Alex's Wake

by Martin Goldsmith

  Martigny-les-Bains had been a thriving spa town since the 1860s, and by 1912 it had reached its zenith as a healing destination. In that year, the Hotel International’s register included visitors from Paris and London as well as from such faraway cities as Budapest, Monaco, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Nairobi, and Istanbul.

  But the hotel’s—and the town’s—fortunes changed two years later, in 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War. The hotel shut down for the duration, and for more than four years, the cavalcade of the well-heeled unwell stopped coming to take the healing waters. Business resumed during the early twenties, but the Crash of 1929 was a severe blow to the area’s fortunes. By 1933, the grand Hotel International had closed its doors for the last time as a place of revelry and the pursuit of good health.

  That same year, Adolf Hitler assumed power in neighboring Germany. Within months of the establishment of National Socialist rule on January 30, thousands of German Jewish refugees streamed across the border to find a haven in France. Unlike the United States, with its quota-driven Immigration Act of 1924, France had never passed legislation that limited immigration. In fact, due largely to the devastation of its labor force in the Great War, France was actively encouraging foreigners to cross its borders to take up the plow or the wrench or to assume a place in an assembly line to help revive its moribund economy. And with both political and personal conditions in Germany deteriorating steadily for the Jews, more and more of them chose to settle their affairs in the land of their birth and begin life anew in the land of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Upon their arrival, these new immigrants found themselves taking part in the latest act of the long-running and sometimes uneasy saga that has been the history of the Jews in France.

  The year 1492 is famous in American history for the first voyage of Christopher Columbus and infamous in the history of the Jews as the year they were expelled from Spain. But a century earlier, in 1394, the Jews were forced to leave the kingdom of France. Over the next four hundred years, about forty thousand Jews managed to make their way back into France, with most of them toiling in rural regions and only about five hundred allowed to make a life in the thriving capital of Paris. But then came the French Revolution, and to the astonishment, perhaps, of the Jews themselves, they learned that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen extended to them as well. France became, along with the United States, the first country on earth to bestow upon the Jews full political, legal, economic, and social equality.

  A few niggling exceptions remained on the books, such as the More Judaico, a special oath that Jews had been required to utter in court since the Middle Ages (“If I am not telling the truth, may I be stricken with plagues such as those visited upon Egypt when we escaped”), which was not abolished until 1846. Until 1831, synagogues received no public funding, unlike Christian churches. In that year, however, a special vote in the Chamber of Deputies established that the two religions would receive equal grants from the Ministry of Cults.

  During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Jewish participation in French social, financial, political, and cultural life indicated the degree to which their emancipation had taken hold. Established in Paris in 1812, the Rothschild bank soon took its place among the most important financial institutions in Europe. Achille Fould was appointed finance minister in 1848 and then four years later served as Napoleon III’s minister of state. And the dazzling opera and theater stages of Paris were nightly illuminated by the contributions of composers Jacques Offenbach and Giacomo Meyerbeer, playwright Ludovic Halevy, and actress Sarah Bernhardt.

  Then came humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, an economic recession, and the rise of a persistent and, at times, virulent anti-Semitism. French pride was deeply wounded by their military defeat as well as the political aftermath, the ceding of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the victorious Germans. In the inevitable search for scapegoats, the fact that many Jews spoke French with German accents placed them under suspicion in the eyes of the easily manipulated. Some blamed the recession of the early 1880s on the pernicious influence of the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers. Then in 1886, a man named Edouard Drumont published a twelve-hundred-page, two-volume book called La France juive in which he named the Jews as the source of all the ills, social and economic, that plagued modern France. By the end of the year, Drumont’s book had sold more than a hundred thousand copies. Six years later, encouraged by the continuing hearty sales of the book, Drumont founded a daily newspaper, La Libre parole, to extend the reach of his anti-Semitic views. Two years after that, the Dreyfus Affair ignited France, calling into question the acceptance by their country’s majority that so many French Jews had assumed was theirs.

  On November 1, 1894, a front-page article in La Libre parole announced the arrest of “the Jewish officer A. Dreyfus” on charges of treason. The paper declared that there was “absolute proof that he had sold our secrets to Germany.” Based on entirely trumped-up evidence, a thirty-five-year-old officer named Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and accused of being a spy for Germany. Dreyfus was from a wealthy family in the Alsace region, which had been annexed by Germany in the aftermath of the war in 1871, and was thus suspected of harboring German sympathies. More suspicious yet, Dreyfus was a Jew whose primary allegiance—the newspaper charged—was to his “race” rather than to his country.

  After a four-day trial, Captain Dreyfus was unanimously convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a military garrison off the northern coast of South America. Two years later, evidence emerged that another French army officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was the real culprit, but high-ranking figures in the army, determined to protect the institution’s reputation, initiated a cover-up. Major Esterhazy was indeed brought to trial, but further forgeries were presented in court as evidence against Captain Dreyfus, and Esterhazy was acquitted.

  But slowly, the arc of the affair began to bend toward justice. On January 13, 1898, on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore, the celebrated writer Emile Zola published his electrifying open letter to the president of France titled “J’Accuse . . .” Zola pointed to numerous judicial errors in the handling of the trial and the lack of credible evidence, and he concluded his impassioned letter by accusing the government of engaging in anti-Semitism, which he ringingly called “the scourge of our time.” Largely as the result of “J’Accuse . . . ,” Captain Dreyfus was brought back to France from Devil’s Island in 1899 for a retrial. He was convicted yet again, but, said the court, owing to “extenuating circumstances” his sentence was reduced from life imprisonment to ten years.

  The Dreyfus Affair both caused and exposed major rifts in French society. Families and friendships were torn asunder by conflicting views of the captain’s guilt or innocence. There were the Dreyfusards, who supported the view that he was innocent and had been the victim of, in Zola’s phrase, “a miscarriage of justice,” and there were the anti-Dreyfusards, who believed that death, not Devil’s Island, would have been the proper sentence. Egged on by editorials in La Libre parole and other organs of the popular press, thousands of anti-Dreyfusards marched through the streets of scores of French cities, calling for the arrest of Jewish citizens, smashing the windows of Jewish-owned stores, and occasionally breaking into and looting synagogues. The plague of anti-Semitism even infected such great artists as the painters Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who began to speak dismissively of “Jewish art.”

  The Hungarian writer Theodore Herzl, assigned by a Viennese newspaper to cover the initial Dreyfus trial, came away from his weeks in Paris convinced that, even in France, the cradle of revolutionary equality, Jews could never hope for full acceptance and fair treatment. Thus, he reasoned, Jews required their own homeland. In 1896, Herzl published a book called Der Judenstaat and founded the World Zionist Organization, which called for the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine.

  The Dreyfus Affair also gave rise to a
n international sporting event. The most widely read sports daily in France, Le Velo, was proudly Dreyfusard in its views. Anti-Drefusards, anxious to have their own sporting news to consume every day, founded a rival rag called L’Auto in 1900. But by 1903, L’Auto’s circulation had declined to the point that its wealthy backers feared that it might go out of business. So to boost interest in the paper, L’Auto announced the launch of a new long-distance bicycle race with an itinerary and cash prizes that would vastly exceed those of any race currently in existence. Thus was born the Tour de France.

  Finally, in 1906, twelve years after his arrest and conviction, Dreyfus was acquitted of all charges by the High Court of Appeal. He was reinstated into the ranks of the French army with the rank of major and was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In 1914, he volunteered for service in the Great War, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Alfred Dreyfus died two days before Bastille Day in 1935, aged seventy-five.

  In 2006, French President Jacques Chirac presided over a ceremony marking the one hundredth anniversary of Dreyfus’s acquittal. In the presence of the living heirs of both Dreyfus and Zola, Chirac declared that “the combat against the dark forces of intolerance and hate is never definitively won.”

  The dark forces of anti-Semitism retreated in France in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, but it was a tactical retreat only, not a surrender; conditions more favorable to their advancement would return soon enough. In the meantime, the atmosphere brightened.

  Although the affair had exposed anti-Semitic elements in the French army, it didn’t dampen Jewish enthusiasm to take part in the military affairs of their homeland. The Jewish population of France in 1914 was roughly 120,000. An impressive 38 percent of that number, or 46,000 Jews, fought for France during the War to End All Wars, with about 6,500 dying in combat. When peace returned to the land, Jewish artists, from Amadeo Modigliani and Marc Chagall to Darius Milhaud and Tristan Tzara, were major reasons that Paris took its place as the most celebrated cultural city in the world during the 1920s.

  But it was not only artists who were made to feel welcome in France in the years following the Great War. France had suffered a greater percentage of national loss during the war than that of any of the other major combatants. Nearly 1.7 million French soldiers and civilians perished in the war, or nearly 4.3 percent of the entire population. (By way of comparison, Germany lost 3.8 percent, the United Kingdom lost 2.2 percent, and the United States lost 0.13 percent of its population.) During the decade that followed the war, many voices in France expressed the fear that the country’s stagnant population—in 1925, for instance, France grew by only sixty thousand citizens, while Germany’s population increased by half a million—would inevitably lead to another war with its Prussian neighbor and a likely defeat. To rebuild its population, including its vastly reduced labor force, France embarked on an ambitious and aggressive campaign to attract foreigners to cross its borders and establish a new homeland for themselves.

  Encouraged by the national government, factories recruited workers from across Europe in an attempt to get their production lines humming again. In August 1927, the National Assembly passed a new and significantly liberalized naturalization law. Whereas before a person had to be at least twenty-one years old and had to have been a resident of France for ten years to be considered for citizenship, the new law required only three years’ residency and a minimum age of eighteen. By the end of 1927, with the new law in effect for only four months, the number of newly naturalized French citizens was triple that of the previous year. With the United States having enacted its much more restrictive immigration law three years earlier, in 1924, France was now seen as a new haven for refugees, and the numbers kept growing over the next several years. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand German citizens crossed the border seeking refuge in France, about 85 percent of them Jews.

  If both native-born and newly arrived Jewish citizens questioned the degree to which their new homeland welcomed their presence, a wildly affirmative answer seemed to arrive in 1936, when France became the first country to elect a Jewish prime minister. True, four months before the election he had been dragged from his car and beaten by an anti-Semitic mob, but on June 4, Leon Blum assumed the prime minister’s office as leader of the government known as the Popular Front. Although Blum was denounced as a “cunning talmudist” by a right-wing member of the National Assembly, the country certainly had come a long way from the railroading of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

  But the worldwide economic depression of the early thirties, which by no means spared France, caused something of a backlash against more liberal immigration statutes, as economic security grew more precarious and foreign-born workers were viewed with greater suspicion and hostility. By the mid-thirties some of the welcoming provisions of the previous decade had been rolled back and thousands of refugees—their citizenship no longer so easily obtained—had been thrown into prison. As the decade approached its end, hundreds of thousands of Republican sympathizers poured over the border from Spain, refugees from the bloody Spanish Civil War. The immigration issue became a topic for heated debate in the National Assembly and elsewhere in France as the country weighed its egalitarian ideals against the social and economic realities of the uncertain present. This was the atmosphere that gave rise to a new conception of how to honor the creed of fairness for all, an idea rooted in the French soil.

  Beginning in 1933, a proposal was made to settle refugees in rural areas of France to assist the country’s farmers with their dawn-to-dusk endeavors. No less than their urban brethren who oversaw factories, French agricultural workers were still feeling the effects of the devastation wrought on the national population by the Great War. So it seemed a natural fit to pair newly arrived men and women who were eager to work with farmers who needed capable laborers to tend the vineyards in the sparsely settled hinterlands of France.

  Two of the voices who spoke out in favor of this idea belonged to leaders we’ve already met. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, who as secretary general of the Comité d’Assistance aux Réfugiés (CAR) greeted the St. Louis passengers when they landed at Boulogne-sur-Mer, wrote approvingly of the proposal in a widely read Jewish journal in the summer of 1933. And Louise Weiss of the Central Refugee Committee of Paris, who helped broker the French agreement to accept the St. Louis passengers, lobbied for the idea later in the decade. The popularity of the proposal ebbed and flowed through the thirties, closely tracking the country’s economy, but after the widely reported atrocities of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, which resulted in a new flood of Jewish refugees from Germany, French authorities were spurred to act.

  In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, the government agreed to a recommendation from an international Jewish relief organization to accept 250 children under the age of fifteen and added that it would accept a thousand more children if homes could be found for them in the provinces. Over the next few months, CAR and other refugee organizations, sensing a shift in public opinion, increased their efforts. In early 1939, CAR purchased property in the Burgundy region on which to build an agricultural center for refugees. The master plan was for a series of such “agricultural retraining centers,” where refugees would learn farming techniques and receive instruction in such professions as the wood and iron trades. Whereas Jewish relief groups saw the plan as an opportunity for refugees to escape the dangers of Nazi Germany and learn a new skill in the bargain, the French government was more interested in the plan as a means of providing the immigrants with tools that would more quickly enable them to find a new home away from France. But the two sides reconciled their differences for the most part and worked together for the venture’s success. A CAR representative wrote in a Paris newspaper that the new Jewish agricultural settlements would “put an end to the anguish of these unfortunates who have been searching the world over for a hospitable land” and would also “give new life to deserted villages, to houses i
n ruin, to uncultivated land.”

  In the late winter and early spring of 1939, five of these agricultural centers were organized, with funds provided by three groups: CAR; the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; and the Jewish Group for Coordination, Aid, and Protection, an organization sponsored chiefly by Robert de Rothschild of the famous French banking family. One of the centers took shape in Argenteuil, the charming village on the River Seine that was once the summer home of the great painters Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Georges Braque. Agricultural centers also sprang up near Nice at Sainte Radegonde and the Villa Pessicarl, and in the south central French departement of Corrèze, the birthplace of film director Eric Rohmer.

  The agricultural settlement that would see the largest influx of refugees was organized in Martigny-les-Bains, a destination spot that had boasted an internationally regarded luxury hotel thirty years earlier and was now fully living up to CAR’s description of it as a “deserted village” with “houses in ruin.” On March 31, 1939, the Jewish newspaper La Tribune Juive reported:

  Our German Jewish refugees who were not legally in France were until now not able to get a residence permit and were subject to imprisonment for breaking the residence laws. To ameliorate this lamentable state of affairs, a number of refugee assistance groups have come up with the idea of creating “welcome centers” to house persons whose legal status is irregular, centers where they would be authorized to stay by the Ministry of the Interior. The aid groups have just created such a center in Martigny-les-Bains, an abandoned summer resort a few kilometers from Vittel. The refugees take professional re-education classes, taught by French professors, with the goal of preparing them for other occupations while they await emigration to their final destination.

  About a week later, an article appeared in L’Univers Israélite, a Jewish weekly published in Paris: