A Good Place to Hide

by Peter Grose

  Paul Trocmé had previously been a major lay figure in the Evangelical Reformed Church, and his seventeen-year-old son was now beginning to develop strong religious feelings. In Paris, André embarked on a prodigious two-year course of study that included university-level Hebrew, Greek and church history at the Sorbonne, university-level philosophy at the Faculty of Theology on Boulevard Arago (Charles Guillon’s alma mater), and high school German, English, geography and literature at home. He completed it all with distinction. He was now determined to become a Protestant minister.

  André paints a picture of himself at the time as stiff-necked and afraid of girls. He was living in the gloriously vibrant city of Paris in the 1920s, which appeared to his puritan Protestant soul to be Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon and the Garden of Earthly Delights all rolled into one. ‘I was,’ he wrote, ‘unable to see the difference between sin and innocent amusement. Life was white in church, at the Christian Union meetings, [and] when we strolled through the Meudon Forest … and black at the movie theatre, the circus and the brothels.’ He was certainly prudish. In 1919, aged eighteen, he went off to a Boy Scout camp at Domino on the île d’Oléron, an island off the Atlantic coast of France near the port of La Rochelle. He recalled afterwards: ‘The conical marabout-style tents were pitched in a little pine forest, and we walked around half naked (so it seemed to me)… here I was, wearing only a bathing suit and exposing my body to the burning sun for the first time.’3 So prudish, yes. Tempted, yes. But give in to temptation? Never!

  This puritanism stayed with him throughout his life. He never drank or smoked; sex outside marriage was beyond contemplation; and he vowed to tell the truth at all times, whatever the inconvenience.

  Andre’s life now took an unexpected turn. His next decision can be seen as wilful, or eccentric, or another example of his clear-headed originality. At theology college the young student had come into contact with a strong circle of pacifists, and he became increasingly impressed by their ideas. There were, in the world of the 1920s, two strong threads running through the pacifist ideal. On the one hand there were those, like André and his friends, who saw pacifism as a moral issue. Christians should obey the sixth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There was no ambiguity. The words meant exactly what they said. And that meant pacifism was the only choice for a believing Christian. (This was not, to put it mildly, a view shared by the established churches, Catholic and Protestant.)

  The second thread was political. Essentially, the socialist left believed that wars were part of a capitalist conspiracy: the rich and powerful tricked the poor and gullible into dying on their behalf. Instead, the poor of all nations should stick together and refuse to fight in support of their kings and bosses. This was quite a different line of thought, since it allowed men to kill for what they saw as a just cause. After all, bumping off the odd tsar and tsarina never seemed to trouble the Russian revolutionaries. Although his experience as a penniless refugee had given him some inkling of the meaning of the phrase ‘class warfare’, this left-wing form of pacifism was never Andre’s line. His position was always based on Christian morality.

  However, we know from his (unpublished) memoirs that young André increasingly felt that his wealthy upbringing and now his cloistered life at theology college were somehow keeping him away from the real world, which included girls and other temptations. To know himself properly, he would have to enter that real world and try to make his way in it. How? All young Frenchmen were liable for military service. As a theology student, Andre’s had been deferred. Against the universal advice of family, friends, fellow students, teachers and professors, André Trocmé knew what he must do next. The young pacifist put his theology course on hold, and joined the army.

  • • •

  André was remarkably tall, particularly for a French man of the time, at six feet two inches (188 centimetres). In all photographs, he towers over those around him. His confident style, middle-class accent and obvious intelligence gave him an air of real authority. Although his round spectacles lent him a slightly bookish appearance, the rest of him proclaimed a natural leader. Contemporary photographs show a young man with film-star good looks. Here, the army decided, was officer material. He was quickly promoted to corporal, and assigned to a disciplinary platoon.

  He was an odd soldier: he didn’t swear, and in his free time he read books while his fellow soldiers headed for the brothels and bars. (If André ever went into a bar, he drank coffee.) Above all, he made it very clear that he would not fight and kill. On arrival at the unit, he had been issued with a rifle and 250 rounds of ammunition. He never made them ready for use.

  A sympathetic friend arranged his transfer to a geodesic brigade (an army map-making group), which sounded like a good refuge for a pacifist soldier. So Corporal Trocmé, his rifle and his ammunition joined the cartographic unit of the 54th Field Regiment and headed for the Bled,4 in Morocco.

  The rifle now became a problem. In France, there was no chance he would be called on to use it. But the Bled was a different proposition. The Berber tribesmen there were not too fond of the French occupying army, and the unit might be called on to shoot back, if not to shoot first. For a pacifist corporal, there was only one way forward. French Army regulations allowed soldiers to deposit unused weapons with the armoury. So Corporal Trocmé’s rifle, suitably greased and wrapped, found a new home in the arms store at Rabat, Morocco, and the reluctant corporal headed off into the wild Bled armed only with a paper receipt for his weapon, signed by the armourer.

  Inevitably, trouble threatened. The platoon’s officer, Lieutenant Tardy, ordered an inspection of the group’s arms. Corporal Trocmé explained that his rifle was back in the armoury at Rabat, adding that, as a pacifist, he would refuse to use it anyway. In his memoirs, Trocmé recorded the following dialogue.

  LT TARDY: If we are attacked tomorrow, the absence of a single rifle could make a big difference in the end result of the battle.

  CORP TROCMÉ: I understand, Lieutenant.

  TARDY: A refusal of obedience in front of the enemy means an instantaneous court martial and an immediate execution by firing squad … do you understand that, too?

  TROCMÉ: Yes, sir, I do.

  TARDY: I should condemn you to a long prison sentence and send you back to Rabat in handcuffs. I can’t do that because I need all of my men. The lieutenant paused for a moment, and then went on.

  TARDY: I’ll tell you what. I’ll ignore your case for the time being. I don’t give a damn whether you have a rifle or not as long as we are not attacked. But, if we are ambushed and if I order my men to fire their weapons in self-defence, and you don’t carry out my order for any reason, then you will be court-martialled and only God knows what will happen to you after that. Is this understood?

  TROCMÉ: Yes, sir.

  Happily, none of this eventuated. The Berbers fired a few shots one night, but the platoon sheltered behind a stone wall and waited for the attackers to lose interest, which they eventually did. No one was ordered to fire his weapon in self-defence, so there was no court martial and no God-knew-what to follow.

  Shortly afterwards, the unit returned to Paris, to find that the whole 54th Regiment had been dissolved. Corporal Trocmé’s rather unpromising military career could now end, as long as he could come up with the appropriate discharge papers. Perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out that all his military papers had been lost, and he could not find his old commanding officer or anyone else to release him. As far as the army was concerned, he didn’t exist. A unit of air force balloonists had taken over his old barracks, and the phantom corporal managed to persuade an air force sergeant there to issue him with a stamped paper that declared for all the world to see that TROCMÉ, André Pascal, had been lawfully discharged from the air force, not the army, and was now a civilian. He never heard from the army again, nor they from him, undoubtedly to the relief of both.

  • • •

  By then it was 1923, the year Adolf Hitler made his first b
id for power in Munich with the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. The attempted revolution may have failed (and led to Hitler’s trial for treason) but the civil unrest that drove it seemed ever more ominous. Throughout Europe people sensed that the Great War, the war to end all wars, was far from over.

  André Trocmé returned to his studies at the Faculty of Theology in Paris, this time in slightly reduced circumstances. The family home in Saint-Quentin had finally been restored, so his father and family gave up their apartment in Rue Jacob in the Latin Quarter and moved back home, while André shifted into student accommodation at the college. This was another turning point: he was now much more exposed to persuasive individuals at the college who were already taking public stands in the cause of pacifism. Jacques Martin went to prison three times for refusing conscription. Henri Roser was thrown out of the Missionary Society after returning his military papers, and had to end his studies at the college. Edouard Theis, another pacifist, became an important ally and lifelong friend and colleague of Trocmé’s. Arnold Brémond mingled anti-war militancy with support for workers’ causes. Surrounded by these powerful voices, André Trocmé now made up his mind: in 1924 he joined the MIR (Mouvement International de la Réconciliation), an international pacifist organisation, and became a member of its European Council. He was now a publicly declared pacifist, at a time when refusal to serve in the military was a criminal offence. The public saw pacifists as cowards and traitors, and this view was supported by the established churches, Catholic and Protestant, and by just about every government in the world. Pacifism could be a lonely business.

  Two ideas now dominated Andre’s thoughts. His experience in the army left him in no doubt about the Tightness and practicality of pacifism. The mounting tension in Europe gave fresh urgency to the cause. At the same time, he grew increasingly conscious of the cruel contrast between his own comfortable, middle-class life and the lives of the poor. His Christian duty, he was convinced, was to help them.

  In September 1925 he moved to New York after winning a scholarship to the Union Theological Seminary there. His father disapproved. He thought it was about time André found a parish for himself and launched a career in the Church. However, André knew his mind, and crossed the Atlantic.

  If his intention had been to get away from comfortable middle-class life, that ambition fell apart in the most bizarre way. He was wanted on the phone. A strange voice said: ‘I am Mr John D. Rockefeller junior, 10 West 54th Street, and I need a French tutor for my sons.’ Edouard Theis had taken the job earlier, and the Rockefellers had come to trust French theology students. So André became tutor to Winthrop and David. He collected them from school each day, shared their afternoon tea and evening meal, even travelled with them to Florida for Christmas. Every Friday evening, he went to the Rockefeller country estate at Tarrytown, on the Hudson River, and returned to Manhattan on Saturday evening. On Sunday, he was free to do as he chose. The pay—$175 a month—was generous. He might even be able to save enough money to make a long-standing dream come true: to go to India to meet that great advocate of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi. Less practically, John D. Rockefeller senior gave him a ten-cent coin and made him promise to invest it. ‘It’s the way I started, and I became rich,’ the great man told him. Sadly, the ten cents never quite became the cornerstone of a new Standard Oil Company, but it was a kindly thought.

  In 1926 the Rockefellers asked André to stay on for an extra year, or even two, but he now believed the time had come to go to work. That meant returning to France and looking for a parish of his own. He was 25 years old, and he could not remain a student forever. This resolve was strengthened in the Easter of 1926. André was sitting with some friends in the cafeteria of International House. One of the friends left. The empty chair was taken by an aristocratic and strikingly attractive Italian social work student, Magda Elisa Larissa Grilli di Cortona. It would be nice to say it was love at first sight, but the truth is it was more like love at second sight. They met again, and this time the attraction was strong.

  Magda came from a radical intellectual Russian family that traced its roots back to and beyond the Decembrist uprising of 1815. The Decembrists had aimed to topple the tsar and bring democracy to Russia. They failed miserably, leading to 289 arrests, five executions and 31 imprisonments. All the other conspirators were exiled to Siberia, including Magdas great-grandfather, Alexei Poggio. Magda was proud of this radical history. She was determined to lead her own life, live by her own standards, and break from her stifling middle-class background of minor Florentine nobility and the expectations of Italian married and family life. She was forthright, clever, and a bit of a rebel. She was not religious: in particular, after five years’ residence in the convent school of Le Mantellate she found the Italian Catholic Church repellent. Like André, she had grown up motherless. Her natural mother had died a month after Magda’s birth, and she never got on with her stepmother.

  André proposed, Magda accepted, and they married in Saint-Quentin, France, in the autumn of 1926.

  André now set to work looking for a suitable parish. He was determined to work among the poor in an industrial town, and his wish was soon fulfilled. At the beginning of 1927 he was sent to the picturesque-sounding Sous-le-Bois (Under the Trees), part of the parish of Maubeuge near the Belgian border. The shady trees turned out to be a distant dream: they had long ago given way to smokestacks, steel mills and industrial grime, while the people of the town were poor, brutalised and downtrodden. Alcohol abuse was a major problem, often leading to domestic and other violence.

  As pacifism was contrary to church policy, the young pastor had given an undertaking not to preach about it from the pulpit. However, he felt free to preach it elsewhere, including at a meeting of the local Socialist Party. His powerful speech pointing out that pacifism was the only logical consequence of Christian belief was reported in the local paper. That led to an angry letter of condemnation from the Regional Council of the Evangelical Reformed Church. Trocmé the troublemaker was born. Worse, his name was now on the Regional Council’s watch list.

  The following year, after the birth of their first child, Nelly, the Trocmés moved on to another parish, Sin-le-Noble, a suburb of the heavily industrial northern city of Douai and not far from Sous-le-Bois. Again, there was not much nobility in evidence. Sin-le-Noble existed to dig coal for the steel mills. It was a single-company town, and that company was determinedly Catholic. Miners who skipped mass were warned they could lose their homes. The company subsidised housing, and what the company giveth, so the miners were told, the company also taketh away. It was hardly promising territory for a young Protestant pastor, but André stuck with it for seven long years, from 1928 to 1934. During this period Magda gave birth to three more children, Jean-Pierre, Jacques and Daniel. André honoured his pledge not to preach pacifism from the pulpit. But the storm clouds were now building over Europe, and the need to prevent another tragic war seemed ever more urgent. He would have to take his message elsewhere.

  Using his fluept German, Pastor Trocmé even took the argument across the border into Germany itself. He spoke in Heidelberg to a meeting packed with communists and Nazis, each spoiling for a fight with the other but all vaguely agreeing on a single point: pacifism was out. At the end of the meeting, one of the Nazi Brownshirts pulled a gun and threatened Trocmé with it. ‘I suggested to him in German that he should kill me right there in front of everybody,’ Trocmé recalled in his memoirs. ‘My proposal seemed to calm him down, because he disappeared into the crowd.’

  At another meeting, this time in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart, Trocmé got a hearing from a hostile audience by springing out from behind the curtains and barking: ‘Deutschland erwache?’ (‘Germany awake!’) As this was a favourite line of Hitler’s, the Brownshirts lapsed into startled silence, and listened respectfully while André called for equal and fair treatment for both German and French former World War I soldiers. This led to cheering and general applause. Why? As one of the Brown
shirts explained afterwards: ‘You have precisely expressed what our Führer tells us every day—justice for all, fairness for all, and peace for all.’ It was not exactly the kind of endorsement André Trocmé had in mind.

  • • •

  The Trocmé family now had a pressing personal problem: the children’s health. The foul industrial air of Sin-le-Noble was starting to affect them all, Nelly in particular. So André began to look for a new parish. The first invitation came from Clamart, one of a group of three parishes on the southern edge of Paris. In early 1933 he met the church council of Montrouge-Malakoff-Clamart, who liked what they saw and voted unanimously to accept him. The appointment then had to be approved in Paris by the Regional Council of the Evangelical Reformed Church, the same council that had rebuked André for his pacifist views at Sous-le-Bois. André managed to persuade the Regional Council to allow him to present his case to them in person. But the council asked him only one question: ‘In case of war, would you put on a uniform and defend the Fatherland? Answer yes or no.’ The answer could only be no. That ended his candidacy.

  With the help of a friend, André now found a vacancy for a pastor at Thonon-les-Bains, near the Swiss border and not far from Geneva. As with Clamart, André met the church council and they approved of him. But one dissident member of the council tipped off the Regional Council in Paris. This time there was no need for André to go to Paris and speak for himself. The Regional Council had already made up its mind. No, again.

  In 1934 Roger Casalis wrote to André asking if he would be interested in taking over from Casalis in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. As we’ve seen, this third church council also liked what they saw, and they voted unanimously to accept him. But this time they were forewarned: stay clear of the Regional Council in Paris. If they called the appointment ‘temporary’ there would be no need to seek approval. So on 22 June 1934, the church council of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, an isolated village high up on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in the Haute-Loire department of France, appointed as their new pastor—temporarily, of course—a restless, charismatic, multilingual, troublemaking, notorious pacifist called André Trocmé.