The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide

by Peter Grose

  The Plateau survived the massacre more or less unscathed. Whether as part of the plot or merely by coincidence, the Catholic governor of Le Puy had issued a decree a few days earlier that all non-Catholic church services were to end, and all citizens should take themselves off to mass. The Protestant citizenry in the lowlands around Le Puy decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and responded by either going along with the order or else scattering, some to the comparative safety of the Plateau and some to exile in other countries. This avoided an immediate catastrophe.

  However, St Bartholomew’s Day proved to be the beginning of a Catholic counter-offensive in the area. In 1574 the Catholics burned down the church in Tence and set about massacring any Protestants they could find. Four Protestant ministers from Velay were hanged under the orders of the governor of Le Puy. Under this pressure, the Huguenots of the Haute-Loire continued to split three ways: some simply capitulated, some moved out of France altogether and a third group retreated deeper into the Plateau, where the local population hid them. Legend has it that when the hanging governor of Le Puy finally arrived on the Plateau to see for himself what was going on, he found the population prostrate on the Catholic church’s flagstones, singing canticles, while the Catholic priests calmly conducted a mass. It may not have been heroic, but it was highly effective. The Huguenots lived to fight again.

  Religion and politics continued to mingle in France. By law, all French kings were required to be Catholics. In 1589, the Protestant Henri de Navarre was due to succeed Charles IX then Henri III and be crowned King Henri IV of France. He was told he had to convert to Catholicism. This he did, famously declaring: ‘Paris is well worth a mass.’ However, he continued to look kindly on Protestants, and in 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, which, while affirming Catholicism as the state religion of France, nevertheless gave the Huguenots more or less equal rights of worship with Catholics. The edict was intended to end the Wars of Religion, and it certainly brought about a lull that lasted beyond Henri IV’s assassination in 1610.

  With Henri IV’s departure, the tide turned. Henri’s son Louis XIII was only nine years old when he became king, and he had for his regent the redoubtable Cardinal Richelieu, who set about breaking the power of the French nobility by razing their castles, and attacked Huguenots at all levels and at every opportunity. This was not a happy time to be a Protestant, even on the Plateau. Although Saint-Agrève was nominally a place of refuge, it had been put to the torch in 1580, and its protective walls had been knocked down. The battle raged up and down the Plateau: the Protestants would destroy a castle; the Catholics would sack a town.

  Between 1622 and 1627, Richelieu triggered off no fewer than three Huguenot wars, ending in 1629, after the fall in 1628 of La Rochelle, whose siege the Cardinal personally commanded. Louis XIII’s successor, Louis XIV (known as the Sun King), took things further, proclaiming that France should have ‘one king, one law, and one religion’.

  For the next 50 years, the French state did what it could to ensure the repression and destruction of the Huguenots. Meetings of Protestants were banned, and Protestant church services were declared illegal. By 1683, the Huguenots of the Plateau had had enough. Armed rebellion looked like the only answer. Led by Jacques Molle, a cavalry officer from Le Chambon, they prepared to fight.

  The story of Cadet Molle (in French, cadet usually means the younger of two brothers, but it can also mean a young gentleman destined for military service, and in this case both meanings probably apply) is still part of Plateau legend. Molle was an enthusiastic Protestant but also a clever organiser. The Plateau was awash with spies at the time, and the authorities quickly got to hear about Molle and his plans. In March 1683, he was charged with ‘rebellion against justice and disobedience to the orders of the king’. A party of archers was dispatched to Le Chambon to arrest him and bring him to trial. With a few friends, Molle barricaded himself in his house. The group, who were armed with pistols and maybe muskets, promptly killed one archer and wounded another. The surviving archers stood their ground and began shouting at Molle to give himself up, to which Molle responded by shouting equally loudly that the people of the town were on their way to rescue him, and the archers had better watch out. Molle proved to be right. According to the Provost in charge of the archers, what looked like the entire population of the town came charging towards them, roaring with fury. The arresting party beat a prudent retreat.

  Next, on the orders of the Provost Marshal of Le Puy, a party of nine archers arrived in Le Chambon in April 1683. They were under orders to disperse the Protestant assemblies in Le Chambon and Saint-Voy and arrest the chief mutineer, Molle. This time Molle barricaded himself in a farmhouse, and again killed one archer and wounded another. No sooner had Molle wreaked this new havoc than two or three hundred irate townspeople, all armed, arrived at the farmhouse and began shouting: ‘Courage! Courage! Courage!’ The townsfolk then killed a second archer, and dragged the bodies of the two dead archers off and burned them. At this point the task of arresting Molle lost all its appeal, and the survivors from the arresting party fled. Molle was seen parading in the streets of Le Chambon later that day, two pistols jammed in his belt and looking very pleased with himself.

  Despite small victories like Molle’s, the pressure on Huguenots was now intolerable. Their churches and schools were closed down all over France; adults were imprisoned and their children packed off to orphanages. The king even chose his roughest dragoon soldiers, under a policy known as dragonnades, for the unlikely role of missionaries. The dragoons were forcibly billeted with Huguenot families (at the expense of the host family) and left to ‘persuade’ the Huguenots to renounce their faith. As a result, Huguenots fled in huge numbers to Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Britain, America, and even to far-off South Africa. The numbers are hard to come by, but it’s estimated that around 550,000 Huguenots converted to Catholicism and remained in France, while a further 250,000 left the country. This exodus was France’s loss: in general, the Huguenots were from the wealthier, better-educated and most skilled section of the population. They were merchants and entrepreneurs, professionals and artisans. They took with them their money, their talent and their crafts, particularly lace-making, silk weaving, clockmaking and optometry, and often became among the most successful citizens in their new countries.

  When the dragoons finally arrived on the remote Plateau, they set about their work with all the subtlety and courtesy traditionally displayed by occupying forces throughout history. There are plenty of records of ‘tough times’, including the abrupt commandeering of animal feed, or grain, or simply money, from local farmers. There were rapes of wives and daughters, together with arbitrary arrests and punishments. Contemporary records tell of some of the individual acts of brutality and cruelty. One party of dragoons was billeted with a farmer called Matthieu Riou. After generally maltreating him, they told him it was time he took himself off to mass. He refused, saying he would rather die. The dragoons then obligingly tied him to a horse and dragged him through the streets, leaving him for dead outside the church. Happily, he survived and was able to escape to Switzerland.

  The importance of these stories, whether of the swashbuckling Jacques Molle or the almost-martyred Matthieu Riou, is that they have survived as part of the folklore of the Plateau. As with similar tales in Ireland or the Basque Country, these stories are told and retold, embellished and distorted, set to music, turned into fiction, exaggerated and immortalised. Streets are named after the heroes, and statues put up in their honour. In testimony given in 1990, Oscar Rosowsky remembered from his time on the Plateau ‘the feats of arms which were recalled over and over during long winter evenings when the farms were cut off by snow’. These legends form the bedrock of the Plateau’s stubbornness, its individuality and its courage.

  • • •

  By 1685 Louis XIV was convinced he had finally rid France of the Huguenots, and revoked the Edict of Nantes. The Revocation, in effect, de
clared an open season on France’s remaining Protestants. Churches were destroyed, and Protestant ministers were given fifteen days to leave France or face execution. This was the beginning of the period known in Huguenot folklore as ‘the Desert’. The church simply went underground. Services were held in private homes, in barns, in forests, in caves. Some of these Desert hideouts remained on standby literally for centuries, and were used by refugees on the Plateau during World War II.

  The period of the Wars of Religion was surely the defining era for the Huguenots of the Plateau. They now knew what it felt like to be a persecuted minority. In the course of 150 years of religious wars, they also learned survival skills: how to keep their heads down, their eyes and ears open, and their mouths shut. Above all, they learned to stick together. Dumas’s famous slogan for The Three Musketeers, ‘one for all, and all for one’, might have been created for the Huguenots of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon.

  From 1700 onwards, a period of relative calm prevailed on the Plateau. The worst of the dragonnades ended. The Catholic and civil establishment, both centred in Le Puy, continued to grumble about the presence of large (and illegal) Protestant communities in the hills beyond them. They made desultory semi-military efforts to drag the Plateau into line, but never sent a large enough force to do anything effective. There were occasional arrests, and some general harassment, but no major campaign—no final solution, if you like, to the Huguenot problem. Tackling the remote Plateau always seemed more trouble than it was worth. Meanwhile, the Protestants tried to keep themselves to themselves. They were aided by the minority Catholic population of the Plateau, who generally regarded their Protestant neighbours with a tolerant eye.

  In 1787 Louis XVI—who deserves better than to be remembered only for marrying Marie Antoinette, obsessively mending clocks and parting company with his head—passed the Edict of Tolerance, which officially ended the persecution of Protestants. For the first time in the nearly 200 years since the original Edict of Nantes, events were moving in the right direction for France’s Huguenots.

  Then came 1789, the year that changed everything. The French Revolution received a warm welcome on the Plateau. The consensus was that if the French kings and their hangers-on, who had harassed and persecuted the Huguenots for 250 years, were now going to get their comeuppance from the revolutionaries, what wasn’t to like about that? This optimism was certainly justified by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, proclaimed by the revolutionary government in 1789, which gave equal rights to all French citizens, including Protestants. The next year a new law granted a right of return to all those (and their descendants) who had fled France to escape religious persecution,64 singling out the Huguenots for special mention. This was surely a time of optimism on the Plateau.

  As with most revolutions, the initial optimism was short-lived. The revolution degenerated into chaos, then terror. Catholics briefly found themselves on the receiving end of revolutionary disapproval, as the French state turned its back on religion and the religious establishment. The church was seen as part of the Old Order. Some recalcitrant priests sought shelter from their former Protestant enemies on the Plateau, and were willingly taken in. The wheel had come full circle.

  With the arrival of Napoleon in 1804 and a new civil order throughout France, the entire Plateau benefited. Even the Napoleonic Wars left the Plateau largely undisturbed. As far as the Huguenots were concerned, peace had arrived, and, left to its own devices, the Plateau prospered. In the course of the nineteenth century, new churches sprang up, both Protestant and Catholic, all over the Plateau. The Wars of Religion were over. Peaceful coexistence was the order of the day.

  • • •

  In the nineteenth century, two major innovations on the Plateau, one cultural and one political, had far-reaching implications.

  While the Plateau remains to this day a largely agricultural community, breeding sheep and cattle and growing grain crops, a new industry took strong root in the nineteenth century: hospitality. As the industrial revolution brought new ugliness and grime to the larger towns and cities of Europe, the rising middle class of city-dwellers sought an escape. The seaside was the most popular answer, of course, but mountains had their advantages: they offered clean air, and a unique, idyllic charm. They were great places to hike, play tennis, ride horses, swim in a clean river, enjoy a picnic, ride a bicycle and pitch a tent. They offered a chance to relax outdoors that no smoky city could match.

  In the first instance, Saint-Agrève was the major beneficiary. It was (and is) attractive, and at the time it was the largest village on the Plateau. So hotels and guesthouses appeared, and the wealthy restored or built gracious second homes there. Tourism was largely a summer trade: people came to the mountains to escape the heat, crowds and pollution of the cities. The bourgeoisie of Lyon, Saint-Étienne and even Paris decamped to the Plateau, mostly to Saint-Agrève, in promising numbers.

  However, this began to change in the late nineteenth century. In 1886 the private railway company CFD (Chemins de Fer Départementaux, roughly ‘Regional Railways’) started building a substantial rail network on the Plateau. On 21 September 1902, with much ceremony, the line opened as far as Saint-Agrève. But to get to Saint-Agrève, passengers first passed through Dunières, Tence and Le Chambon. Quite simply, they got off the train at the earlier stops, and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was the principal beneficiary. As a result, in the early twentieth century the majority of the tourist business on the Plateau shifted to Le Chambon.

  Tourism was so important that in 1910 the town set up a tourist office, known as a syndicat d’initiatives, to try to draw in more people. They were hugely successful: richer families would spend up to three months at a time on the Plateau, and come back for more the following year. One family came from as far away as North Africa, and stayed for a month every year. The posters and brochures are fascinating; some even hark back to old battles. ‘Protestants, take your holidays in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon,’ one undated old poster advises, over an idyllic drawing of a village dominated by a Protestant church and nestling in picturesque hills. Charles Guillon took a similar and primly moralistic line. In his capacity as mayor, he wrote in a tourist brochure: ‘Le Chambon is above all a place for families: it is an ideal holiday venue for children and teenagers. They can lead a perfectly free life here among the mountains and the pine woods, because our air is pure, and so is our mountain lifestyle.’

  It all worked. People poured off the little narrow-gauge train, ‘The Clog’, into Le Chambon, Tence, Saint-Agrève and the rest of the Plateau, anxious to breathe in the clean mountain air, swim in the clear (if chilly) waters of the River Lignon, and generally refresh themselves away from smoky cities, grimy factories and terrible mines. The numbers are impressive. In 1934 the village of Le Chambon had a permanent population of around 900, but in July this number rose to about 4500, swelling to 6000 in August, then dropping back to 4000 in September. The people of the Plateau welcomed these strangers not simply as a source of extra money (though that must have been handy in a poor agricultural community) but also as an act of charity. They knew their visitors would be healthier and happier as a result of their time on the Plateau. So they encouraged them to come, to stay and to come back again. It helped everybody.

  The other important development on the Plateau in the nineteenth century was purely political. The Huguenots of the Plateau had embraced enthusiastically the notion of equal rights for everybody as set out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man; after all, this simple idea had transformed their lives. So they remained loyally republican, a position that became increasingly identified with the political left.

  France had a bumpy ride in the nineteenth century. Napoleon had brought stability in the wake of the French Revolution, then glory as he conquered most of Europe. After Napoleon’s defeat and departure in 1812, France toyed with a restored monarchy (Louis XVIII), a restored republic (the Second Republic), a restored Emperor (Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew, w
ho became Napoleon III), and finally settled on a Third Republic, which lasted until the arrival of the Vichy government in 1940. Throughout this period the Huguenots of the Plateau remained doggedly on the side of the republican left. Indeed, their voting record is almost suspiciously solid. Between 1876 and 1936 in Le Chambon and Le Mazet, the combined vote for moderate left-wing republicans, a few radicals and the odd hard-line socialist never fell below 90 per cent of the total. In 1914 the voters of Le Mazet set some kind of democratic record for a non-rigged ballot by voting 100 per cent for the candidates of the left. The left’s worst showing was in the second round of voting in 1932, when a mere 81.2 per cent of the voters of Le Chambon chose the left-wing ticket. This dismal result was well and truly compensated for in the same round in Le Mazet: 98.8 per cent turned à gauche.65

  In the 1930s, the politics of France, and indeed the whole of Europe, were deeply polarised between the far left and the far right. In a world still scarred by World War I and the Great Depression, there seemed little choice: either you were a socialist or you were a fascist. Russia led the way for the left. Germany, Italy and Spain led the way for the right. The towering figures in Europe were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. The Plateau wanted no part of any of this. It was in favour of the rights of man, as set out in the Declaration of 1789, and the political parties of the left seemed to respect this ideal more wholeheartedly than the parties of the right. Otherwise, there was not much to pick between them.

  So we have a picture of the Plateau up to the outbreak of World War II. Its people had a proud tradition of resistance, and of sticking together. Their history and folklore told them what it was like to be persecuted, hounded and victimised. It also taught them that their best hope of salvation lay in solidarity, in trust between neighbours and in keeping a low profile. If they could manage these things, they could withstand anything the world threw at them.