Allocution de la présidente sortante, le Professeur Évelyne Pewzner-Apeloig « La psychiatrie en France sous l’Occupation, 1940–1945 »

Abstract

Until recently, there have been few studies concerning the fate of the mentally sick in Occupied France during the Second World War, from 1940 to 1945, except for works consecrated to the comparatively high death rate due to the famine that massively affected the psychiatric hospitals. The author first mentions the main facts about this hunger tragedy that caused at least 45,000 deaths and about the controversy relative to the responsibility of the Vichy collaborationist government in this drama, then the author centers her work on the fate of some minorities exposed to persecution and to mortal risks due solely to their religion or to their opinions (Jewish internees; caretakers who were resistant fighters; communists; Jews and free-masons). Actually, from the signing of the Armistice (June 1940) to the re-establishment of republican legality (October 1944) the Pétain government promulgated and enforced, sometimes ahead of the occupier's requests, an anti-Semitic legislation widely inspired by the laws set up by Nazi Germany as soon as 1933. Taking into account, on the one hand, articles of the Annales Médico-Psychologiques from 1939 to 1945, and, on the other, the few recent works of the last decade consecrated to Jewish internees and to dissenting caretakers the author emphasizes that caretakers had to choose between their duty to care and to protect – in conformity with the terms of the 1838 law – and their obedience to the laws issued by a collaborationist regime and that some accomplished indisputable actions of resistance within the midst of medical and psychiatric circuits. Thus, the internment of some Jewish patients in a hospital, prolonged even if their condition did not require it, saved these patients from deportation and death. Similarly, some resistance fighters who were not sick were saved thanks to the conjugated actions of several caretakers. These facts, illustrated by concrete examples lead the author to underline the virtue of resistance and of disobedience to dishonorable leaders and laws.