Read the first part of John Fletcher’s story here “A Teacher in Vichy France by John Fletcher”
The Oueil Valley
On graduating from the école normale M. Pédussaud was posted to the Oueil valley high up in the Pyrenees, and like every other instituteur in France, was required to include in his teaching of civics the notorious section ‘les devoirs envers Dieu’ (Atkin, pp.11-12). Cowed by the abolition of the écoles normales (Atkin, p. 9) and the wholesale dismissal of individual teachers (Atkin, p. 7), schoolmasters and mistresses in the public sector who, at any other time, would have been outraged by the requirement to teach ‘the duties towards God’, kept a low profile. They were, however, capable of passive resistance. There was no pre-concerted plan, but a number of teachers began to ‘finesse’ that part of the syllabus. No inspector, nor anyone else so far as M. Pédussaud knew, made any attempt to check that the Chevalier arrêté was being obeyed. (There was one inspector who, to distract attention from his own situation, harried teachers known to be prominent trade unionists, but this did not prevent his being dismissed as a Freemason. He was reinstated at the Liberation as a victim of Vichy, only to be arraigned by the trade union activists he had persecuted, and sacked a second time.)
One of M. Pédussaud’s colleagues had tried to speak to the curé of his village about the ‘devoirs envers Dieu’, but the priest refused to accept that children who did not believe in God should be excused from lessons devoted to that part of the curriculum; as far as the curé was concerned, the best place for unbelievers was the pigsty. M. Pédussaud was fortunate in having as his curé a man far more interested in hunting, fishing and café-crawling than proselytising. Their relations, though indirect, were cordial enough. The priest did give offence on one occasion, however. One morning the pupils announced that they would be returning to afternoon school an hour later than usual, since from that day forward they would be having catechism after lunch. The curé had not thought to inform the teacher of the new arrangement himself.
As no village in the Oueil valley had more than about ten children of school-age each – today all its schools are closed because of depopulation – there was no question of competition with the private sector, and in the Haute-Garonne generally Vichy’s measures did not noticeably increase numbers in church schools. In any case, family tradition determined whether children were sent to a church or to a state school, and legislation – especially over a relatively short timescale – could make little difference to parental preferences. The new state subsidies did help to improve somewhat the wretched lot of teachers in private schools, and perhaps to reduce fees a little for parents (not too much, though, since such schools were not anxious to dilute the ‘quality of recruitment’ by attracting too many working-class children).
Although like all the children in Montesquieu-Volvestre, M. Pédussaud had knelt to kiss Mgr Saliège’s amethyst ring, as a young teacher later, in his remote Pyrenean village, he had no opportunity to evaluate the archbishop of Toulouse’s efforts at promoting better understanding between teachers and the church (Atkin, p.16). But he does recall that the cardinal sent a pastoral letter to his priests condemning racial persecution. This was in the summer of 1942, at the time of the Vélodrome d’Hiver round-up in Paris, and was one protest among several from Catholic and Protestant churchmen (see H.R. Kedward, Occupied France, p.63). However, gendarmes were sent into the churches of the archdiocese of Toulouse with orders to forbid the reading from the pulpit of the cardinal’s letter.
With the promulgation in February 1943 of the Service du Travail Obligatoire, M. Pédussaud, like so many of his generation, declined to help the Nazi war effort. He lived in his valley with a wary eye on the narrow road up from Bagnères-de-Luchon by which the gendarmes would have to come in order to serve him with his call-up papers. He kept a rucksack packed ready to leave at a moment’s notice for the mountains (which he knows like the back of his hand) and make for the nearby Spanish frontier, which he intended to cross at the first sign of the approach of the police.
Fortunately his call-up never came, and the Normandy landings soon made the whole question of the relationship between Church and State in the field of education far less important than it had been in Vichy’s relatively tranquil early years. He was, however, surprised to discover that although the Provisional Government soon abrogated Vichy’s laws, subsidies to Catholic schools were maintained, a situation which continues to this day.
M. Pédussaud’s recollections offer interesting confirmation of Dr Atkin’s findings. It is clear from both accounts that the relationship between state schoolteachers and the church in VichyFrance was frequently difficult and occasionally tense. M. Pédussaud was lucky in a number of respects: he was posted to a remote, sparsely-populated area where he was largely left alone; he was not a Freemason nor an active trade unionist, so he did not attract Vichy’s attention; and the curés both at Montesquieu-Volvestre, his home village, and in the Oueil valley where he took up his first appointment, were undogmatic men who did not feel it necessary to antagonise the local state schoolteacher (taking their cue, no doubt, from their archbishop, Mgr Saliège, whose breadth of vision Dr Atkin singles out for special mention). But even he found the situation irksome and degrading, and is understandably reluctant to delve too deeply into his memories of ‘ces années noires’. One is thus all the more grateful to him for having done so, thereby appending a valuable personal footnote to the history of VichyFrance.
Source: The French Historian, 5, 2 (December 1990), pp. 14-18.
Revised by the author, 8 March 2013.
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