Calvin. History and Reception of a Reformation Week 4. The Spread of Calvinism
Sequence 10. Francophone Calvinism during WWII: Madeleine Barot and Marc Boegner You may be familiar with an institution in Jerusalem called Yad Vashem, whose mission is to honor everyone who, during the war and particularly during the Holocaust, sought to protect and hide Jews, or took a stand against the abomination that was the Holocaust. Among them, there are currently just over 3,300 French people. Patrick Cabanel, the great historian of French Protestantism in the modern era, has pointed out that among these 3,300 people honored with the title of "Righteous Among the Nations," there are slightly over 360 Protestants -- more than 10%. Yet at the time of the Second World War, French Protestants made up just over 1% of the country's total population. Protestantism, then, played a prominent role in the denunciation of the Holocaust and the protection of Jews. I'd like to read a very moving testimony that comes to us from a woman who taught math in the French heartland, the Cantal region. The quote is from a wonderful book published in 2012 by Patrick Cabanel about the history of French Protestants. "My family is Protestant, originally from the Cévennes, a region long blood-stained by the wars of religion and the ‘dragonnades' persecutions. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes has striking similarities with the current Statutes and these remain the shame of the regime and the men who decreed them. My ancestors stayed true to their faith in the face of hardship, imprisonment, persecution and death. I cannot, nor want to, turn my back on such a noble example and that is why today, I stand side-by-side with the new victims of persecution." This woman is referring to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, back in 1685. As you recall, Louis XIV decided to prohibit the Protestant form of worship throughout the kingdom, chased away pastors and and tried to force French Protestants into renouncing their faith. This led to movements of exodus in which perhaps as many as a quarter-million people were driven into exile. So the situation in 1685 is being compared, in July of 1941, to the Statutes on Jews. These Statutes were decreed in October 1940 by the Vichy government in order to legislate the place of Jews in occupied France as well as in "Free France," as the Vichy regime called it. For a number of Protestants, these racial laws and the victimization of the Jews immediately called to mind memories of past persecutions, and so they naturally felt that their place was alongside those being persecuted. That being said, it would be an error to idealize things. Reactions to racial laws were often ambiguous on the part of both French Protestants and French Catholics. Many of these reactions were timid. In 1940, a man named Marc Boegner was President of the Protestant Federation of France. His position on these laws was that there was no Jewish problem for the Church, while essentially recognizing that there was a Jewish problem in certain countries -- meaning Hitler's Germany. Boegner argued that it is not the Church's business to tell the State what to do -- all things considered, a timid reaction, and one that strikes us today as far short of what you might expect from Protestants. Yet Boegner is among those who have been honored as "Righteous Among the Nations." Why? Marc Boegner was born in 1881 and died in 1970. He is one of the very leading figures of French Protestantism over the past two centuries. Someone once quipped that a Boegner only comes around every 100, maybe even 150, years. So who was this man? First and foremost, he was a pastor. It is as a pastor that he signed his books and the articles he occasionally contributed, to ‘Le Figaro’ for example, after the war. He always presented himself as a pastor, even when he was elected to the Académie française. He felt that, as a pastor, he could contribute to that body. Alongside his pastoral duties, Boegner occupied many leadership positions in the Church. As I mentioned, he was President of the Protestant Federation of France. Beginning in 1938, he also served as President of the National Council of the Reformed Church of France. He was very actively involved in the creation of the World Council of Churches and, following its founding assembly in Amsterdam in 1948, was named one of six co-presidents. Yet through it all, Boegner remained a pastor first and foremost. Though he had a PhD, having written his thesis on his uncle Tommy Fallot, what characterized him most was his concern for the flock entrusted to him. For 35 years, from 1918 to 1953, Marc Boegner served as pastor of Passy, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, but his duties and responsibilities in the Reformed Church of France convinced him to stay close to the government. Thus on June 10, 1940, when the news came out that the government was abandoning the capital, fleeing the imminent arrival of German forces, Boegner drove his car, that very night, to Bordeaux to meet with Laval, Darlan and a few other men he would continue to see on a regular basis. From Bordeaux, he traveled to Vichy, in central France, home to the government of "Free France," as it was known. There he remained and worked for several years. Until 1942, it is undeniable that Boegner allowed himself to harbor what Cabanel and others have called an illusion, namely, the illusion that he might mitigate Vichy's policies. He met with Marshal Pétain, Pierre Laval, François Darlan, expressing concern about the promotion of Catholic values in Vichy France, reminding them of the Protestant presence in France. Above all, he expressed concern about the racial statutes. The turning point for Marc Boegner, his wake-up call so to speak, was the famous Winter Velodrome round up (or "Vel' d'Hiv Roundup") of July 1942. Following the raid, he wrote to Laval as well as to Rabbi Schwartz, France’s Chief Rabbi. In his letter to Rabbi Schwarz, Boegner wrote: "Our Church, which once experienced the pain of persecution, is filled with ardent sympathy for your communities, whose faithful have been thrust into the throes of misfortune." Boegner's letter to the Rabbi was not meant to be published, but it fell into the hands of German propagandists and was published in full in ‘Au Pilori’, a French collaborationist newspaper. ‘Au Pilori’ excoriated the leader of French Protestantism for sticking his nose where it didn't belong -- sooner or later, it said, he should be made to suffer the same fate as these Jews he so eagerly defended. This was the first time Boegner's position was made public, albeit against his will, in denunciation of raids to capture Jews. Subsequently, Boegner acted covertly. He knew full well that certain Protestant parishes, such as Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Haute Loire region, were active in protecting Jewish families and children, and he gave his support -- without ever making it public -- to these clandestine activities. Where did Boegner get his information? It seems that it came in part from a woman named Madeleine Barot, herself one of the "Righteous among the Nations." Madeleine Barot was born in 1909 and died in 1995. She was very active in the ‘Cimade’, a solidarity association that helped refugees from Alsace -- the border region through which the German army entered into France. Many people from Strasburg and the rest of Alsace fled to central France. The ‘Cimade’ protected and helped these evacuees. It soon became known, however, that camps were springing up in places like Gurs, in the Pyrénées atlantiques, and Madeleine Barot soon went to work in these camps. Strictly speaking, we are talking about concentration camps on French soil. Living in these concentration camps were Jews -- mainly newly-naturalized, foreign or stateless -- as well as Germans who had fled the Nazi regime hoping to find refuge in France. Madeleine Barot dedicated herself to helping people in these camps, mainly in the south of France. This woman, then, though probably no great theologian, had a deep understanding of Protestantism as a religion rooted in past struggles and persecution. She saw this as a necessary and sufficient reason that to live according to the Gospel means to stand alongside present victims of persecution. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes is a dark stain on French history; the 1940 Statutes on Jews, an even darker one. It was thus imperative, as a French Protestant, to actively support the persecuted. After the war, Madeleine Barot continued to work with persecuted groups. She went to Algeria, then in the 1980s was very active in an NGO called ACAT (Action by Christians for the Abolition of Torture). Thus there is a clear continuity between the painful history of Protestantism and its tradition of solidarity with those being made to suffer in the present. We've reached the end of this sequence. Thank you for your attention.
