Cruel World (52 page)

The Vichy reforms began right away. By July 1940, only weeks after the armistice, teachers deemed “too independent” began to be dismissed, among them men who had fled during the fighting, political activists, and foreigners. In October, Jews were forced to resign and Freemasons had to sign a declaration renouncing their membership. All teachers were eventually required to sign a loyalty oath to the Pétain government. The new French regime had its own ideas about books and began a campaign to get rid of works that were deemed too “republican” or anti-clerical. When combined with the German efforts, this process, left to a variety of local officials with a variety of ideologies, caused chaos and confusion as to which were the “right” books, and had little real effect.
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It soon became clear that Vichy France was no less fragmented than the Third Republic, which had preceded it. Everyone had his own ideas about how to transform youth and their education, a situation the Germans did nothing to relieve, as a unified French youth was the last thing they desired. Some Vichyites urged more sports and Nazi-like indoctrination. Others harked back to the days of chivalry and Joan of Arc. The Maid of
Orléans was, in fact, useful all across the French spectrum, both for having been anti-English and for having rid France of an invader. All factions called for more service and obedience, discipline, honesty, and morality, with everyone in his place. “Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité” was, significantly, replaced by Pétain’s “Travail, Famille, Patrie.”

None of it was much fun. Church and state inveighed against coed activities of any kind, and dancing was discouraged. That was not all. In an effort to reconnect Frenchmen with their native soil and break down what was viewed as the overcentralization of the Third Republic, regionalism was heavily promoted. In the provinces children were taken on field trips to local historical sites and given courses in regional dialects such as Breton and Flemish. This was fine with the Germans, who had already carved considerable chunks off the borders of France and planned to reduce it to a small rump state in the future.
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In the short history of Vichy a series of ministers of education culminating in the very pro-German Abel Bonnard decreed and revoked a dizzying array of initiatives for the schools. God was put in and taken out of the secular schools several times. The stately Marshal Pétain, who, like Hitler, had no children, but who loved to visit schools, floated above it all, and graciously received the pupils’ flowers, songs, and obligatory letters.

Despite all the ferment, little actually changed in the French school system. The separate primary and elite secondary tracks continued despite innumerable suggestions, many not new, for their reform, and nothing from battles to hunger ever caused the sacred Baccalauréat exam to be canceled. Efforts to introduce more physical education, to this day not a strong tradition in France, were not a success, as many parents could not see any reason for it and such luminaries as the archbishop of Bourges declared that “the natural method used, in which young males display themselves almost naked, offends decorum and shocks our Christian souls.” Even worse, the athletes might be seen by girls, “and we know the inmost mind of adolescents.” His fellow bishop at Viviers noted that exercises were “unbecoming to females and should be avoided.”
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If the Germans in France were determined to stamp out any anti-German manifestations in the schools, they were even more determined to prevent the establishment of a strong national youth movement by Vichy. The Scouts and Catholic Youth continued on as ever. But, inspired by their desire to reform France and raise it from prewar decadence, a plethora of French organizers would eventually set up new groups. Two of these, officially sanctioned by the Vichy government, were considered too nationalistic by the Germans and were not allowed to operate in the Occupied
Zone. The Compagnons de France, organized immediately after the armistice to take care of teenagers who had been scattered about by the invasion and those who were unemployed, was operating a camp by August 1940. Its regulations and ceremonies, with much flag raising, saluting, and an elegant dark blue uniform adorned with the
coq gaulois
, were much like the Hitler Youth, but its activities were not militaristic and its orientation was decidedly French. Boys were sent out to harvest crops, build roads, and, it being France, run restaurants. There was even a music and theater section.

The heavily funded Compagnons were criticized variously for being dropouts, sheltering Jewish and Gaullist members (which was true), and, by the Church, as being too totalitarian. German suspicions were not misplaced: by 1942 many of the Compagnon leaders, disillusioned with Vichy, were deeply involved in Resistance activities.

For boys of draft age, some of whom had already been inducted but had not completed training by the time of France’s surrender, Vichy set up the Chantiers de la Jeunesse. This group, which was made obligatory for all French boys reaching draft age in subsequent years, was somewhat Boy Scout–like in atmosphere and was headed by the former French Army General Paul de la Porte du Theil. Small camps were scattered in remote areas all over Vichy France, and there was also a Naval Section. Emphasis was on “manly” training combined with uplifting group sessions around campfires. The by now familiar themes of godliness, cleanliness, community, moral education, exercise, and discipline were combined with supposedly inspiring manual labor of various kinds. Indoctrination sessions and ceremonies in which the troops sang songs with lyrics such as “Venerable one, I would that I were able to kneel, simply, as one does before the Holy Image at your feet”
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glorified Pétain and earlier suitable historic heroes (Charlemagne, Napoleon, Louis XIV) and vilified the recently defeated Third Republic. The Germans suspected that the Chantiers were an army in waiting and kept them under careful surveillance. This seems not to have been the case, although the Chantiers and their large alumni organization could, according to General de la Porte, have enabled the French to field forty divisions in a short time. As the threat of an Allied invasion of France increased, the General was arrested and, as we shall see, the Chantier youths were used to supply manpower for quite a different purpose.
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The universities of the Western occupied nations of course did not escape the German desire for total control either. In the Nordic lands,
unlike the Slavic ones, the various Nazi governors and commanders were determined to keep the universities going not only as training institutions for vital professions but also as centers for Germanization. The idea was to have these universities conform in every way to those of the Reich, a process that would require the by now usual purges of faculty, appointment of professors of Nazi ideology, and the introduction of racial studies. Once again the Nazis would be surprised at the resistance to the suppression of religions and national loyalties even by those sympathetic to their ideas. The university faculties and students were determined to continue in their traditional manner, and were particularly resistant to the appointment of their collaborationist countrymen to professorial chairs.

The earliest student reactions were fragmented, nationalistic, and passionate, consisting in the main of graffiti insulting to the Reich, rudeness to German soldiers, defiant bouts of singing, and a proliferation of anti-German leaflets and information sheets. In the summer of 1940 no one was sure how long the occupation would last or how extensive German control would be. The Sorbonne in Paris reopened within weeks of the French surrender. Officially this was done so that students could take the exams they had missed during the invasion, but secretly because keeping the classrooms filled would discourage requisition of the buildings by German agencies.
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As the summer wore on, the inability of the Germans to reduce Great Britain to surrender sustained the defiant student mood across the Continent. At the beginning of the academic year in Oslo, 800 members of the Student Union, who previously had protested the brutal arrests by the Nazis of more than 1,000 Czech students, rose as one to support the declaration of their honored speaker, seventy-year-old writer Dr. Johan Scharffenberg, that their exiled King Haakon was “the living expression of the will of the Norwegian people to regain their freedom and independence.” This was not at all what the Nazis had in mind, and both the speaker and the president of the Student Union were immediately arrested, but, for the time being, the school remained open.
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In late October students in Paris, already outraged by Pétain’s friendly meeting with Hitler at Montoire, demonstrated peacefully, but firmly, to protest the arrest by the Germans, condoned by Vichy, of famed physicist Paul Langevin, a longtime anti-Fascist whose daughter also had made the mistake of marrying a Jew. The large crowd was contained by a combined Franco-German police force impressively armed with machine guns.
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This incident inspired both the Germans and the university authorities to issue dire warnings against any further demonstrations, especially on the
fast-approaching Armistice Day, November 11, when the French traditionally celebrated the German defeat in World War I and memorialized their war dead. The red flag had now been raised. Plans for a demonstration at the Arc de Triomphe spread like wildfire—by word of mouth and leaflets—through the lycées and universities of Paris.

On the morning of the eleventh all went to class as usual. It was not until the afternoon that ever growing groups of students began to be seen wandering aimlessly up and down the Champs-Elysées below the Arc de Triomphe. All was well until a German staff car pushed its way into one of the groups. This provoked shouts of “Vive la France” and rude comments about the Germans. At the same moment a phalanx of a thousand high school students from the famous Lycée Janson entered the Etoile, followed by others from the Lycée Carnot and many more. The idea was to keep moving at all times and walk under the Arc de Triomphe in groups of three or four, which, the students theorized, would give the police no grounds for action.

Unfortunately, Hitler salutes given by uniformed boys from a French Fascist youth group that had its headquarters on the Champs-Elysées led some of the passive demonstrators to lose their cool. Stones were thrown and windows broken. The French police at first did nothing. The Germans, not so shy, arrested five students. Now the French police began to charge into the amoeba-like crowd, which had continued to grow. By 6:00 p.m. the Germans had had enough. Heavily armed, motorized Wehrmacht units appeared at both ends of the Champs-Elysées and began zigzagging on the sidewalks in their vehicles. These maneuvers, plus the use of machine guns, dispersed the demonstrators in less than an hour.
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Five days later all the universities in Paris were closed on the grounds that the demonstrations had been “incompatible with the dignity of the German Army.”
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The lycées remained open, but under guard. Wild rumors, later disproved, of many deaths and injuries circulated. In fact, only a few participants were injured or arrested, but the incident, with its blatant use of force, made clear to all the realities of open resistance to the Nazis. The masks of “correctness” had fallen; a time of fear and waiting had arrived.

Ten days after the closure of the universities in Paris and Dijon, students in Holland at the University of Leiden and the Delft Technical University also went on strike, to protest an order expelling all Jewish professors and instructors from Dutch institutions of higher learning. At Leiden, which stood to lose ten faculty members, the students, led by a popular professor, defiantly sang the national anthem in their assembly before dispersing.
Both schools were closed down. Delft reopened in April 1941, but Leiden, Holland’s premier university of liberal arts, whose motto was
“Presidium Libertatis,”
or “Bulwark of Liberty,” and where resistance to the appointment of Nazi professors and the teaching of courses in racial science persisted, would remain closed until the war was over. Its students, after being allowed to take certain examinations, were dispersed to other institutions.

Some of these were run by pro-Nazis, but in most the
rector magnificus
, as the president of a university was known, was all too aware of events in Czechoslovakia and Poland, where thousands of students and faculty had been sent to concentration camps, and agonized over what to do. Closure of the universities would leave the students in a state of limbo that would immediately be exploited by the Nazis. Some rectors therefore urged students to keep politics off campus and continue their studies.
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Despite these warnings, continued purging of the faculties and the increase of Nazi-skewed lectures led to sporadic protests by both faculty and students, which were harshly punished. But Seyss-Inquart was loath to give up on his idea of converting the Dutch elite through the university system, so most universities stayed open. In June 1941 the students again protested the imposition of quotas for Jewish students, who by October would no longer be allowed to graduate. This led to abolition of all student organizations. The measure did not stop students from becoming involved in resistance activities. But it was not until 1942 and the introduction of extreme measures in two areas—Jewish persecution and forced labor—that resistance would become the central activity of many students’ lives.

(photo credit p4.1)