Vichy France (27 page)

The primary school “instituteurs” had become a rather homogeneous and inward-looking body by the interwar years. They were of modest social origins and were strongly marked by the secular rationalist progressivism of their founders’ generation. To their traditional anticlericalism and positivism was added a strong current of pacifism after 1914. Already bound together by shared views and by the isolation of village intellectuals elevated from a modest social background, they also became politically organized in the twentieth century. The
Cartel des gauches
government of 1924 finally recognized the teachers’ long-claimed right to unionize, and the National Teachers’ Union became a mainstay of the non-Communist unions, the CGT. The teachers staged a twenty-four hour strike on 12 February 1934 in reaction to the antiparliamentary demonstrations of the 6th and were prominent in the strike of 30 November 1938 against Reynaud’s decree-laws. The Teachers’ Union also helped found the Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels contre le Fascisme in 1934 and was thus a grandparent of the Popular Front. After 1936, however, their intransigent pacifism made them one of the two CGT branches (along with postmen) who opposed aid to the beleaguered Spanish Republic. The Teachers’ Union was a conspicuous supporter of concessions to Hitler over the Sudeten-land and continued to oppose war right up to 1939. The union did not represent all primary school teachers, of course (some were Communist and were bitterly opposed by Delmas’ union; a few were Catholic), but the union made a convenient target for labeling the whole teaching profession as antipatriotic and dangerously left.
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Vichy tried to uproot the “primary school spirit,” as embodied in its “dangerous and disloyal” body of teachers.
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There is little information on the purge of teachers after 1940, partly because four of the six Vichy education ministers were acquitted after the war, and their trials do not go into such matters. The law of 17 July 1940 permitted the state to remove any civil servant without formality during the next three months, if he seemed likely to be an “element of disorder, an inveterate politician, or incapable.” The law excluding Freemasons from public service seems to have removed at least 1,328 teachers, going by the names published in the
Journal officiel
in the fall of 1941. Jews were forbidden to teach on 3 October 1940. Teachers who remained had to take a loyalty oath to the regime. The purge climate among teachers is probably best recaptured in an exchange of letters between Youth Minister Jean Ybarnégaray and the prefect of the department of the Basses-Pyrénées where Ybarnégaray was a local political power. Naming two teachers who seem to have uttered threats of revolution against the Germans, Ybarnégaray ordered these two “female moujiks” fired, not merely transferred, and an immediate investigation to locate other “undesirable teachers.”
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Politicized school teachers also had to be shut off at the source. In July 1940 Vichy’s second minister of education,
Le Temps
editor Emile Mireaux, abolished the departmental Consultative Committees for primary education that had “encroached” on the educational bureaucracy with local political pressures. On 20 September 1941, in a step long predicted, the
écoles normales
—the provincial training schools for primary teachers—were abolished. The Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, a conservative pressure group on educational policy, had long proposed that primary teachers go to
lycées
and get a good classical education. This was partly another blow for quality by classicists
against modernists. But it was undeniably mainly a blow against those “antiseminaries,” those “evil seminaries of democracy” that “for sixty years had separated French children from their priests.”
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This brings us to the elite educational system, the secondary system of
lycées
: fee-paying public boarding schools leading to the liberal professions and the university.
Lycée
professors in 1940 included some of France’s most distinguished intellectuals, some (but not all) as closely identified with the Third Republic as the
instituteurs.

Indeed,
lycéens
and graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris had been so prominent in Third Republic politics from Jaurès through Herriot to Blum that Albert Thibaudet christened the regime since the Dreyfus Affair as “the republic of the professors.” The
lycées
too were bound to be touched by the personnel purges and loyalty oaths of the new regime.
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The picture is complicated, however, by the fact that the elite secondary education system had been under attack between the wars from the Left as well as from the Right. Its selectivity operated on two levels—cost and classical curriculum—to screen out all but a handful of poor children from the route that led to high professional and intellectual careers. A group of
lycée
professors who met on Pétain’s staff in 1917 formed a movement to democratize French education by combining the primary and secondary systems in a single track, abolishing fees for the secondary system and basing selection to the elite
lycées
solely on intellectual merits. This program, summed up in the catch-phrase “école unique,” became the mainstay of Radical and Socialist educational projects between the wars. Some of the “école unique” program was enacted into law. The secondary school system became free in the years 1930–33.

Popular Front Education Minister Jean Zay tried to carry
through the rest. He wanted to reorganize the overlapping primary and secondary systems into a single set of successive stages. This meant integrating the upper levels of the primary system into the secondary system and merging the lower levels of the secondary system into the primary. He also set up final courses for students leaving school at sixteen, which were criticized as socialist propaganda (Zay himself belonged to the Radical party). Above all, Zay wanted to leave options open to promising late starters. This meant permitting transfers between technical, modern, and classical tracks at all stages. Some of this could be enacted by decree, but Zay’s legislative project, finally submitted to parliament on 5 March 1937, arrived after the Popular Front had already lost its elan.

Furthermore, it aroused a disparate cluster of hostilities typical of the Third Republic’s difficulties with sweeping reform. The National Teachers’ Union was opposed to the secondary system’s swallowing up the upper levels of the primary system, to losing its best students even earlier, and to the concentration of the minister’s attentions on the secondary system. Professors were dismayed by the flood of new students pouring into the secondary system after the abolition of fees and by the whole assault on quality that democratization seemed to threaten. Having remained stable from 1880 to 1930 while the upper reaches of the primary system absorbed the numbers, the secondary system began to grow steeply after 1930, smashing a comfortable stability and launching the “school explosion” that has not to this day been resolved by any pedagogically and politically acceptable principle of selection for higher schooling.
⁴⁴

Cutting across these professional resentments was the pedagogical quarrel of classical education against modern and technical
curricula. Latinity, of course, nicely reinforced the elitism of the old
lycée
system. It is no accident that its defense was associated with political conservatism. It was Léon Bérard, later one of Vichy’s ambassadors to the Holy See, who, as education minister, had restored obligatory Latin in 1922, and Edouard Herriot who had gone back to the Dreyfusard program of optional Latin in 1924.
⁴⁵

These swirling currents, held at deadlock under the Third Republic, took a more positive direction after 1940. The Vichy solution was a return in the direction of both elitism and classicism in secondary education. This was what one would have expected of the Vichy ministers of education. Vichy, as usual, left things to top professionals. The politician-ministers of the Third Republic were replaced by conservative university professors: Albert Rivaud, philosophy professor at Strasbourg; Emile Mireaux, professor and codirector of
Le Temps
, Georges Ripert, dean of the Paris law faculty, Jacques Chevalier, professor of philosophy at Grenoble (all in 1940), and Jérôme Carcopino, Sorbonne classicist (February, 1941–April 1942). Only Abel Bonnard (1942–44) was not an academic but rather an essayist and writer, but he had been active in a conservative teachers’ group, the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, before the war. Teachers or officials from the primary system were of course conspicuously absent.

First, there was an attempt to arrest the alarming swarm of students into the free
lycées.
The law of 15 August 1941 reestablished fees for the higher classes of secondary education, and although Jérôme Carcopino has pointed out that some scholarships were available and that free
lycées
had favored city children, it remains clear that the main motive for return to
lycée
fees was the desire to save the idyll of the small, elite
lycée
of the halcyon days of 1880–1930.
⁴⁶
Then, predictably, there was a return toward the superiority of the Latin curriculum, although a qualified one. Carcopino in 1941 gave up on the Third Republic’s
efforts to have an equal dose of sciences in all secondary school options and set up four sections of which three required Latin and one permitted modern languages. Finally, there remained the tangled questions of the “école unique.” Carcopino went back to allowing the secondary system to have its own elementary classes, a revival of part of the old twin systems. But his law of 15 August 1941 also suppressed the upper sections of the primary system and joined them with the secondary. This actually moved in the same direction as Zay’s efforts and the eventual reforms of 1945, but for a different reason. The intention was to suppress yet one more vehicle of the dangerous “esprit primaire.”

The main question was what was taught. The regime’s efforts to end the Third Republic’s militant laicism had swerved through Jacques Chevalier’s restoration of religious instruction to the benevolent neutrality of Carcopino. The Third Republic’s schools had sought to form citizens in its own image; Vichy schools would do no less. The school program of 15 August 1941 established different curricula for city and country, boys and girls. The Enlightenment “citizen” had given way to members of unlike communities. There must also be, as Carcopino wrote, a primacy of “national education” over “public instruction.” A letter survives in which Admiral Darlan requests his education minister in October 1941 to have the school instill love of France and help block Gaullism. As late as 1943, the prefects were still instructing teachers as public servants to support the government actively.
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It was not enough, of course, to rely on teachers and professors, even after a purge and the requirement of an oath to Pétain. A major part of the Vichy effort to capture the young went on out of school. The young individual was supposed to be conditioned by enrollment in a healthy group experience. Youth organizations—and, indeed, the very concept of adolescence as a particular stage of life with its own properties, neither child nor adult—were spreading in the twentieth century. The scout
movements and the youth hostel movement (introduced into France in 1929) had already gained ground. Uniformed youth groups had become important devices between the wars for the Left and the Catholic church as well as for fascists. The Vichy regime, nervous about restless young people in 1940, adopted a technique already used by the Socialists’ “Red Falcons” and the Catholic Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne as well as by the Young Communists and the Hitler youth. Where Vichy innovated for France was the prodigality of its support for youth movements. The number of young people belonging to organizations more than doubled in the year after the armistice until it seemed that there were uniformed groups everywhere.
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At first, it was widely expected that the new France would set up a single national youth organization.
⁴⁹
But Vichy achieved unity here no more successfully than in any other realm. The church worked against it, reluctant to see its own youth organizations, which had grown so prominently in the 1930’s—JOC, JAC, etc.—swallowed up in some state enterprise.
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The division into two zones did the rest, for the German authorities, fearful of the militarist and chauvinist tone of the Vichy youth organizations, forbade them in the Occupied Zone.

So there existed some fifteen or twenty “free” youth organizations—mostly church groups or scout groups—alongside the official but voluntary Compagnons de France. The Compagnons, boys of fifteen to twenty, were supposed to be the “avant-garde of the National Revolution,” as Pétain told them in September 1941.
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The Compagnons included several different kinds of “companies”: rural companies sheltering the young unemployed who were put to farm work, city companies whose objective was to “unite all social classes,” eight itinerant companies of
young artisans, and an itinerant theater company. There were supposed to be 25,000 Compagnons, but German intelligence estimated their number at about 8,000 in March 1941 with only 3,350 actually in camps in June 1942.
⁵²

The Compagnons were intended to save young Frenchmen not only from the risks of unemployment but also from the viruses of dissidence. Some hints about its indoctrination efforts may be drawn from its leadership. Youth affairs was a cabinet post at Vichy. The first minister of youth, the family, and sports was the prominent Basque sportsman Jean Ybarnégaray. Ybarnégaray was president of the National Pelota Association, an avid shot in his native Pyrenees, and a man who took pride in his sporting exploits. Politically, he was a lifelong militant in right-wing leagues: active in the Jeunesses Patriotes of the 1920’s, a leader of Colonel de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu, and the most prominent deputy of La Rocque’s
Parti Social Français
after 1936. He stumped France after the rightist demonstrations of 6 February 1934 calling for a French “revival in work, order, authority, and honor” and an answer to “that appeal of the race” that had been heard in Italy and Germany but not yet in France. “Is the old Gallic blood so anemic?”
⁵³
He brought in Jean Borotra, the Basque Olympic tennis star and a fervent apostle of moral reeducation through sports.