The Responsibility of the Church to the State in an Era of Mass Migration: The Leadership of Pastor Marc Boegner in Occupied France

Introduction: Christian Responsibilities in an Era of Massive Migration

We are in an era of massive demographic displacements. Hundreds of thousands of persons have moved from one country or region to another, driven by hardships ranging from wars to climate change. This mass movement of persons across borders raises complex questions about their rights and the protections that citizenship, naturalization, refugee status and asylum seeking do and do not afford. The political life of the nations which receive them has frequently been upended in the process and national policies regarding the right of asylum, enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are in flux and often contested. Policies for dealing with genuine immigration challenges can become vehicles for the prejudicial singling out of a particular group or inflaming latent xenophobia and racism. Christians, in the midst of this confusion, have had to reckon with their responsibilities, to their governments, to the displaced, and to the Gospel.

We are not the first to experience such large-scale waves of emigration, nor is our Christian faith the first to grapple with the calling of the church in response. Although past experiences offer at best analogues to our own, they constitute a witness against which to test our imaginations. The present essay is a modest attempt at outlining one such witness, in the hopes of prodding our discernment as to our Christian responsibility in the face of the diverse and often disruptive migratory dynamics of our times. The sketch I offer is of the French Reformed church, under the leadership of Marc Boegner, and its fidelity to its Christian duty in response to its government's antisemitic legislation, round-up and deportation of Jews to their deaths during the German occupation from 1940–44. ¹ As this essay highlights, the Vichy government defended its singling out of immigrant Jews as a necessary solution to France's immigration problems of the 1920s and 1930s. For Christians who are uncertain about the responsibility of the church to the state, the historical, political and ecclesial contexts of Boegner and the French Protestant church are too specific to form a common picture of our vocation. Nonetheless, though this essay is descriptive, not prescriptive, the witness of the Protestant church under Marc Boegner lays out the possibilities and limitations, inherent in a clear sense of the church's responsibility to the state on the matter of immigrants. Their experience forms a necessary element in our contemporary discernment and merits our careful reflection.

The Rev. Marc Boegner

The Rev. Marc Boegner (1881–1970), the head of the small French Reformed Church, L’Église Réformée de France (ERF) from 1938 to 1950, is not well known in North America. If he is known, it is for his tireless commitment to Christian unity and his leadership in the formation of the World Council of Churches. His memoir, The Long Road to Unity, is one of a handful of his works which has been translated into English.

Boegner deserves to be better known. He was the first religious leader to protest the anti-Jewish legislation of the government of Marshal Pétain (the regime known as Vichy) organized after France's defeat to Germany. Boegner did so in the name of French Protestants. His protests took the form of direct communication with the highest levels of the Vichy government and were only one part of the church's response to the atrocities against Jews in France. Boegner was a part of an extensive ecumenical and international network of the body of Christ that worked together to save lives. That network included Madeline Barot and Susanna Dietrich, key leaders of CIMADE (Comité Inter-Mouvements Auprés Des Evacués), a French NGO organized in 1939 by Protestant youth groups to help refugees fleeing Hitler; Dr. Willem Visser’t Hooft of the nascent WWC in Geneva; Charles Guillon, working in Geneva on behalf of the YMCA; Donald Lowrie, who led the Nîmes Committee in France, an umbrella organization of 25 humanitarian groups coordinating relief work in internment camps; Cardinal Jules-Géraud Saliège of Toulouse; and countless chaplains, pastors, priests, parishioners and citizens. One of the few stories related to this work of “saving lives” known in North America is that of the people of the Plateau Vivarais and the village of Le Chambon, who, through the leadership of André and Magda Trocmé, Eduard Theis and other pastors, priests and lay persons saved thousands of Jews.

For French Protestants there was no doubt that the church had a two-fold responsibility to the state. First, it is to obey the state, even when it is difficult to do so. Second, it is to hold the state accountable to its divine responsibility to govern according to God's requirement of truth and justice for all its people. The obedience due to the state is ordered and subordinated to the absolute obedience due to God alone, and when necessary, obedience to God involves acts of ‘spiritual resistance’ to the state. Compelled by the Gospel, spiritual resistance is the active non-violent refusal to go along with ideologies, fascist or otherwise, that dehumanize or degrade oneself or others. ²

From 1940–1944, in response to the Vichy regime's antisemitic legislation, while under German occupation, the Protestant church exercised its faithfulness to this divine responsibility in two essential and distinct ways. It spoke directly and authoritatively to the regime through Boegner's private communication with government leaders, and, at great cost, it undertook numerous acts of spiritual resistance. Beginning with the first wave of refugees from eastern Europe in 1933, obedience to the Gospel was lived out in acts of compassion. From living with refugees in internment camps, working ecumenically to find money for food, negotiating with officials to save a few lives and, most importantly, in sheltering thousands of Jews in a protective sphere described as a “conspiracy of silence,” the secret acts of sheltering and flight across borders. This story witnesses to the Christian hope, that, as Boegner wrote, in Christ's resurrection “when horror and distress germinate [there] is born the counterpart of service and love.” ³

The first aspect of this responsibility, direct communication with the state, is the primary focus of this article. Boegner was the official voice of the national synod of the Reformed church, and, in a way that seems impossible today, he privately spoke directly and repeatedly to the highest levels of government. For two years he insisted on this approach rather than on making public statements of protest against the policies of the Vichy regime. In 1942, only after Boegner concluded that his efforts to speak directly to the regime were futile, he agreed to address the church and world publicly.

What follows is a brief (and necessarily selective) overview of Boegner's actions on behalf of the church to hold the state accountable to its divine duty to govern justly. The story reveals that certainty about this divine mandate does not determine how it should be fulfilled. Fidelity to this call was often determined day by day, as events rapidly unfolded. Acts of spiritual resistance initiated in multiple parishes, which Boegner only partially knew about, took place side by side with his direct communication. There were disagreements over when and how the church should speak and to whom. Given the certainty of their responsibility, however, these complexities did not, and could not, lead to silence.

After Boegner's multiple efforts to persuade the Vichy government to repeal their antisemitic statutes had failed, the national council of the Reformed Church of France, L’Église réformée de France (ERF), sent pastors a letter to read from their pulpits on October 4, 1942. It stated in part,

A Christian Church would have lost its soul and its reason for being if it did not maintain, for the very safeguard of the nation in which God has placed it, divine law above all human contingencies … The Reformed Church of France cannot remain silent in the face of the suffering of thousands of human beings who have found asylum on our soil … The gospel obliges us to consider all men without exception as brothers … the church is obliged to make heard the cry of Christian conscience. ⁴

A Church Equipped to Fulfill its Responsibilities

The French Protestant church, through its ecumenical relationships and historical identity, was well equipped to resist the Vichy regime. ⁵ Though the church over which Boegner presided included just two percent of the French population, around 800,000 members, it played an outsized role in resisting the policies of the Vichy regime. Protestant Christians’ knowledge of Nazi Germany was unparalleled in France because their ecumenical and international ties kept them well-informed. The historical Huguenot emphasis on reading the Bible led to their greater literacy in comparison to their Roman Catholic counterparts. In the early 1930s there were already numerous articles in the Protestant press denouncing Nazism and antisemitism. Boegner wrote to the Chief Rabbi of France, Israël Lévi, in April 1933 to assure him of the indignation of French Protestants toward the treatment of their fellow Israelites. In June 1939 he led a conference on the Gospel and racism in his parish, Passy-Annonciation, in Paris. Knowledge of the Confessing Church in Germany and of the Barmen Declaration was widespread. In November 1939 Barth wrote the first of two letters to his French Protestants friends about their vocation to resist Nazism. ⁶ Boegner intervened with French censors to make possible the distribution of shortened versions. They were widely read.

As a minority group, the Protestant church in France had a long history of being outside the religious mainstream. Its identity as a church which resisted the state in obedience to God was forged during the persecutions of the 16th and 17th centuries. The word ‘refugee’ was first used to denote a Protestant who fled religious persecution in France to seek refuge elsewhere. In 1730 a young Huguenot woman, Marie Durand (1711–1776) was imprisoned in the Tour de Constance in Aigues-Mortes for reading the Bible. There she refused to abjure her faith (which would have brought her freedom) and encouraged the other imprisoned women to likewise refuse. She scratched in the stone wall of the tower in which she spent 38 years the word which was to become the watchword of all French Protestants: Resistez. Resist.

Marc Boegner (1881–1970) was of Alsatian background and was influenced by his uncle, Tommy Fallot (1844–1904) who was a founder of the Social Christianity movement in France, along with Élie Gounelle (1865–1950) and Henri Nick (1868–1954). Boegner became Fallot's biographer. The Social Christianity movement taught that conversion to Christ involved an essential two-fold turning: both inward to Christ and outward to one's neighbor and social reforms. Ordained in 1905, Boegner began his ministry in the Protestant parish in the Drôme, where his uncle had been a pastor. In 1918, he was assigned to the Reformed Parish of Passy-Annonciation in Paris and remained there until 1953.

In the Corridors of Vichy

In 1939 there was no other French Protestant with Boegner's stature, authority or influence. He was the head of the two Protestant organizations in France. First, he was the president of the national council of the French Protestant Federation (Fédération protestante de France [FPF]), an umbrella organization created in 1905 to bring together independent Protestant churches or unions. He was also the president of the national council of the newly formed French Reformed Church (L’Église réformée de France [ERF]), created in 1938 when, after years of work, Boegner and others were able to unite liberal and evangelical Protestants under a common declaration of faith.

The events around the fall of France and German occupation put Boegner in a unique position to be the primary voice of French Protestants to the Vichy regime. On July 10, 1940, faced with imminent military defeat by Germany, the French National Assembly, in a rushed vote, approved a constitutional change that dissolved the democratic Third Republic and granted extraordinary powers to Prime Minister Phillipe Pétain, a hero of WWI. Twelve days later, France signed an armistice with Germany which divided the country into an Occupied Zone in the north, which was controlled by the Germans, and a Free, or Unoccupied Zone in the south, ruled by the authoritarian government of Pétain, and located in Vichy, southeast of Paris.

The national council of the FPF had agreed that Boegner would follow the government if it left the capital so he could represent Protestants to Pétain’s regime. Boegner moved to Nîmes, a short train ride from Vichy. The two vice-presidents of the Protestant institutions, Rev. André Numa-Bertrand, of the FPF, and Maurice Rohr of the ERF, remained in Paris, which was under German occupation. With the dissolution of the democratic Third Republic, Pétain's new regime was officially no longer secular. In January 1941, Pétain established a National Council, an advisory council, which was an ‘alternative’ to the Parliament which he had abolished. He asked Boegner to sit on it along with two Roman Catholic priests. This provided an opening for the small Protestant church to have a voice in the Roman Catholic-leaning government. Boegner took hold of the opportunity.

Thus, the Protestant Boegner had the rare role of an insider at Vichy. The national synods of the FPF and the ERF were the only bodies authorized to speak officially for the Protestant church and, though they were able to convene during German occupation, they were not able to react quickly when a situation arose. At those times Boegner functioned with a level of authority unheard of within Protestant federative polity. The city of Nîmes, close to Vichy, became his home and office, and relieved of his duties at the Parish of Passy-Annonciation in Paris, he could travel freely to clergy gatherings, youth conferences, parishes and regional synods in the Free Zone and ecumenical meetings in Geneva. Nîmes became the headquarters of multiple aid organizations, including CIMADE and the Nîmes Committee. ⁷ Boegner was a member of both. Through all this he took on a kind of episcopal authority on a par with his colleague, the archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier, whom he enlisted to work with him to condemn the deportation of Jews. This was no so small feat for the head of a church which represented just two percent of the French population.

Beginning with his first visit to Vichy in June 1940, until the fall of 1942, Boegner began, as he later described it in a 1945 report to ERF on the activities of the church during the war, a “policy of presence.” ⁸ He wrote confidential letters and met multiple times with Pétain in his private apartment, with François Darlan, the Deputy Prime Minister of France and the de facto head of the Vichy government, and with Pierre Laval, who replaced Darlan as prime minister in 1942. Boegner wrote, “It was necessary to be present whenever the voice of the Protestant Churches of France had to be heard, … whenever it was necessary to demand respect for the human person. It is this presence that I have tried to make perceptible.” ⁹

From Rapport to Resistance

Boegner and Protestants, as did most of France, initially supported Pétain. Protestants welcomed his National Revolution with its focus on moral rectitude and Boegner was deeply grateful to Pétain for the place he gave the small Protestant church at the table. Though Boegner had respect for Pétain and felt a moral affinity with the leader, he and others quickly discovered the regime's deeply antisemitic attitudes. As Paxton and Marras documented in their seminal work, Vichy France and the Jews (1981), Vichy immediately began to conduct its own anti-Jewish program well beyond the initiatives of the occupying Nazis. Just twelve days after Pétain had been invested with full powers as head of state in Vichy, he enacted a denaturalization law and created the Commission for the Review of Naturalization to review 500,000 naturalizations given since 1927. Approximately 15,000 people had their French nationality revoked, of whom 40 percent were Jews. ¹⁰ A month later it repealed the Marchandeau law, which prohibited in the press defamatory comments or incitement to hatred based on origin, race, or religion. In its armistice with Germany, the regime agreed to the possibility of repatriation—the forced return of now stateless German refugees. By October the regime began to round up and force into detention camps all the refugees of the “Jewish race”—legal and illegal immigrants, and Jewish citizens, who had been naturalized since 1937. Their citizenship was retroactively revoked. ¹¹ Local prefects were authorized to intern foreign Jews and in time their authority included the round-up of French Jews. By January 1941, more than 50,000 men, women, and children were in detention or in forced labor camps, in horrendous conditions, in the Free Zone. From internment camps they were deported to Germany and death in the gas chambers and crematories. As a result of this anti-Jewish immigration policy, by the time of the liberation in summer 1944, more than 74,000 Jews had been deported from France to Nazi extermination camps. Within France, about 1,200 Jews were killed by the German police or their French accomplices, and another 3,000 died of exhaustion or disease in French internment camps. In total, approximately 80,000 Jews in France, 25–30 percent of whom were French citizens, were killed in the Holocaust. Nearly 2,000 were under six years of age. More than 6,000 were younger than 13 years old. About 8,700 were over 60. ¹²

Antisemitism in the Guise of an Immigration Problem

Boegner's first meeting with Pétain was in July 1940, just after France had agreed to send back to Germany 40,000 stateless Jews who had sought refuge in France. Here and in subsequent meetings Boegner protested Vichy's treatment of foreign Jews, whom Boegner called “religious refugees.” ¹³ In response to his protests, Boegner was told by Pierre Laval, an architect of Vichy's antisemitic policies, that the deportation of foreign Jews was a response to an immigration problem and was a way to protect French Jews, who had been in France for generations. “It was a prophylaxis.” ¹⁴ Vichy's goal was to prevent the arrival of more refugees, especially Jewish refugees, and to encourage foreigners, especially Jews, to leave. ¹⁵

France did have an immigration problem, as most politicians of the time recognized. Yet the narrative of this problem, offered by the government, was not even half true and it would take some time for Boegner to realize this. By the late 1930s, France was the only major western power to have retained an open-door immigration policy and as a result, it had become the haven for approximately three million foreigners. The immigrants were primarily Poles and Italians who replaced the labor force lost in WW1 and the half-million Spanish refugees who fled Franco's victory in Spain. But when France began to experience the effects of the Great Depression in the mid-1930s and a rise in unemployment, calls for economic protectionism, the restriction of the entry of refugees, and the emigration of the foreigners already in France, bolstered the government's anti-refugee and antisemitic policies. At the 1938 international conference on the refugee crisis in Europe, organized by the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and held in Evian, France, the French representative, Henri Bérenger, told the representatives of the 32 countries present that France could no longer welcome, house and feed the three million foreign residents currently living in the country, let alone the exodus arriving from eastern Europe. The participating nations provided no help.

In the spring of 1938, the Daladier government passed a decree which called for the expulsion of all foreigners without resident or work permits. If the expelled workers could not find another country to accept them, they were sent to remote parts of France to live under ‘house arrest’. Several months later another decree replaced house arrest with detention in special centers. According to Marrus and Paxton, this November 1939 decree was the basis for the establishment of concentration camps in France. ¹⁶

But France's immigration problem was not a Jewish problem. In 1939, there were just over 300,000 Jews in France, the majority of whom were in Paris. It is estimated that about half were foreign Jews, that is 6 percent of the immigrants and 0.35 percent of the total French population. ¹⁷ This increased in 1940, with the exodus of Belgian and Dutch Jews and the expulsion of Jews from Baden and the Palatinate, which brought the total to an estimated 340,000 Jews (two-thirds of them foreigners), less than 1 percent of its total population of 42 million. ¹⁸ As Marrus and Paxton conclude, Vichy's measures against Jews were motivated by French concerns, rooted in the French crises of the 1930s and propelled by the defeat of 1940. ¹⁹

Throughout his protests with Vichy, Boegner clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that the state had a immigration problem, created in part by the mass migration of a large number of foreigners, which included but was certainly not limited to Jews, and by the hasty naturalization of many foreigners in the 1920s and 1930s. ²⁰ In the face of this problem, while the church was not to assume the role of the state or get involved in politics—that is, in the formulating and executing of policy, Boegner insisted on the church's responsibility to persuade the state to govern justly; and from the beginning he protested the singling out of Jews through its antisemitic legislation. Boegner wrote, “A senior police officer thought he would silence me by trying to persuade me that this [the treatment of foreign Jews] was a governmental question that the Churches had no business dealing with. Unfortunately for him, our Churches did not share this view.” ²¹

Who Speaks for the Church?

The speed with which the Vichy regime enacted its anti-Jewish legislation meant the Protestant church did not have the time to discuss its response in its synods. In its first three months in power, the regime had revoked the citizenship of naturalized citizens, limited the practice of medicine, law and employment in public agencies to those born of a French father, deported thousands of Jews who had sought France's protection, and had enacted two antisemitic statutes. The first statute of October 3, 1940 defined a Jew as anyone with three Jewish grandparents, or with only two, if one was married to a Jew, and it excluded all Jews—French or foreign—from most professions. Many Christians were included in this definition. A week later, Vichy stripped all Algerian Jews of their citizenship by revoking the Crémieux Decree. A week later, on October 10, a second statute gave prefects authority to round up foreign Jews and intern them in forced labor camps.

The Protestant clergy wanted their church to make a public statement of protest against Vichy's antisemitic statues, as the confessing church in Germany had done. In December 1940, Boegner wrote the clergy two letters in which he tried to clarify the distinction between speaking in the name of the church and speaking one's Christian conscience. In the first letter he told the clergy of his conviction that the church must protest directly to the government before making any public statement. He urged restraint in assessing political events. In the second letter, he gave them permission to preach about the situation, but made it clear that they were not to speak for the church per se. In the face of obvious injustices, every Christian and pastor should have the freedom to express his opinion as a citizen or as a Christian without giving the impression that they are speaking in the name of the church. “Let us know how to maintain the indispensable distinctions between what the Church says, through the sovereign national Synod, and what we say, in the light of Christian Revelation.” ²² The refusal to make a public statement did not sit well with all the clergy, and some presented a formal motion in a May synod for a public statement of protest. ²³ Boegner quashed the motion, insisting that “personal conversations with certain responsible personalities” was the most effective means for the voice of the Protestant church to be heard. ²⁴

The Situation Worsens: Early 1941

In early 1941 Vichy widened its net of persecutions. When the national council of the EFP learned that Vichy was establishing a Bureau for Jewish Affairs commission (Commissariat général aux questions juives, CGQJ) to coordinate the enforcement of the various antisemitic measures, including the seizure of Jewish property, they voted unanimously that Boegner communicate a written protest in its name. He wrote two confidential letters in response to their vote. Both acknowledged the state's responsibility to solve its civil problems and the church's duty to call it to do so justly. The first was a letter of support to the Grand Rabbi of France, Isaïe Schwartz. Boegner had visited Schwartz on several occasions and tried unsuccessfully to arrange a meeting between Schwartz, Pétain and himself. ²⁵ He expressed the pain the ERF felt at the racist legislation and injustices inflicted on French Jews, and reiterated that the solution to the state's serious problem must be “inspired by respect for the human person, by faithfulness to the State's responsibilities, by the demands of justice of which France has never ceased to be the champion.” ²⁶

The second letter, to Admiral Darlan, Vice-President of the Council of Ministers, was similar. After acknowledging the state's responsibility to deal justly with its immigration problem, it protests the legislation against Jews and begs Vichy to reform its antisemitic statues.

As French people and as Christians, we are nonetheless aroused by a law which introduces into our legislation the racist principle and whose rigorous application entails, for French Jews, cruel trials and poignant injustices. We rise up in particular against the principle by virtue of which the State has broken formal commitments made to men and women, the vast majority of whom have served it with loyalty and selflessness …. Our Church, which has known all the sufferings of persecution, would fail in its primary mission if it did not raise its voice in favor of this minority. ²⁷

Both letters were confidential, but in March 1941 the letter Boegner wrote to the Chief Rabbi was made public without his consent. An antisemitic newspaper in Paris, Au Pilori, published it as an attack on Protestants. ²⁸ The attack backfired. Somehow thousands of copies were widely distributed in the Free Zone, and it became the first glimmer of hope to Jews. Au Pilori began to condemn Boegner's activity and to demand that he be prosecuted. His library in Paris had already been burned.

Boegner's letter to Darlan had no effect. Darlan met with Boegner and informed him of a new law prescribing a census of all Jews—foreign and French—and the requirement that the word ‘Jew’ be stamped on their identity and food ration cards (Statute of June 2, 1941). Darlan reiterated (falsely) that this action was to protect Jews who had been in France for several generations, “des Français Israélites”. “As for the others,” Boegner reported, “he only wants to see them leave.” ²⁹ As the antisemitic legislation accelerated, Boegner met with the Archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier, and proposed that their two churches work together to protest Vichy's racial laws. It was the first of several meetings between them. Both Gerlier and Boegner wrote Pétain and in response to the joint protests from the churches, Pétain ordered Xavier Vallat, the high commissioner for Jewish affairs, to moderate the application of the racial laws. This was the only time Boegner's protest seemed to have a direct effect on Vichy's actions—though the moderation did not last long. Three days later, on October 31, Boegner preached on the national radio from Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than men,” and used the examples of Joan of Arc, Martin Luther, Marie Durand, and the refugees as those who had resisted the state. In response to Boegner's use of the Huguenot watchword, ‘Resist’, Laval censored further radio broadcasts.

The Foundation of Spiritual Resistance

Boegner's interventions with the Vichy regime were not his or the larger church's only response to the policies of the regime. That same fall (September 1941), 16 Protestant theologians met at a Protestant retreat center in Pomeyrol, France to write a statement of resistance to the Vichy government. Though it echoed the “Theological Declaration of Barmen” in Germany (May 1934) it was not an official statement from either of the two Protestant institutions. Boegner was prevented from being a part of the deliberations because of a meeting of Pétain's National Council, of which he was a member. The statement of eight theses, which became known as the Pomeyrol theses, provided a theological foundation for the public speaking of the church, acts of spiritual resistance against Vichy's persecution of Jews, and unlike the Barmen declaration, it spoke directly about the treatment of Jews. The first four theses deal with relationship between church and state, the fifth with the limits of obedience to the state, the sixth specifies respect for essential freedoms, the seventh protests any statute ejecting the Jews out of human communities, and thesis eight condemns collaboration, and states that it considers resistance to all totalitarian and idolatrous influences a spiritual necessity. ³⁰ The Pomeyrol theses were published in the Protestant magazine, Foi et Vie, and widely disseminated and studied by pastors and congregations in both zones. ³¹

That same fall, Boegner visited the internment camp in Gurs, in southwest France, where Protestant chaplains and members of CIMADE were living with the prisoners and working with the nascent WCC and others to supplement their meager rations. There was not enough food, heat, beds, sanitation, medicine, or staff. At that time the overcrowded camp had just received over 7,000 Jewish men, women and children whom the Nazis had rounded up in Baden, in southwest Germany. What Boegner saw left him speechless: Men inert, emaciated, dying on the floor. That winter 30 prisoners died each day due to the inhumane conditions of the camp.

Summer 1942: A Turning Point

The summer of 1942 became a turning point for Boegner and most of France. The Vichy government accelerated its round-up and deportations of Jews to their deaths. First, the Nazis decreed that all Jews in the Occupied Zone over the age of six were to wear a yellow star. This measure made them easier to segregate and to facilitate deportations. Members of the Council of the Federation Protestant in Paris saw the effects of this law first-hand. They wrote Pétain, and Boegner, who had met with Pétain in January, met with him again at the end of June to read to him the forceful letter of André Bertrand, President of the Council of the FPF. The letter described the humiliation imposed on Jews, including young children and the harmful effects of dividing Jews and Christians into two groups. But the imposition of the yellow star was only a first step in an intensified, systematic plan to deport Jews to their deaths. Less than three weeks later, July 16–17, 1942, the French police conducted the first mass arrests of entire families—13,000 Jews in Paris pulled from their homes and confined in appalling conditions in the stadium known as the Vél’ (or Velodrome) d’Hiver in Paris. Within days, the deportation trains carrying them to Auschwitz began to leave.

Quickly, Vichy and the Nazis turned their attention to deporting Jews from the Free Zone. Boegner met again with Cardinal Gerlier in order to synchronize their protests. Boegner wrote Pétain the next day, August 20, officially protesting the deportation of Jews. The letter was broadcast by British and American radio. In it he challenges the Vichy rhetoric that their anti-Jewish policies are a solution to the immigration problem.

No Frenchman can remain unmoved by what has happened since 2 August in the security and internment camps. One knows that the answer will be that France is only returning to Germany the Jews that were sent here in the fall of 1940. The truth is that men and women who came as refugees to France for political or religious reasons have just been delivered to Germany, and they know what terrible fate awaits them. ³²

On behalf of the church he calls Pétain to treat the refugees humanely.

Until now, Christianity has inspired the nations, and in France in particular, to respect of the right of sanctuary …. I must add, Monsieur le Maréchal, that the ‘delivery’ of these unfortunate foreigners was effected in many places under conditions of such inhumanity that the most hardened consciences were sickened and witness to this measure were made to weep … I beg of your, Monsieur le Maréchal, to impose the indispensable measure in order that France not inflict upon herself a moral defeat, the weight of which will be incalculable. ³³

Pétain and Laval were unaffected by this letter. By September 5, Laval had agreed to hand over to the Nazis 10,000 foreign or stateless Jews and their children who were living in the Free Zone. Initially, there were exceptions for military veterans and pregnant women, but the secretary general to the Vichy police, René Bousquet, revoked these exceptions in early August because Vichy was behind in its quota of arrests. Six weeks after the round-up at the Vel d’Hiver, the Vichy government ordered the round-up of foreign Jews in the region of Lyon. As in Paris, more than 6,500 Jews were pulled from their homes and taken to the nearby internment camp in Vénisseux, where they were sorted for deportation, first to the Drancy internment camp and then to Auschwitz.

Boegner was able to intervene with the Chief of the Vichy Police, René Bousquet, to help save a group of children from deportation to the Vénisseux camp. Laval, under the pretense of not separating families, ordered that Jewish children under 16 be included in the deportation convoys. Bousquet, who had overseen the round-up in Paris, expanded Laval's deportation orders to include children as young as two. There was, however, a provision which prevented the deportation of children, but it required that their parents do the unimaginable. Parents could relinquish their parental authority to an approved organization, which would take charge of their children, saving them from deportation. Amitié Chrétienne (1941–43), a Catholic counterpart of the Protestant CIMADE, founded in Lyon to help Jewish refugees, was working in the camp. ³⁴ The members of Amitié Chrétienne convinced some parents to sign over their parental rights to them, but Bousquet was unconvinced that they were an approved organization. Boegner intervened and after several attempts, they convinced Bousquet otherwise. ³⁵

Amid the screams of both children and parents, three buses took 108 rescued children to a former Lyon convent occupied by the French Resistance. Their parents, meanwhile, went by bus to Drancy and then Auschzwitz. The Vichy police launched a search for the children hidden in the former convent. Those caring for them refused to give them up.

The end of August was Boegner's tipping point. Any illusion that the deportations were a solution to the France's immigration problem was gone. He wrote another letter of protest to Laval, requesting that he give him assurance that no foreigner who has been condemned in his native country for political reasons or who has requested asylum in France for similar reasons be directed to the Occupied Zone—and deportation and death. ³⁶ No guarantee was forthcoming. At this point the leaders of the ecumenical and international networks working to try to save lives reached the same heartbreaking conclusion. Leaders of CIMADE, the YMCA, the WCC and the Quakers all told Boegner the same thing: that they no longer believed it was possible to save adult Jews. All efforts must be focused on saving the children.

Boegner Finally Breaks his Silence

Just after accepting this devastating conclusion, Boegner traveled south to the large annual gathering of Protestants at Le Musée du Désert, an event that takes place on the first Sunday of each September. There at the Assemblée du Désert he would break his silence and openly discuss with his clergy the already extensive ecumenical and international network trying to shelter Jews.

The museum, located in the thick forests of south-central France known as the Cévennes, takes its name from the period in the 16th and 17th centuries when outlawed Protestants, refusing to abjure their faith, took to the deserted places of this area to worship. Each year thousands gathered for a service of Holy communion in the morning, followed by fellowship and additional addresses in the evening.

That year Boegner led the event. As he drove there, he passed hundreds of people traveling to the assembly by bus and bicycle. Among the 4,000 who gathered that day were over 40 Jews who had fled the Occupied Zone during the August round-ups. They had come on the chartered buses, assisted by Protestants, disguised in the uniforms of Protestant scouts.

In the morning Boegner preached from Revelation 2:10, “Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor's crown.” In his sermon he spoke clearly about their duty to be good Samaritans to the Jews who are suffering close by.  “Put into practice the law of love given by Christianity. At a time when hatred is blowing in a storm. The love that accepts to share the sufferings, that wants to take them on itself …. Suffering all close to us. Suffering of Jews and Christians of Jewish origin …. Let us be Christians. Let us persist in seeing in every human creature a brother for whom Christ died.” ³⁷

In the afternoon Boegner gave an address which was broadcast on National Radio. In it he spoke about the fidelity of the church to its vocation, especially in front of the state and in ecumenical work. Between the morning worship and afternoon address he met with the 70 pastors who were present. As the crowd dispersed, they exchanged information. Boegner made them aware of the dire situation as he knew it and they shared with him information about numerous clandestine efforts to shelter Jews which were already taking place. The clergy pressed him to make sure that the voice of the Protestant churches was heard without delay. Boegner did not think this was as easy as his clergy thought. As a Protestant leader he lacked the authority to issue a pastoral letter to be read in all the churches, as the Archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-Géraud Saliège, and Archbishop Gerlier had just done in their dioceses. Nor could he quickly assemble the national council of the FPF. In addition, he was still holding onto the conviction that before the church publicly protests the policies of the government, it must speak to those in authority to try to persuade them to change its unjust measures. For these reasons he planned to meet with Laval before convening the national council of the ERF.

On his way back to Nîmes from the desert assembly he did just this. Once again he protested the arrests and deportations that were taking place in the Free Zone. In response Laval declared that he could not do otherwise in the face of German demands. All foreign Jews (and Christians considered as Jews by the law of June 1941) had to leave. He said again that this was necessary to save French Jews. Boegner reports their chilling conversation in the 1945 report.

“Will you make it a manhunt?” Boegner asked him.

They went on to argue about what was happening to those deported. When Boegner spoke of the abominable things taking place, Laval changed the subject.

At the end of their conversation Boegner told him, “Mr. President, I am obliged to point out to you the seriousness of the situation. The Churches cannot remain silent in the face of such facts.” Laval responded, “let them do what they wish; I will continue to do what I must.” ³⁹ Only then did Boegner fully accept that his approach of speaking directly to the leaders of the regime was futile. He left Laval and went to Lyon to visit Cardinal Gerlier, who gave him the text of his statement which had been read that previous Sunday in all the churches of his diocese. Boegner had an interview with the chargé d’affaires of the United States, who promised him he would send a cable to ask Washington for authorization to tell Laval that America would agree to take the children of the deported parents.

The Church Cannot Keep Silent

When Boegner got back to Nîmes he called an emergency meeting of the national council of the Reformed Church. They issued a message to the faithful, dated September 22, read in all the pulpits of the Reformed Church on October 4, despite efforts by local police in some places to seize it. In it the church speaks of the ways the Vichy regime has violated its divine duty and calls the faithful to disobedience to the state through prayer and reaching out to the suffering with the compassion of the Good Samaritan.

The Reformed Church of France cannot remain silent in the face of the suffering of thousands of human beings who have found asylum on our soil. Divine law cannot accept that families willed by God can be broken, children be separated from their mothers, the right of exile and compassion be unrecognized, respect for the human person be violated, and helpless individuals be surrendered to a tragic fate. The Gospel obliges us to consider all men without exception as brothers for whom the Savior died on the cross. How can the Church ever forget that it was from that people from whom the Jews are descended that came in the flesh the Savior of the world?

In the Corridors of Bern

Just days after writing the public letter of protest, Boegner used his authority as head of the FPF and ERF to save the lives of a few hundred Jews, who were able secretly to cross into Switzerland from France. In 1938, Switzerland began to tighten its immigration policy in response to the rising tide of refugees fleeing the Nazis and then, in response to the flood of asylum seekers trying to leave France after the round-ups in the summer of 1942, it enacted an emergency policy and closed its borders. An outcry from Swiss citizens, churches, and aid organizations led the Swiss government to issue “tolerance” instructions, permitting the admission of vulnerable refugees, families with young children, children entering alone and those with strong ties to Switzerland. ⁴¹

In the face of these more flexible measures Boegner, working with the Swiss churches and aid organizations, brokered a deal to get some Jews across the closed border. With the Swiss Department of Justice and Police, Boegner negotiated the establishment of a list of ‘nonrefoulements’—Jews, selected and assured by French Christian and Jewish relief organizations, whom the Swiss guaranteed they would not turn back at the border. The agreement was between the sovereign government of Switzerland and Boegner, who was representing a group of foreign and international aid organizations. The plan was legal in Switzerland, illegal in France, and kept secret from Vichy. Unlike his efforts with the Vichy regime, Boegner's efforts with the Swiss government in Bern clearly saved lives.

Out of this agreement, an extensive ecumenical underground network grew in 1942 and 1943. CIMADE and Amitié Chretienne, financed by funds raised in Switzerland by the World Council of Churches, smuggled into Switzerland hunted Jews who were lucky enough to be on the nonrefoulement lists. Pastors, priests, abbés, farmers and villagers hid and fed the refugees, and through coded messages, directed them to the smugglers, who, risking their lives, used routes that members of CIMADE had established from Le Chambon, Lyon and other towns, through the mountains to the Swiss border. This list would include up to 1,400 names at the liberation; but not all found their way to Switzerland. ⁴²

As Boegner took leadership in secretly establishing the lists of nonrefoulements, he did not stop protesting directly to the Vichy government—but he was under no illusion that a policy of presence would bear fruit. In the spring of 1943, he met with both Laval and Pétain to protest the recently enacted law of compulsory work service, which required young men and women to work as forced labor in Nazi Germany. The law ('service du travail obligatoire’, STO) was the extension of a voluntary work program which had failed. Over the next two years Vichy sent about 650,000 young French men and women to Germany to work as forced labor.

Boegner's conversations with Laval and Pétain met with the usual lack of results and this time Boegner did not wait to issue a public letter of protest. Immediately he asked the national synod of the ERF to issue a letter to be read in all the churches on May 2, 1943. It was a pastoral letter for those being forced into dangerous labor in Germany and spoke of the “irreconcilable opposition between the Gospel and any conception of man or society which leads to considering work as a commodity that one has the right to buy or requisition at will.” ⁴³

The new law heightened the question of the limits of obedience to the state. Thousands of young people fled to the mountains and woods to avoid conscription as forced laborers in Nazi Germany. Multiple resistance groups quickly formed, including a Jewish-Protestant Resistance group, and the Maquis, who were armed bands of resistance fighters. In October 1943, when the national council of the ERF realized the extent to which its pastors were involved in various resistance movements, Boegner wrote a private letter to the clergy. He had recently had to negotiate with the head of the Vichy police to secure the release of several pastors, who had been arrested as political prisoners and sent to internment camps. ⁴⁴ Boegner sympathized with the clergy for taking part in the resistance but called them back to their vows to the church and submission to its discipline. They had to choose between a vocation in the church or in the world.

After Liberation: The Trial of Pétain

In August 1944 French and Allied troops began to liberate French towns and in September, they reached southern France. As Allied forces advanced, Pétain and the remains of the Vichy regime fled to exile in Germany. One by one Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and other concentration camps were liberated by Allied troops. The following May Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. A week later Germany surrendered. In August 1945 the provisional French government, headed by de Gaulle, placed Pétain on trial for treason. Boeger was asked to be a witness for the defense, one of only two called specifically to testify to Pétain's treatment of the Jews. Boegner agonized over whether to testify and, in consultation with the national synod of the FPF, he agreed to do so. On the stand he described the six meetings he personally had with Pétain to protest Vichy's treatment of Jews. Under oath he said, “I had the impression that he was impotent to prevent these terrible evils that, privately, he condemned without reservation.” ⁴⁵ Pétain was found guilty of all charges, but due to his advanced age, de Gaulle commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. He died on July 23, 1951, at the age of 95. Laval was arrested by the French government and likewise put on trial for treason. He was found guilty and was executed by firing squad in October 1945. Darlan had been assassinated in December 1942.

Boegner and his family returned to Paris and he resumed duties at the parish of Passy-Annonciation. In a meeting with de Gaulle in September 1944 he demanded humane conditions for those arrested for collaborating with the Vichy government. In 1945 he became president of CIMADE and would remain in that position for over twenty years. A member of the provisional committee of the WCC from 1938–48, he became its president in 1948. He was elected a member of the Political and Moral Science Academy in 1947, and then of the French Academy in 1963. Until his death he continued to strengthen ecumenical ties, especially Roman Catholic-Protestant. He was an observer at the Second Vatican Council and in 1965 addressed the gathering in Geneva at which Cardinal Bea announced the creation of the Joint Working Group, a collaborative effort between the WCC and the Roman Catholic Church. In 1988 he was given the title, Righteous Among the Nations, by Yad Vashem for his courageous efforts to save Jews. He was one of 350 French Protestants, as well as the entire village of Le Chambon, to receive this honor.

Conclusion

Boegner's insistence that on behalf of French Protestants he protest the Vichy regime's antisemitic policies directly and privately to Pétain and Laval came from the conviction that the church has a divine responsibility to the state. He would not criticize the state in the third person until he first had spoken directly and repeatedly to its leaders, urging them to repeal their antisemitic legislation. It was only after he had concluded that this approach was futile that he convened the national synod of the ERF in order to issue a public letter of protest, which spoke about the regime in the third person. In his private letters, sermons and public statements he calls on the regime to refrain from inflicting on France a moral defeat on top of a military defeat and to remain faithful to the state's responsibilities despite the current hardships. This faithfulness involved: treating all persons humanely and justly, repealing antisemitic legislation, preventing inhumane living conditions of those detained, respecting the right of asylum, protecting foreigners condemned in their homeland who had sought asylum in France, refusing to separate parents and children, allowing Jews to worship, refusing to separate Jews from Christians, and remaining faithful to the tradition of human generosity and nobility of spirit that France was known for.

The situation of the church in France was different than that in Germany, and the events which necessitated resistance to Hitler's takeover of the German Evangelical Church, by setting up an alternative body, the Confessing Church, did not take place in France. Neither Vichy in the Free Zone nor the Germans in the Occupied Zone tried to prohibit worship or create a ‘national church’, as Hitler had done with the German Christian Church. Though Boegner denied requests for two years that the church issue a public statement of protest, as the Confessing Church in Germany had done, it would be a mistake to interpret his actions as anything other than based on the public speaking of God's Word. The Pomeyrol theses, modeled after the Barmen declaration, are a little-known statement of the theological foundation for the public speaking of the Word and the mission of the church to the state that arises from it. The theses assert that the sovereign Word of Christ over the church and the nations gives each its specific duties or vocation. The church, recognizing the authority of the state, is to obey the state and it is to remind the state of its divine responsibility to govern according to God's requirement of truth and justice for all its people (Thesis IV). The limits of obedience are likewise ordered by the Word and are a part of these distinct divine duties: the state is to be obeyed only if it complies with biblical requirements, which the churches and Christians cannot forget under any circumstances.

Boegner's correspondence and actions from 1940–43 is one story of how obedience to the state is subordinated to obedience to God in a complex, fast-moving period. Boegner initially focused his protests on the treatment of French Jews, who had been designated as such under Vichy's statutes. He quickly realized that Vichy's policies for dealing with a genuine immigration challenge was the government's vehicle for the prejudicial singling out of all Jews, French or otherwise. The quick slippage by Vichy from a legally defined “foreign” Jew to a certifiably legal Jewish citizen as the object of the government's rounding up, interning, and deportation, both demonstrated how easily racist antisemitism could drive policy, and how easily the legal standing of former immigrants could be dissolved in the midst of a political crisis. In such situations, the ethical difference between “stranger” and “neighbor” became blurred. The divine demand that the government treat all its people—including the foreigner on its soil—with the biblical requirements of truth and justice led Boegner to redirect his protests to Vichy ‘s treatment of all Jews—foreign and French, including the “recently French”—and call on Christians to become Good Samaritans to all persons in their midst, without the casuistic distinctions that might otherwise pertain to the definition of “neighbor.”

This compelling witness offers several places to enter into discernment of the church's responsibilities in light of national policies around diverse and disruptive migratory dynamics. Though obedience to the state and to God was a core conviction of the Confessing Church and Reformed churches in France, growing out of the 16th-century confessions, it has fallen from the Christian vocabulary of most churches today. The French Protestant church's clarity around the distinct roles of the church and the state—and the essential role of obedience in safeguarding both—is what convinced them that they could not keep silent in the face of the state's actions. Obedience to the state has a red line in the sand and that line is the Word of God. The French Protestant church's acts of spiritual resistance, caring for the stranger (but also the native French Jew!) in their midst at great cost and personal risk, constituted a refusal to abjure their faith and Christian duties in the face of the state's violation of its own God-given responsibilities. A strictly limited form of obedience to the state in part defined the church's identity. Their obedience was the obedience of love.

Boegner's insistence on protecting the distinction between what the Church says, through its synods and leaders, and what individual Christians say in light of God's revelation, invites a conversation about the nature of this differentiation. In occupied France this distinction allowed the Church to speak with one voice to the state even while all Christians were granted scope to fulfill their vocation of obedience to the Gospel by becoming like the Good Samaritan. Boegner, given the circumstances of France during German occupation, was able to assume a kind of almost episcopal authority, on a par with his Roman Catholic colleague, Gerlier—that is not a part of Reformed Protestant polity—but at this time allowed him to enter and command attention in both the corridors of Vichy and Bern. ⁴⁶ His role raises the question of who in Protestant churches today, with their varying polities, can represent authoritatively the decisions of its governing bodies to the state, the church and the nation and, when necessary, call the people to acts of spiritual resistance.

In his radio address to the church on the afternoon of the assembly at the Musée de Désert, while Jews were hidden in the gathered crowd, Boegner spoke of the vocation of the church in dark times. He said, “We are gathered at a time when the distress of the world is increasing day by day and when, in the disarray of souls, the Christian Churches are constantly brought back to question their primordial vocation and to ask themselves how to respond to it.” ⁴⁷

More than once, Boegner declared that the church would lose its soul if it kept silent in the face of Vichy's actions, its primordial vocation being the public proclamation of God's Word. Boegner's role as the official voice of the Protestant church to the state was distinct, courageous and necessary but it was only one part of the church's fidelity to its vocation, one part of its refusal to abjure its faith, one part of its refusal to remain silent. The institutional structure of the church, with its designated leaders and systems of accountability, meant it could work ecumenically and internationally in a network that was absolutely essential to the aid work and clandestine activities in France. After its defeat, France did not have the necessary resources for this kind of care. On its own, the church in France could not save lives. This network of pastors, priest, convents, children's homes, schools, congregations, farms, villages and international aid organizations and councils risked their lives to care for both citizens and strangers on the side of the road. The conspiracy of silence around sheltering Jews and the insistent voice of the church through Boegner to Vichy were distinct and essential parts of the Body of Christ working together to safeguard the Gospel by safeguarding persons. One could argue that the church did so only in a limited way, and with only limited fruit: too many Jews and others were lost, and efforts at a witness of “presence” to the government wasted time and proved futile. But the efforts of the small Protestant church in the face of massive confusion, political disruption, and uncertainty were both genuine, often pursued at great risk, and required difficult and agonizing discernment. Safeguarding the Gospel and human persons was hardly a straightforward task. That it was pursued at all, and with such care and cost, remains an astounding witness in a time where such witness was mostly invisible and often completely absent.

Boegner's statement that dark times drive Christian churches back to question their primordial vocation is an invitation to us—or perhaps a demand—to do likewise. Reflecting on the demands, pressures, and choices made by the French Protestant church during these dark years is something churches today ought to engage as a necessary part of learning discernment for new social challenges. Boegner's example is unique to his situation in many ways. Yet, the church's divine duty to the state remains the same, and the gifts God gives the church for its fidelity have not changed or dried up. As the national synod of the FPF wrote in October 1942, to be read in every Protestant church in France, the Gospel obliges us to consider all men and women without exception as brothers and sisters … “the church is obliged to make heard the cry of Christian conscience.” ⁴⁸