the SS sought to eliminate as many enemy agents as possible as quickly as possible, the Abwehr sought to gather intelligence and prevent attacks on German troops and installations, and this often required leaving in place for as long as possible networks of the Resistance that they had infiltrated and even partially controlled. By Reile's account, the Abwehr sometimes even aided the escape of relatively harmless Resistance members for humanitarian reasons.

From June to October 1941, the Alst infiltrated the Hector network, a large but loosely organized network of the French Resistance that was secretly funded by Vichy's Air Force. The network was in contact with London through the British embassy in Lisbon. The Alst called their infiltration and dismantling of the network the “Porto affair” (Fall Porto), after the Portuguese wine. Oscar Reile recounted details of the affair in his memoirs (see especially Reile 1970, 141–176, or Reile Reference Reile1973, 98–199).

According to Reile, the Hector network collected extensive and significant intelligence about German military installations for transmission to London, and by September they were impatiently awaiting orders from London to undertake acts of sabotage. The German infiltrators, who were controlling the communication with London, managed to minimize what London learned and stall any significant sabotage, intending to delay action against the network as long as possible in order to learn as much as they could about its capacities and intentions. But after attacks on German officers in Paris on 10 and 15 September, Reile became concerned that the network might already be passing to action and persuaded Colonel Rudolph that the time for arrests had come. On 9 October, they launched a crackdown of unprecedented scale, engaging all the units of the Geheime Feldpolizei in France and Belgium. Within a few days, 962 individuals were behind bars.

Reile launched an immense judicial process, involving correspondence with local authorities all over France, to decide the fate of those arrested. Those for whom there was clear evidence of espionage or sabotage were referred to military tribunals;Footnote ⁷ others were released. Reile planned to recruit some of those who were to be tried as double agents, and in order to give them cover, he planned to arrange for the eventual release of hundreds of the least guilty of those convicted. But on 7 December 1941, Hitler signed his notorious Nacht und Nebel decree, authorizing the disappearance of opponents in the occupied countries; they were to vanish without a trace, and no information was to be given about their fate. Those who had been arrested in the Porto affair and not yet released or tried quickly disappeared in this fashion. In Reile's opinion, the sudden arrest of nearly a thousand French saboteurs and the continued assassinations in spite of the crackdown had panicked the authorities in Berlin, who erroneously feared that the French population was about to stage an insurrection that the thinly spread German forces could not have contained.

Documents prepared by the MBF's Group 4 tell us that Borel, Cotton, Lapicque, and Mauguin were arrested by the Alst on 10 and 11 October 1940, at a time when all the police forces at the Alst's disposal were engaged in the Porto sweep. We have not been able to find documents directly giving reasons for the arrests of the academicians, but the dates make it clear that they were swept up as part of the Porto crackdown, either because they were implicated in the affair or because the Alst decided to extend the arrests to others who had already been under investigation by the Alst or the SS. Reile does not mention the academicians in his memoirs, but the MBF documents make it clear that he was personally involved in deciding on their release. Archives of the Alst now at Freiburg in Germany (Martens Reference Martens2002, 243–248) may contain additional relevant information.

4.1 Purifying the professoriat

Beginning in the summer of 1940, Pétain launched his National Revolution by promulgating a series of laws that facilitated the removal of undesirable individuals from education and other branches of the civil service. The first, dated 17 July 1940, authorized the removal of civil servants without cause.

A law of 13 August 1940 prescribed that Freemason lodges be closed, their properties impounded and sold. Civil servants and public officials were ordered to break any links with the dissolved lodges and not to affiliate anew if they were reconstituted. Other laws forbade the government to employ individuals of foreign origin and restricted the government employment of women. The most notorious law, promulgated on 3 October 1940, forbade the government to employ Jews. Later legislation further discriminated against Jews and Freemasons.

The law excluding Jews allowed for exceptions, and the French thought this was important. Some hoped exceptions would minimize the law's effects, or at least permit the separation of the wheat from the chaff, as Darquier de Pellepoix, Laval's zealous Commissaire aux Questions Juives, put it. Others were outraged that exceptions were possible. But the Germans saw to it that there were no exceptions. According to Singer the Vichy government authorized exceptions for fourteen leading Jewish professors at the University of Paris, but the Germans vetoed all fourteen (Singer Reference Singer1992).

As the academic year 1940–1941 drew near, the Germans obtained lists of professors from the French bureaucracy and gathered intelligence to decide which ones should be eliminated. Their deliberations were a three-way affair, involving Group 4, the embassy, and the SS. The first discussions seem to have centered on the Institut libre des sciences politiques, a private school, and the Collège de France, a prestigious government institution (Thalmann Reference Thalmann1991, 103).

On 30 October 1940, before any recommendations had been made to von Stülpnagel, the secret police arrested Paul Langevin (1872–1946), a member of the Collège de France, at the request of Abetz's lieutenant Karl Epting. Langevin was well known both for his left-wing political activity and for his accomplishments in physics. According to Group 4's report for 18–24 November,Footnote ⁸ Langevin was not accused of continuing his political activity under the Occupation, but Epting wanted to make an example of him, to intimidate those in the university who might want to resist the occupiers, and to encourage those interested in collaboration.

Langevin's arrest came as the German forces, coordinated by Group 4, were involved in two tests of will with the Collège de France.Footnote ⁹ On 16 September, the MBF had informed the school that the results from research in nuclear physics that were being conducted with the school's cyclotron by Frédéric Joliot-Curie together with German researchers would be exclusively for German eyes and could not be communicated to French authorities. On 21 October, the MBF had informed the school that Langevin's presence on their faculty, along with two of his left-wing colleagues, Ernest Tonnelat and Henri Wallon, was incompatible with German interests and prestige.

For all we know, Werner Best and Group 4 at the MBF were complicit in Langevin's arrest, but von Stülpnagel was not pleased that such a step had been taken without his knowledge. According to Group 4's report for 18–24 November, von Stülpnagel had been consulted neither before nor after the arrest. Best was obliged to call together Epting, SS-commando Biederbick, and representatives of other secret police units to make it clear that no arrests of political significance were to be undertaken without consulting the MBF. He also made it clear that political activity before the war was not grounds for measures against French scientists; von Stülpnagel wanted to be very cautious about interfering in personnel matters in French higher education. It was quite another matter if Abetz, through diplomacy with Vichy, could get the French government to impose measures on which the embassy and the MBF were agreed.

On the morning of 11 November, the anniversary of the armistice of 1918, students mounted an impressive anti-German demonstration on the Champs Elysées. This demonstration, often considered a turning point in French opinion, was violently repressed. The Germans arrested 150 demonstrators, mostly lycée students. Gustave Roussy, the rector of the Academy of Paris, was dismissed, and the university was closed.Footnote ¹⁰ Roussy was replaced as rector by Jérôme Carcopino, a distinguished classicist and personal acquaintance of Pétain's, who had been director of the Ecole Normale since August.

Group 4, with Epting and Biederbick, was instructed to continue their investigation of the politics of French academics, in case the reopening of Paris higher education could be made conditional on personnel changes. The outcome of this investigation was explained by Dahnke in a Group 4 report dated 13 December 1940 (in CARAN AJ/40/567). Even though Abetz's hand was strengthened by a new decree from Hitler, on 20 November 1940, giving the embassy exclusive authority over political matters and telling the MBF to attend to its military duties, Abetz and Epting did not manage to mount a purge of non-Jewish professors.Footnote ¹¹ As Dahnke explains, Epting prepared a list of academics to be excluded, and then Biederbick and Group 4 pared it down by omitting some of the non-Jews. The result, published in 1991 by Thalmann, includes (with some repetitions) names of 109 individuals identified as Jews and 16 identified as non-Jews (see Thalmann Reference Thalmann1991, 354–361). But on 7 December, the embassy contacted Group 4 orally to withdraw the suggestion that the French be required to exclude the 16 non-Jews before the university was opened, because not enough consideration had been given to excluding right-wing as well as left-wing enemies of Germany. So on 8 December it was decided to demand only the expulsion of Jewish faculty members. Harald Turner, representing the MBF, informed the Education Ministry that the MBF expected the French laws excluding the Jews to be applied without exception to higher education and that Jewish teachers also be excluded from private schools.Footnote ¹² Consideration of measures against academics because of their political past, especially those on the right, would have to await further study and an appropriate occasion, Dahnke concluded.

Although Borel had not yet retired from the university when these lists were prepared, his name does not appear on any of them. Epting's list included the name of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, but the list approved by Group 4 did not. The lists contain many errors, suggesting that the Germans and their informers were not yet very knowledgeable about the French academic world. The mathematicians Maurice Fréchet and Georges Darmois, for instance, are identified as Jews. A French Germanist active with Epting's institute is identified as anti-German. In some cases, there are remarks about the political activity of which the individual is accused. Some are labeled, probably erroneously, as Freemasons. Others are labeled Kolonialaufruf (colonial call); perhaps this indicated that they supported de Gaulle's call to continue the fight against Germany from the French colonies.

As for Langevin, the Education Ministry dismissed him from the Collège de France on 19 November, under the authority of the law of 17 July, and the Germans released him from prison and put him under surveillance at Troyes, 180 kilometers from Paris, on 7 December. Tonnelat and Wallon were eventually allowed to resume teaching at the Collège de France. On 18 January 1942, the MBF wrote to the French government to insist that it had exclusive rights under the Hague convention to the research in Joliot-Curie's laboratory because it was a military installation. On request, however, it would inform the chief of state (Pétain) about work currently in progress.Footnote ¹³

Also relevant to our story is the launching of the clandestine newspaper L'Université libre by three young communists, Jacques Decour, Georges Politzer, and Langevin's son-in-law Jacques Solomon (see Favre Reference Favre2002, 175–178; Racine Reference Racine and Rioux1987; Raphael Reference Raphael, Martens and Vaïsse2000, 722). The first four-page issue, in late November 1940, protested Langevin's arrest and dismissal, denounced the inadequacy of the university's protests against the arrest, and reported nearly unanimous reprobation for the government's anti-Semitic measures. It reported that Joliot-Curie had suspended his collaboration with the Germans in protest of Langevin's arrest, and that the Faculty of Sciences, with only the physicist Eugène Darmois dissenting, had voted that all its members should continue to teach regardless of their “race.”Footnote ¹⁴ The three founders of L'Université libre were arrested along with others by the French police in late February and early March 1941, and turned over to the Germans. They were executed in late May 1941, but L'Université libre continued to appear irregularly until the Liberation, publishing altogether 104 issues.

In the spring of 1941, the SS extended their attention to the academies in the Institut de France.Footnote ¹⁵ On 15 April 1941, the SS addressed a memorandum to the MBF (in CARAN AJ/40/566) making two unrelated accusations concerning these academies:

1. 1. A council of the Académie française had held a vote on collaboration, in which the anti-German forces had a narrow majority.

2. 2. Two members of the Académie des Sciences, Aimé Cotton and Charles Mauguin, had been involved in distributing L'Université libre.

Cotton and Mauguin were arrested along with Borel the following October. According to documents preserved by the MBF, the SS continued its investigation. In a brief note for the week of 1–13 May 1941 (in CARAN AJ/40/567), the SD reported that the Académie des Sciences did not have any distinct political orientation as a whole. In an undated memorandum stamped with the date 24 May 1941 (in CARAN AJ/40/567), SS Major Biederbick reported that L'Université libre was being distributed in the Latin Quarter by professors who were Freemasons, including Cotton, Mauguin, and Joliot-Curie.

The 15 April 1941 memorandum concerning the supposed vote on collaboration in the Académie française claimed that three members had voted for collaboration and four against. The three reported to have supported it, Cardinal Baudrillart (1859–1942) and the writers André Bellessort (1866–1942) and Abel Bonnard (1883–1968), were indeed well known supporters.Footnote ¹⁶ The four reported to have opposed it were the writers Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) and Paul Valéry (1871–1945), the physicist Maurice de Broglie (1875–1960), and the mathematician Emile Picard (1856–1941).

The case of Emile Picard illustrates the difficulty the Germans had in dealing with their right-wing opponents. Picard was known for anti-German outbursts during World War I and for advocating ostracism of Germany afterwards (Lamandé forthcoming; Mazliak and Tazzioli Reference Mazliak and Tazzioli2009). He was also very well known for his right-wing views. The memorandum of 15 April 1941 shows that the SS was confused by this, as it erroneously identifies Picard as a member of the French Popular Front of the 1930s.

From Vichy's point of view, Picard was a natural ally. In August 1940, the Journal de l'Aveyron, falling in line with Vichy's national revolution, wrote at length about the educational reforms needed to undo the damage from the radical and anti-clerical conceptions that had prevailed during the previous regime and led to the disaster. Never mentioning the name of their native son Emile Borel,Footnote ¹⁷ they quoted Picard, who had no connection with Aveyron, at length. But Nazis who were aware of Picard's past had no use for him. In a report on the prospects for collaboration with French mathematicians, dated 20 December 1940, the Nazi mathematician Harald Geppert, who edited the Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete during the war, mentioned Picard's leadership of the International Mathematical Union, from whose quadrennial meetings the Germans had been excluded in the years following World War I, and which had not met since 1932.Footnote ¹⁸ According to Geppert, the Germans had decided to create a new international organization for mathematics rather than reviving the Union.

Picard's attitude towards collaboration was nuanced. According to Audin Reference Audin2009, Picard argued, in a discussion in the Académie des Sciences in November 1940, that efforts to distribute its Comptes rendus should not involve any direct relationship with the Germans. Yet in correspondence with Alfred Lacroix, his fellow permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences, he maintained that Pétain had rightly agreed to a “very general” collaboration, necessary for an indefinite time in order to avoid France's being completely crushed.Footnote ¹⁹ Because Picard died in December 1941, he did not see where Pétain's policies led. Members of his family took different paths. One of his sons-in-law, Jean Villey, was caught by the French police on 13 October 1941 in the act of distributing Gaullist propaganda, delivered to the Germans, and condemned to two years in prison (see CARAN AJ/16/7117). Another, Louis Dunoyer de Ségonzac, who was close to the extreme-right Action Française, was faulted after the war for accepting his appointment to Jean Perrin's position at the Sorbonne in 1941, after Perrin had joined his son in the United States.

4.2 Jérôme Carcopino (1881–1970)

As Pétain repeatedly shuffled his cabinet during the first year of the Occupation, four Education Ministers came and went.Footnote ²⁰ They were Albert Rivaud (1876–1956), who left the post in July 1940, when Laval became Vice President of the Council; Emile Mireaux (1885–1969), who left the post in September 1940; Georges Ripert (1880–1958), who left the post in December 1940, when Pétain dismissed Laval; and Jacques Chevalier (1882–1962), who left the post in February 1941, when Darlan became Pétain's vice president.

Chevalier, Pétain's godson and a clerically-minded philosopher, ran into resistance with his plans for religious instruction in the primary schools, and Darlan replaced him with Jérôme Carcopino, who had demonstrated his ability to negotiate with the Germans and keep the peace as director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure from August to November 1940 and then as rector after the 11 November 1940 demonstrations. Carcopino remained Education Minister until Laval returned to power in April 1942 and replaced him with the well known author and journalist Abel Bonnard (1883–1968), an avowed collaborator but less effective administrator, who remained minister until the Liberation.Footnote ²¹

Stubbornly loyal to Pétain, Carcopino implemented Vichy's measures against Jewish teachers and students and appeased the Germans as he found necessary. In 2008, after reviewing Carcopino's communications with the Germans in the MBF archives, the historian Alan Mitchell opined that collaborationism had no more fervent advocate (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2008). According to L'Université libre, Carcopino had been a Gauleiter as rector; as minister he tried to be more flexible, more hypocritical, and more demagogic than his Vichy predecessors (see issue 14, 1 April 1941).

The collaborationist press in Paris praised Carcopino at the outset of his tenure but soon found plenty to criticize. When he softened Chevalier's proposals to strengthen religious instruction, the anti-clerical papers that had decried the measures fell silent, while the pro-clerical papers derided him.

In his memoirs, Carcopino complained bitterly about L'Université libre's attacks, but he acknowledged that the Vichy government in 1941 was a military dictatorship, with each minister exercising immense power within his own domain so long as he retained Pétain's and Darlan's confidence (see Carcopino Reference Carcopino1953, 298–299). One power Carcopino exercised was to review dismissals made under the 17 July 1940 law. He used the review to purge teachers considered incompetent or corrupt. He also restored some individuals to their positions; even L'Université libre conceded that he rehabilitated a few Freemasons (see issue 18, 15 May 1941).

According to his own account after the war, he recognized merit regardless of political opinion, and he found reasons to dismiss individuals whose collaboration with the Germans threatened the university's independence. This is documented not only in his memoirs but also in the criticism of the Paris press. In the archives of the MBF, for example, we find a clipping of an article from the 28 August 1941 issue of Le cri du peuple that deplores Carcopino's appointment or retention of a whole list of individuals: Charmoillaux, Maurain, Piobetta, Luc, Masbou, Chattelun, Santelli, and Hatinguais, and his dismissal of another, Jeanneret. In its weekly reports, Group 4 took note of such articles matter-of-factly, as if they expressed public opinion.

In February 1941, when Carcopino had left the Paris rectorship to become minister, he postponed the problem of finding a new rector acceptable to the Germans by putting Charles Maurain in the position temporarily. As dean of the Faculty of Sciences, Maurain had been taking his turn as vice president of the university council, and Carcopino reasoned that he was therefore in line to step in as president of the council, or rector. But Maurain was due to retire at the end of September. Carcopino himself had been appointed to the Paris rectorship after the student demonstrations of 11 November 1940, and his success in calming the students while satisfying the Germans had led to his appointment as minister. Who could follow this act?

According to a report in Group 4's archives (Report for the weeks 25–31 August and 1–6 September, dated 8 September 1941, in CARAN AJ/40/563), Carcopino went personally to the German embassy and proposed three names: Paul Hazard, Olivier Martin, and Pierre Renouvin. Abetz rejected all three. The comparative literature professor Hazard and the law professor Martin were unacceptable because they knew nothing of Germany. Renouvin, a historian, was unacceptable because he had written about the causes of World War I from the French point of view. In Abetz's view, German cultural-political goals in France required a Paris rector with personal and professional connections with Germany.

Faced with an impasse, Stülpnagel asked Abetz to make his own suggestions. Abetz found it difficult to respond. Did anyone in the university with the stature and skill to serve as rector satisfy Abetz's desiderata? In the 1930s, Abetz had become acquainted with French journalists and literary figures who were interested in Germany and whose political and intellectual attitudes he had found congenial. Some of them, Abel Bonnard for example, had influence and stature. In Germany, they might have been university professors. But in France, where the social sciences still hewed much more closely to the rationalism and empiricism of the natural sciences, public intellectuals were not likely to be university professors (Raphael Reference Raphael, Lehmann and Oexle2004).

Abetz was reduced, it seems, to looking for potential rectors in the natural sciences and mathematics, where there was at least a healthy respect for German accomplishments. By 8 September, the only name Abetz had suggested to the MBF was that of a mathematician, Albert Châtelet (1883–1960). Châtelet had been rector at Lille from 1924 to 1937, and then worked in the education ministry until 1940. Abetz's argument for Châtelet was that he had promoted French-German exchanges while rector in Lille.

The appointment needed to be made before Maurain left the rectorship, so von Stülpnagel agreed to meet with Carcopino to settle the matter. In the meeting, Carcopino explained that Châtelet was on the extreme left and therefore unacceptable to the French government. Carcopino had dismissed Châtelet from the rectorship in Caen, and to reinstate him now would undermine his authority with the students by making it clear that he was acting on the order of the Germans. Carcopino made a new suggestion: Gilbert Gidel, who was highly regarded by Friedrich Grimm, a German professor who visited France regularly to lecture, assess the situation, and advise Abetz. Von Stülpnagel agreed to Carcopino's appointing Gidel. Group 4's report for December 1941–January 1942 states that Gidel had been received by von Stülpnagel and pledged his loyalty. Gidel's report on the meeting (in CARAN AJ/16/7117) puts the matter differently: Gidel was committed to keeping the university calm and creating an atmosphere of work.

After being replaced by Bonnard as minister, Carcopino returned to the Ecole Normale, where he was director until the Liberation. After the war, he was tried for collaboration and cleared on the grounds that he had made up for what he had done as a minister by his assistance to the Resistance afterwards. He was elected to the Académie française in 1955.Footnote ²² Gidel remained rector until the Liberation, then returned to teaching law; he died in 1958. Châtelet finished his academic career as dean of the Faculty of Sciences at Paris and then went into politics; he was a candidate for President of the Republic in 1958.

4.3 Raymond Voize and Albert Peyron

Of particular interest to our story is Carcopino's dismissal of Raymond Voize, a 51-year-old professor of German at the lycée Louis le Grand. Voize's personnel file (in CARAN AJ/16/6176) indicates that he was an individual of ability and industry. Born in 1889, he worked in commerce until he was 16, but then he managed to study at the lycée Voltaire, the Sorbonne, and the University of Halle. He passed the agrégation in German on his first attempt in 1913. He also studied law and was interested in political science. He was seriously wounded during the war, obtaining a 75 per cent disability pension. His agrégation entitled him to a position teaching in a lycée, but he refused assignments outside of Paris, teaching in a private school and working in a center for “social and political documentation” until finally being assigned to a Paris lycée in 1936. In 1939, he ran into trouble with his superiors for using the name of his lycée, Louis le Grand, to promote courses he was teaching during the holidays. He remained in his position at that time in spite of exchanging very nasty letters with the Paris rector, Gustave Roussy, but in late 1940 his superiors became nervous about his relations with the German authorities. One note in his file indicates that he had unloaded such a mass of denunciations on the Germans that they had not hidden their disgust from the French authorities.

According to a vicious article in the Paris newspaper L'Appel on 7 August 1941, Carcopino forced Voize to retire in July 1941 because of his connections with the Germans. Carcopino happily confirmed this in his memoirs (see Carcopino Reference Carcopino1953, 351). Also on 7 August 1941, Voize published a long article in the weekly La Gerbe proposing a high commission for French-German intellectual relations, which would award books on Germany to prize-winning French students. He began with a diatribe against the prospect that Carcopino might bring Roussy back to the rectorship in Paris. When Roussy had been ousted as rector in the aftermath of the 11 November 1940 demonstrations, he no longer held a chair in the Faculty of Medicine. Carcopino, by his own account (see ibid., 351–352), had no intention of trying to reverse Roussy's removal from the rectorship, which had been signed by Pétain, and he did not have the means to return Roussy to the Faculty of Medicine. But he had wanted to appoint him director of the Institut Pasteur, and he had dropped the idea in April 1941 only because Roussy had reacted angrily at being offered so little. In Carcopino's view (see ibid., 550–551), Voize's article was the crudest and most unfair attack the Paris press ever made on him; he saw Abetz's hand behind it.

In his attacks on Carcopino and Roussy, Voize had an ally in Albert Peyron (1884–1947), a distinguished scientist at the Institut Pasteur who also fell victim to Carcopino's willingness to dismiss those who threatened the university's independence by their dealings with the Germans. A dossier on Roussy in the German archives contains both letters of accusation and letters defending him from “Peyron and Voize's calumnies.”

Voize's article was noticed by the MBF's press service, which considered it outstanding. It was also praised by Edmond Pistre-Caraguel, the new Aryan Commissioner-Administrator for the publishing house Fernand Nathan under the German ordinance of 18 October 1940.Footnote ²³ On 11 August 1941, Pistre-Caraguel wrote to the Propaganda Abteilung Frankreich to ask them to grant Voize an opportunity to present his idea for a commission. Such a commission, Pistre-Caraguel argued, would give his own mission better support than he was getting from the Education Ministry (in CARAN AJ/40/563).

Voize was soon in contact with Group 4. On 6 September 1941, he wrote to Dahnke at the MBF that he wanted to go into private work instead of heading his proposed High Commission and wanted to see Dahnke again about creating an “Institute for Languages and Culture.”Footnote ²⁴ Dahnke responded on 20 September 1941 (in CARAN AJ/40/563) that he had not yet found the means for creating the institute and that he would be out of the office for five weeks, but that Voize should contact him again at the end of October.

We may surmise that Voize and Peyron were both in contact with Dahnke at the end of October, because the MBF archives include a memorandum (in CARAN AJ/40/567) signed by Dahnke and dated 1 November 1941, that lists 15 individuals they had accused of being “representatives of the Freemason and Bolshevist view in higher education and the administration of public education.” Gustave Roussy heads the list, and Dahnke reports a claim by Peyron that Carcopino told him personally that he wanted to make Roussy rector again.Footnote ²⁵ Next are seven individuals whom Carcopino had appointed or retained even though their collaborationist bona fides were suspect: Hippolyte Luc, Maurice Guyot, Edmée Hatinguais, Marcel Masbou, César Santelli, and Lucien Chattelun, and an eighth, Ludovic Zoretti, whose outright dismissal by Chevalier he had changed to retirement.Footnote ²⁶ These are people Voize and the Paris press had been denouncing since August. Then Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie. Then our four academicians: Mauguin, Cotton, Lapicque, and Borel. And then Gustave Monod, who had been in the Education Ministry before the war, had been demoted to teaching in a lycée because he refused to enforce the expulsion of Jews, and had then retired (Lecoq and Lederlé 2009).

Voize and Peyron surely knew in late October that Borel, Cotton, Lapicque, and Mauguin had already been arrested. Was Dahnke, catching up on his work after returning to Paris, compiling information that Voize and Peyron had provided to him or others earlier? Or did Voize and Peyron (or Dahnke) add names of individuals who had already been arrested in order to make the accusations against Carcopino more persuasive? It is noteworthy that the document cites individuals for their opinions, not for actions against the occupiers. Except for Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who was a member of the Communist Party, “Bolshevist” was a wild exaggeration, but they were all on the left.

Were those named Freemasons? Louis Lapicque was a Freemason (Piéron Reference Piéron1953), but this seems to have been unusual for a scientist. On 11 August 1941, a new law was promulgated stipulating the publication of lists of Freemasons in the Journal Officiel and directing that civil servants who had been Freemason dignitaries would automatically lose their jobs. Huge lists of names were published in the subsequent weeks, and many did lose their jobs. Borel was not on any of the lists, but Voize himself, who was a Freemason before returning to Catholicism, was.

As Jean Guéhenno noted in his diary in 1941, the lists of Freemasons refuted the myth of the Freemasons’ power, for hardly anyone prominent in the Third Republic was on the lists.Footnote ²⁷ Carcopino noted that there was only one Freemason among the 80 members of the faculty of letters at the University of Paris.Footnote ²⁸

4.4 Emile Borel in 1940–1941

Borel turned 70 on 7 January 1941, and so 1940–1941 was his last year at the University of Paris. He officially retired at the end of the academic year, 30 September 1941.Footnote ²⁹ In retirement, he remained active in the Académie des Sciences, and he remained Borel, to whom others in French higher education would turn for advice on appointments and prizes in mathematics.

Although we know little about Borel's activities at the university during 1940–1941, his last year there, we catch a glimpse of him in a story told by Carcopino in his 1953 memoirs. Carcopino's account, if it is to be credited, is an interesting example of the solidarity that existed, at least at that date, within the French establishment. In Borel's eyes, it seems, Vichy's Education Ministry was not the enemy. The story takes place in a monthly meeting of the university's council in which Carcopino, as rector and president of the council, sought to obtain the council's support for his opposition to a change in governance decreed by Jacques Chevalier, then Education Minister, on 20 January 1941. The rector served as president of the council, but its vice presidency was rotated among the deans of the five faculties. Chevalier had proposed a change: a permanent vice president would be appointed by the Education Minister. Carcopino saw this as a dangerous encroachment on the independence of the university, and all his colleagues on the council agreed, except Borel. According to Carcopino, Borel thought that the appointment of a vice president by the government would have more advantages than disadvantages, because it would give the university administration greater unity and continuity.Footnote ³⁰ It is plausible that Borel would have seen advantages in having a permanent vice president, but it is also understandable that Carcopino should have remembered their exchange as he did, for it underlines his own insistence on the independence of the university, which he needed to document in every possible way to refute accusations that he had conceded too much to the Germans. And information in Borel's personnel file (in CARAN F/17/24854) gives us some reason to doubt that he was present at the Sorbonne for the meeting. Carcopino placed the meeting on the morning of Monday, 24 February 1941, more than a month after Chevalier's decree and on the very day Vichy announced Carcopino's appointment to succeed Chevalier as Education Minister. On 22 January 1941, Borel had requested a leave of six weeks, from 20 February until the Easter vacation, saying that he hoped to obtain by 20 February a pass to cross the demarcation line so he could rest at Saint-Affrique. An attached note from his physician states that he has a bad cold, complicated by acute pulmonary congestion, and recommends convalescence in the south of France for three months. He was granted the leave he requested on 5 February 1941. There is no indication in his personnel file that he returned to the Sorbonne to teach after this official leave expired.

On the other hand, the Germans did not hand out the needed passes readily, and we have no other evidence that Borel was in Saint-Affrique in 1941. In the little she says about 1940–1941 in her autobiography, Borel's wife does not mention any trip to Saint-Affrique. She does report that the couple moved within Paris, from their elegant apartment on Boulevard Hausmann, where her mother and husband were shivering for lack of fuel, to a small apartment in Montparnasse, where Borel could be close to an intellectual milieu. She recalls that after a brief vacation south of the Loire at the beginning of the summer, they had returned to Paris, where Borel had made contacts [où il a pris des contacts]. The wording suggests that the Germans were right to suspect that this 70-year-old man, however poor his health, was plotting resistance.

5.1 How it looked to the French

In the autobiography published a year before her death in 1969, Borel's wife Camille Marbo gave a five-page account of her husband's imprisonment (Marbo Reference Marbo1968, 299–304). A German officer, accompanied by four soldiers and a sergeant, came to their apartment at 2:00 in the afternoon, searched it, and then took Borel away at 5:00 with no explanation. Marbo's brother managed to learn that Borel was in the prison at Fresnes, south of Paris, only by taking a package there and getting it accepted. Borel was never allowed visitors, but Marbo's packages, including clean clothes, were sometimes accepted.

Marbo does not tell us the exact date of Borel's arrest, but it was almost certainly either 10 or 11 October 1941. According to documents in the archives of the French Education Ministry (in CARAN F/17/13385), Mauguin was arrested at the university on 10 October. The next day the ministry contacted DGTO, asking them to find out from the Germans where Mauguin was being held and whether the arrest had any bearing on the university as a whole. Two days later, they contacted the DGTO again to add that Borel and Cotton had been arrested on 11 October.

News of the arrests spread quickly. In the 12 October 1941 entry in his diary, Jean Guéhenno writes that Borel has been arrested and that Langevin has been arrested anew. The new Paris police commissioner, Guéhenno says, is boasting of having arrested 1100 communists and anglophiles, and the Gestapo has declared the whole university suspect.Footnote ³¹ Langevin's biographers confirm that he was arrested at second time while at Troyes, interrogated, and then released after a few days. Biquard places the arrest on a Wednesday at the end of September, and notes that the local German forces who arrested and interrogated him were not aware of his scientific stature (see Biquard Reference Biquard1969, 95).Footnote ³²

As Marbo's account indicates, the French police were not involved in Borel's arrest. All they could do was check after the fact on whether it had happened. A report in archives of the Paris police (in Dossier BA 1789), dated 16 October 1941, states that they investigated the reported arrests of Langevin, Lapicque, Mauguin, Borel, and Cotton. They confirmed the arrests of Lapicque, Mauguin, and Borel, giving 10 October as the date in each case. They visited the address in Paris where Langevin had lived, but learned only that he was retired and now lived in Troyes. A subsequent report in the same police archives, dated 7 November 1941, inveighs against communist militants whom it accuses of using the arrests to stir up fear and anti-German feeling to the detriment of France.

The arrests soon came to international attention. On 18 October 1941, an article on occupied France in the London Times concluded with the comment, “No reason has so far been given for the arrest in Paris by the German authorities of the well-known mathematician Emile Borel, a former Minister of the Navy.” Two days later, on 20 October 1941, the Times devoted an entire article to the arrests. As this article tells us, the reasons for the arrests remained a matter of speculation.

Although the Times correspondent was mistaken to believe that the French government had a hand in the arrests, the collaborationist press was loudly supporting Laval's demand. On 23 October 1941, for example, in a violent article opposing Roussy's return to the university, l'Appel asked how Roussy could be allowed to hold his position when Professors Lapicque, Cotton, Mauguin, Borel, Villey, and Saintelagüe had been locked up for Bolshevist Gaullism.

While the academicians were imprisoned, the Germans escalated their terror in a way that shocked the French population. Following the assassination of a German officer in Nantes on 20 October, they shot 48 prisoners on 22 October and published the names of the victims on 23 October. Another assasination in Bordeaux on 21 October was followed by a mass execution on 24 October. Marbo remembered the terror that she and the wives of the other imprisoned academicians experienced at every announcement of an execution or deportation.

Marbo hoped that the Académie des Sciences would petition for their members’ release, and she marshaled support from three members, Maurice de Broglie, Elie Cartan, and Paul Montel. But the leadership of the Academy feared that speaking out would risk the Academy's abolition. Marbo also went to talk with Carcopino; he told her his hands were tied. Carcopino confirms this in his 1953 memoir, where he writes of feeling sad and helpless when she told him about Borel's not getting the blankets she had brought to the prison for him (see Carcopino Reference Carcopino1953, 472). He also recalls that in November 1940, when he was rector and Georges Ripert was Education Minister, Ripert had asked him to approach the Germans about Langevin. Neither the Collège de France nor the other institutions where Langevin worked fell under the rector's jurisdiction, but Ripert appealed to Carcopino for help because of Carcopino's reputation for dealing with the Germans. Dissuaded from approaching the MBF directly by officials at the DGTO, Carcopino asked the scientist and industrialist Georges Claude, the most outspoken proponent of Collaboration in the Académie des Sciences, to talk with the Germans about Langevin. Claude told Carcopino he would, but changed his mind after finding that the permanent secretaries of the Académie des Sciences would not lend their names to the effort.Footnote ³⁴

During the period when Borel and his colleagues were imprisoned, the representative of the Education Ministry at the DGTO was Maurice Roy. Born in 1888, Roy had been a professor of German at the lycée Saint-Louis until being promoted to the rank of inspector in 1940. He was delegated to the DGTO in March 1941. According to Carcopino's biographer Stéphanie Corcy-Debray (see Corcy-Debray Reference Corcy-Debray2001, 76), Roy intervened with the Germans routinely on behalf of students and professors who had been arrested, at the same time as he worked on many other conflicts involving education and youth movements. It was his job, for example, to submit legislation and regulations to the German censors before they were published by the French government. He was doubtlessly in contact with the Germans about Borel and his colleagues as soon as their arrests were known to the Education Ministry.

In her biography of her husband Emile Cotton (Cotton Reference Cotton1967) Eugénie Cotton states that the four prisoners were released on 13 November, and this date is confirmed by a handwritten note on an MBF document prepared in Feburary 1942 (in CARAN AJ/40/567). Other information is consistent with this date. Marbo tells us that Borel fell ill with double pneumonia the day after he was released. By 19 November he was writing a note to his colleague Albert Lacroix.Footnote ³⁵

We have not found any account of Borel's recollections about his interrogation. The biologist Maurice Caullery, a fellow member of the Académie des Sciences and friend of Borel, Cotton, Mauguin, and Lapicque, stated in his own memoirs that the interrogation of the four was a sham.Footnote ³⁶

5.2 The intervention of the German Navy

The earliest mention of Borel's name that we have found in the MBF archives comes in a letter dated 25 October 1941, from the office of the Commanding Admiral of the German Navy in France to the secret police section of the MBF (in CARAN AJ/40/558). Here is the body of the letter in English translation:

It seems unlikely that Frédéric Joliot-Curie and his French assistants would have been getting help from their aging colleagues in Paris, let alone from Langevin in Troyes, or that Joliot-Curie could have convinced the German scientists in the laboratory that this was the case. But it is plausible that the German scientists would have solicited this letter as a gesture to Joliot-Curie. Joliot-Curie's role in obtaining Langevin's transfer from prison to Troyes in December 1940 is documented by Burrin (Burrin Reference Burrin1995, 315–322).

5.3 How it looked to the MBF

By 10 November, at least, Dahnke knew that the academicians had been arrested. On that day he writes:

In a handwritten note added on 18 November to the memorandum of 10 November, Dahnke reports that Borel, Cotton, and Mauguin had been released in the meantime after a note from Roy. This is surely a reference to Maurice Roy, Carcopino's liaison with the Germans. Dahnke seems to have been meeting with the Alst weekly. In his next report, he writes the following:

We are left to conjecture that Abetz decided that it was not worthwhile to exile the four academicians from Paris.

We learn a little more from documents prepared by Group 4 in early 1942, when Charles Mauguin again came to the Germans’ attention. Mauguin was elected to the council of the university, and the clandestine press, noting that a collaborationist had also stood for the post, celebrated the election as a defeat for the Collaboration. Group 4 duly looked into the matter, and in a report to the Verwaltungsabteilung's police section, dated 11 February 1942,Footnote ³⁸ they noted that Mauguin had been accused by his right-wing opponents of being close to the communists but that no proof had yet been found; they would investigate further. A handwritten note on this report states, with reference to the archives of the Alst, that Mauguin had been already been arrested in October 1941 and released on 13 November 1941.

Why did the Alst arrest the four academicians as they were sweeping up the Hector network? Were they implicated by some of those arrested on October 9, the first day of the sweep? Or were they arrested because of the earlier evidence gathered by the SS concerning professors who were likely to be encouraging students in the Resistance? The fact that Dahnke reports communicating Voize and Peyron's accusations to the Alst after the arrests of the academicians suggests that these accusations were not responsible for the arrests. We must remember, however, that Dahnke was making a record for his superiors in the MBF, and that von Stülpnagel had expressly forbidden the SS to take action against prominent scientists without consulting him. Von Stülpnagel had formal authority over the SS agents in France, but he had no authority over the Abwher's counterespionage operations in France. It is possible that the SS had pushed the Alst to take an action that they themselves could not take because of von Stülpnagel's opposition, and that Dahnke was to some extent complicit.

The German documents give us a clearer picture about the reasons the four academicians were released. They tell us repeatedly, in a variety of contexts, that von Stülpnagel was not willing to punish French scientists who could not be proven to have taken action against the Occupation, because to do so would interfere with keeping order in the university.

Perhaps the intervention of the German Navy had some influence, but on the whole, we must take at face value Dahnke's report that the Alst released the academicians for lack of evidence that they were actively resisting the Occupation. According to Gilbert Gidel's account of his meeting with von Stülpnagel on 15 December 1941 as Paris rector (in CARAN AJ/16/7117), von Stülpnagel made explicit the bargain the Germans were offering university authorities: the Germans would refrain from harsh measures so long as students and professors stuck to their academic business.

Dahnke's reports do not tell us that his communication with the Alst, reported on 10 November, played a role in the prisoners’ release on 13 November. Nor do we have records of correspondence between the DGTO and the Germans about the arrests. But as we have already mentioned, Maurice Roy, the DGTO official concerned with the arrests of professors and students, intervened routinely on their behalf with the MBF, and Dahnke would surely have been aware of French concerns when he consulted with the Alst about the fate of Borel and his colleagues.

6.1 Borel's candidacy to succeed Picard

Emile Picard died on 11 December 1941 at the age of 86. Borel, a relative by marriage,Footnote ³⁹ would normally have attended the funeral. But he seems not to have done so, perhaps because he was still recovering from his ordeal or perhaps out of prudence. The published list of those who attended the funeral lists Marguerite Borel as a member of the Appell family.

Picard had been one of two permanent secretaries for the Académie des Sciences, the other being the mineralogist Alfred Lacroix (1863–1948). As permanent secretary, Picard had represented the mathematical sciences, which had subsections for geometry, mechanics, astronomy, geography, and physics. On 2 February 1942, the academy elected the physicist and Nobel laureate Louis de Broglie to succeed him.

Had he not been arrested, Borel would have been a natural successor to Picard, as the post had been held previously by the academy's most senior pure mathematician. Jacques Hadamard was more senior than Borel, but he had fled to the United States because he was Jewish.

The file at the academy's archives for its meeting of 2 February 1942 confirms that de Broglie's election was a delicate matter. A letter from the ministry, dated 30 December 1941, reveals that in response to the ministry's official condolences to Picard's widow, Lacroix had mentioned the vacancy of the post of permanent secretary and the academy's intention of proceeding to an election to fill it, and asking for an appointment with Carcopino. He met with Carcopino on the morning of 7 January 1942.

The next day, Lacroix wrote to the members of the academy laying out how the new permanent secretary would be elected, with reference to documents going back to 1803, when the post had been introduced. There would be nothing out of the ordinary about such a notice, but the circumstances seem to have required supplementary documentation. Perhaps someone had suggested leaving the post vacant, because Lacroix cites an article of the regulations that had been amended in 1816 to state that the academy would not deliberate about whether or not to elect someone to the post (Lacroix's emphasis) but would elect a commission of six members from the section (mathematical sciences in this case), which would produce a list of candidates in consultation with the academy's president. Lacroix then proposed a calendar for the process: the commission would be named on 19 January, it would name the candidates on 26 January, and the election would take place on 2 February if a quorum of 40 could be assembled; failing the quorum the election would take place on 9 February by simple majority of those present. The file also contains a tally showing that there had not been a quorum at any of the meetings for December 1941.

Another document, in Lacroix's hand, indicates the results of a secret committee meeting on 12 January that chose the commission members to be elected by the assembly the following week. The commission consisted, naturally, of the most senior members of the five subsections: Borel for geometry, Villat for mechanics, Deslandres for astronomy, Bourgeois for geography, and Cotton for physics, along with Maurain as the most senior of the other members of the section. At the bottom of the document is a discreet acknowledgement of Hadamard's existence: It is a matter of the most senior members present in Paris.

The two candidates proposed by the commission on 19 January were Louis de Broglie and Elie Cartan. In his 7 January notice, Lacroix had prescribed that the commission would not make a report, on the surprising grounds that its work concerned a competition among colleagues.

On 2 February, 41 members of the academy were present, and 39 voted: 22 for de Broglie, 15 for Cartan, and two with blank ballots. The same day, Lacroix sent Carcopino an excerpt of the minutes proclaiming de Broglie's election and asking him to confirm the choice. The published minutes of the following week's meeting (see CRAS 214, 16 February 1942, 294) records the confirmation and reproduces de Broglie's very proper acceptance speech. He merely affirmed that the Académie des Sciences had to play its role in the difficult times being endured for the sake of the country's recovery. Such rhetoric would have been completely satisfactory from the viewpoint of the Vichy government, which always insisted that it was working for the restoration of the country and for its future triumphs.

6.2 The arrest of academicians in April 1942

On 2 April 1942, the Germans arrested and imprisoned for two days a dozen members of the Institut de France, including two members of the Académie des Sciences, Aimée Cotton, who had been arrested with Borel in October, and the biologist Maurice Caullery. Carcopino's liaison at the Militärbefehlshaber was told by the Germans that the academics were arrested because they had been receiving the clandestine periodical La France Continue. Caullery, who compared notes with the others who were arrested, confirms that the Germans accused them all of receiving clandestine material. Caullery told them that this was true; he had received the material in a sealed envelope, had not known who sent it, and had destroyed it. Caullery conjectured that the Germans’ only evidence against those arrested was the presence of their names on a distribution list for the clandestine material. Aside from the questioning when they were arrested, the academicians were not interrogated further before being released on 4 April (see Telkes Reference Telkes2001, 239–243).

According to Carcopino the arrests were discussed by Pétain and his ministers. Pétain tried at first to minimize the significance of the arrests, observing that none of those arrested were in the Académie française. But Carcopino countered that some of them were Pétain's own colleagues in l'Académie des Sciences morales. Pétain was persuaded to act on behalf of the prisoners in a way he had not in previous cases: he told Darlan to have de Brinon intervene with the Germans. When the prisoners were released on 4 April, Carcopino rejoiced in the effectiveness of Pétain's action, but he later concluded that the Germans had released the prisoners because the arrests had achieved their goal of bringing Pétain around to changing his government. If the Germans’ purpose had been to attack the Resistance, Carcopino reasoned, they would have arrested more members of the Académie des Sciences, the citadel of the Resistance within the Institut de France, rather than arresting eight or nine members of Carcopino's own academy, the Académie des Inscriptions. After the war he found support for this opinion in telegrams from the German Embassy in Paris to von Ribbentrop in Berlin, one on 21 March 1942 proposing that the crisis created by the fiasco of the Riom trial be used to oust Carcopino and other undesirable ministers, a second on 3 April 1942 indicating that Pétain had now conceded to Laval the departure of Carcopino and the minister of agriculture (see Carcopino Reference Carcopino1953, 560–565; Corcy-Debray Reference Corcy-Debray2001, 232). By the middle of April, Carcopino had left the government, returning to the directorship of the Ecole Normale in Paris, and Laval was in charge at Vichy.

According to Marbo's memoir, Borel was arrested again in 1942, this time by two French policemen, who returned him home after three hours, reporting that the German officer to whom they had taken him had rejected him as a prisoner because of his age. Marbo does not give a date for this second arrest. Was it on 2 April when the other academicians were arrested? Perhaps, but Marbo's testimony that the French police executed the arrest may count against this, as accounts of the other arrests on 2 April suggest that the Germans acted without French help.

The second arrest persuaded Borel and Marbo to return to Saint-Affrique. They did so, after obtaining the necessary permission for crossing the line of demarcation, in October 1942. According to Marbo, they worked with the Resistance in Saint-Affrique. Borel's contribution was to allow the Resistance to use a forest he owned, but Marbo, thirteen years younger and in better health, did what she could to feed and otherwise help Jews and other fugitives. By the spring of 1944, Borel and Marbo were back in Paris, where they stayed with Marbo's brother Pierre. Marbo helped Pierre deliver messages for the Resistance. On D-Day, Borel and Marbo were staying clandestinely in a clinic in the Passy district of Paris, where Borel underwent surgery (see Marbo Reference Marbo1968, 306–309).

6.3 Borel's remonstrance at the Académie des Sciences

The Liberation of Paris disturbed the activities of the Académie des Sciences very little. The assembly did not meet during the week when the Liberation took place, but they did meet the following Monday, 28 August, starting late because of the difficulties experienced by the trains, and unanimously voting to join the other academies of the Institut in congratulating the provisional government and thanking the allied troops and French forces (see CRAS, 219, 225). The following week, on Monday, 4 September, they went into secret session and decided to expel Georges Claude, the scientist and industrialist who had been so vocal a proponent of the Collaboration (see ibid., 264).

Soon thereafter, on 23 September 1944, Borel wrote to Lacroix proposing a reconsideration of the election of de Broglie as permanent secretary. In this letter, Borel recounts what Jean Vincent, president of the academy, has told him about the academy's actions in 1941. Vincent had opposed appealing to the Germans to release the four prisoners, because de Brinon had persuaded him that such an appeal would be dangerous both for the prisoners and the academy itself. For the same reason, Vincent had opposed Borel's selection as permanent secretary, and he now agreed that Borel would have been elected had he not been arrested. At the beginning of 1942, Borel had thought he had enough votes to be elected in spite of Vincent's opposition, but as Lacroix very well knew, Carcopino had forced him to withdraw his candidacy. In light of this history, Borel felt that he was owed “reparation”; Louis de Broglie should resign, and Borel should replace him. Borel had already talked to friends of Louis and his brother Maurice, and he thought they could be persuaded that this was appropriate.

Borel's plan seems to have gotten off the ground. He wrote to Lacroix again on 6 October 1944, saying that he had a good conversation with Maurice and was convinced that Louis would indeed resign. But Louis did not resign, and Borel never became permanent secretary. We have no further evidence concerning the attitudes of the de Broglies and other members of the Academy, but it is easy to imagine them hesitating to revisit decisions made during the Occupation. Did reparation mean an admission of fault? Who else might deserve reparation? If Borel had a claim, did Hadamard also have one?

After the war, Borel resumed his activity in Paris and served again as mayor of Saint-Affrique,Footnote ⁴⁰ from 1945 to 1947. He died in Paris in 1956. Camille Marbo died in 1969.