Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France by Caroline Moorehead

Abstract

Reviews 201 (673–74). The passages in which the authors skillfully blend company history with that of France more generally are highpoints of this study. These include Larousse’s support of his workers during the Commune, proving“l’engagement idéologique [...] du citoyen”(156); the political attacks on Larousse’s depiction of “les grands hommes de la République”(460) and the company’s material struggles (“le manque de papier”; the need for French-German dictionaries [460–62]) under the Occupation.Readers may take issue with the authors’ uncritical treatment of the founder’s desire to “répandre partout le savoir [...] à rendre les hommes meilleurs,”and of the Petit Larousse illustré’s capacity to delight non-metropolitan readers with “une sorte d’universel [...] qui apparaît tel à ceux pour qui la France, c’est aussi bien les droits de l’homme que le bon vin, la gastronomie, la haute couture, les parfums et le ‘Larousse’, adopté comme un symbole d’élégance et de savoir-vivre”(15). Nevertheless, this is a touchstone work on the history of publishing that will be of interest primarily to scholars of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century French literature and culture, and historians of the book. Georgetown University Anne O’Neil-Henry Moorehead, Caroline. Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France. London: Chatto & Windus, 2014. ISBN 978-0-701-18641-8. Pp. x + 374. £20. The most original part of Moorehead’s study takes place before the reader gets to the village in question, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. These ninety pages trace the itinerary of a dozen foreign and French Jews who find their way to the plateau where the village is located in south-central France. As she follows them, Moorehead skillfully paints the country with its disease-ridden internment camps, its hungry inhabitants, and the chaos and fear of the Vichy years. She depicts collaboration, anti-Semitism, and the growing menace to Jews, subjected to round-ups and deportation. It was a brilliant idea to begin by letting the reader experience this treacherous flight from various minefields to ultimate safety. Once we get to the village, however, Moorehead relates the same story told in one form or another since 1980. Despite the jacket cover’s ludicrous claim—“Just why and how le Chambon and its outlying villages came to save so many people has never been fully told”—nothing here is new; it has all been openly debated particularly since 1990. Moorehead mentions only one book and one film but criticizes them both. One wonders if she read the books in her bibliography. The book she attacks was published in 1979: Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed by Philip Hallie.Moorehead claims Hallie was a historian,but he was a philosopher.His pioneering work is a brilliant study of the ethics of rescue in which he deliberately states that he would be unable to tell the story “as thoroughly as a careful historian might tell it” (7). Consequently, since the mid-1980s, historians have been rectifying approximations and inexactitudes in his work. As regards Pierre Sauvage, Moorehead repeats a litany of unsubstantiated charges, finding Sauvage’s original and inspiring Weapons of the Spirit (1989; 2014) guilty of having a 40-second portion (in this 93-minute film) in which the filmmaker“asks”whether the rescue mission might have been helped because the head German officer in the region looked the other way. From someone who hammered Hallie and savaged Sauvage, one might expect impeccable scholarship. But the text is riddled with dozens of mistakes: Madeleine Dreyfus was never General Secretary of OSE (Jewish Children’s Welfare Organization), nor did she work on the Swiss border or in the internment camps. Georges Garel was Russian, not Polish; neither Joseph Bass nor Georges Loinger were Righteous Gentiles because both were Jewish. Darbyists are Protestants. OSE was not in Paris in 1932 and Albert Schweitzer was hardly its president, but in 1923 OSE was in Berlin where Albert Einstein was its honorary president. Finally, Moorehead snipes continuously at Pastor André Trocmé, whom she accuses of “malice,”“complacency,” and self-importance; the same Trocmé who wrote in his unpublished autobiography, when informed that he would...