Life Lessons In The French Mountains
(11/19/2009) I stayed in touch with a couple of classmates from the College Cévenol, but then life separated us until the Internet reunited me with one classmate for whom the experience of the school was life-changing.
In the summer of 2008 he invited me to his house in Connecticut for a mini-reunion with him, another American alumnus, and a French alumnus whom I had often wondered about. We looked at photographs, talked for a long time, and compared notes. The Frenchman, who married a classmate and lives in Arnhem, in the Netherlands, with her and their children, found out as a grown-up that his mother was actually from a Jewish family, which opened up a whole other way of looking at the world and his family.
Situated in the Haute Loire village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (altitude 1,000 meters), the College Cévenol, an international secondary school, was founded by André Trocmé and Edouard Theis, two Protestant ministers, in 1938, on the eve of World War II. Long known as a Protestant pocket of resistance to political and religious oppression, the village is in a mountainous, fairly isolated part of France, making it easier for the many Protestants who had not already fled in the exodus of the 1600s and 1700s to thrive there.
Nonviolence, peace, and cross-cultural understanding were and still are values the school lives by and inculcates in its students, a large percentage of whom are from other countries, races, and religions. They seem to be values held more closely to the hearts of French Protestants than French Catholics, perhaps because the Protestants are a minority in the country. They are also values shared by Quakers, another formerly persecuted religious minority, which may account for a strong bond between American Quakers and the school, as well as between Concord Academy in Massachusetts and the school.
I was lucky enough to attend the College, a private high school but one under a contract of state sponsorship since 1971, for my last year of school and still graduate from Dalton, in New York City. Although I knew when I was there that the director, Pierre Gagnier, also a minister, had been imprisoned in a concentration camp for resisting the Vichy government during the war, I did not have a full understanding until many years later of how the villagers and other Haute Loire inhabitants had risked their lives by hiding 3,500 Jews and other refugees, many of them children.
I learned more about that extremely moving history when I read “Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There” by Philip Hallie, who was one of the children saved by the villagers. The story was also recounted in Pierre Sauvage’s film “Weapons of the Spirit.”
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to another mini-reunion by the same friend, Kevin Weyl. We met up in New York with two schoolmates, one from our class who works in Geneva and lives in Le Chambon, Samy Debard, and one who lives and works in Paris, Laurent Pasteur. Both are still involved with the school and had come to New York for the weekend to attend a business meeting about how the school might survive in the rough economic climate of today’s world.
Sitting over French onion soup at Bill’s, a former speakeasy on East 54th Street, we reminisced and caught one another up on what had happened to whom, including our former teachers. Memories that I had been unaware of swam into my mind’s eye. All it took was a little context and commiseration to bring them up — a boy’s face, a teacher’s voice, a girl’s name — details and impressions I had formed when I was the same age my own daughter is now, 17.
Although it seems likely that my parents sent me there because the school embodied their own, especially my mother’s, unspoken code of ethics, it was the school itself, the teachers, the weekly sermons at the temple, that reinforced those values in me, without my even knowing it consciously.
Isabel Carmichael is a writer and proofreader at The Star.