André Trocmé’s Christian Pacifism by Patrick Henry and Mary Anne O’Neil

To understand the French pastor and theologian André Trocmé’s commitment to pacifism, we must first appreciate his concept of Christianity, which he came to through a powerful conversion experience. In the third chapter of his memoirs, he notes that, although raised in a pious Protestant family that prayed together daily and attended church regularly, Christianity was, until his adolescence, little more than an aspect of his bourgeois upbringing. But around the age of 15, while studying catechism with his pastor, Jacques Kaltenbach, in preparation for formal initiation into the Reformed Church of France, he converted from “a religion of duty to one of truth and spirit.” Kaltenbach’s instruction was nothing less than an exhortation to surrender oneself entirely to God: “He implored me to give myself to God by practicing the virtues of purity, truth, love, and selflessness, and by placing my whole life and will in the hands of the God who saves those who have lost their way.” This total surrender involved not only a direct personal experience of conversion but a commitment to evangelization.

Kaltenbach’s influence is primary, but it’s only the beginning of the story of how this bashful, unsure young man, born into a conservative, nationalistic, and militaristic family, managed to free himself from his stifling bourgeois roots to lead a life dedicated to peace and the service of others.

André was 13 years old when World War I began. His conversion took place either in 1915 or 1916. He had considered himself a “young patriot” given to “uncomplicated nationalism,” and even engaged in individual acts of rebellion such as tearing down public notices posted by the Germans. But the war was waged in his backyard. The Trocmé family lived in the industrial city of Saint-Quentin, which had fallen into German hands by late 1914. André describes the hardships his family endured during the occupation—his father’s loss of livelihood, the forced quartering of enemy soldiers in the family mansion, the danger of being shot for disobedience to the German soldiers, not to mention the family’s fear of losing the three sons who had enlisted in the French army. Major battles, including the Battle of the Somme, took place near Saint-Quentin. The sounds of war could be heard in the background. The frightened youth experienced the noise and smoke drifting from the battlefield towards his home and witnessed the parade of hostages and prisoners of war who passed in the streets. He was especially horrified by the treatment of starving Russian prisoners of war and the mutilated bodies of living German soldiers returning from the front.

One day, one of the German soldiers living in his home, a young man named Kindler, reassured André by telling him that he didn’t carry a gun because he was a Christian, and God had revealed that “A Christian must not kill, ever.” The Christianity espoused by Kindler, like that of Kaltenbach, was Pentecostal, a direct, personal experience of salvation that “converts” or “turns around” André’s understanding of patriotism. Although the adolescent André doesn’t measure the full effect of this encounter until after the war when he begins his theological studies, Kindler’s immediate impact is to demonstrate that religion has the power to erase hostilities between “enemies.” Kindler joins André in Saint-Quentin’s Union, a young Christian men’s group, for prayer and Bible study. After a few weeks, he leaves with his unit for the front, where he is, presumably, killed in battle. Through Kindler, André has found himself “face to face with what [he] would later call a ‘conscientious objector.’ All at once, [his] nationalism and militarism collapsed.”

After the Trocmé family’s forced exile into Belgium and relocation in Paris, André began studying at the School of Theology. Here, he was exposed to radical versions of Christianity unlike anything preached in the Reformed Church of his youth, not only by his teachers but also in discussions with older students returning from war who had been influenced by Marxism. From among the many types of social activism he learned about in these discussions, the only one that appealed to him was Christian pacifism, the belief that all forms of violence are incompatible with Christianity. “When I studied in Paris,” he notes, “I heard about Christian pacifism and felt the same, immediate evidence as when I heard Kindler say ‘Of course, one must refuse to shoot. That’s Christ’s Gospel, and anything else comes from the devil’.”

The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) had recently been founded (in 1914), and Trocmé met Oliver Dryer, then the secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Dryer told him that “Many of us have gone to prison rather than kill in the war.” After his introduction to Henri Roser, co-founder of the International FOR, André commented: “‘That’s it!’ I told myself as I listened to him. ‘That’s true Christian radicalism.’ I thought about Kindler and the illumination I had received in 1917, something I had forgotten during the exaltation of the Liberation. I was born, I was on my way, and I would never stop.” While most of his classmates in theology “heartily condemned conscientious objection,” Trocmé had seen the light. For him, pacifism made perfect sense in a Christian context and was the only acceptable form of social engagement.

Trocmé was right to use the term “on my way” rather than “at my destination,” because it would be almost twenty years before he found an effective means of practicing pacifism. Even though he claimed to be a “Christian pacifist,” by his own admission he was not yet a “social Christian.” In any event, André decided to give up his student military deferment and serve two years in the Army “to gain knowledge of human nature.” In France in the 1920s, there was no such thing as alternative service for conscientious objectors. Such people went to prison if they refused to serve. Once in the Army, one was expected to kill. No exceptions. While in France, Trocmé tried both to serve his country and remain a pacifist. He refused promotion to corporal, telling his colonel: “I have sworn never to kill. Thus, I can’t teach others to kill.” When his colonel chastised him for not stating these views upon entering the Army, Trocmé, “a bit cowardly,” accepted the promotion, but soon got himself transferred out of the infantry into the Geographic Service, a unit engaged in re-establishing property lines and restoring roadways.

Things changed, however, when his unit was transferred to Morocco, where he was expected to defend himself and others against Berber insurgents. He leaves his rifle in Rabat and, when called upon to take it up again, admits to his commanding officer that he has disobeyed orders out of religious opposition to killing. Trocmé was lucky to have a sympathetic lieutenant, who not only didn’t punish him but taught him that honesty demanded that he declare his unwillingness to kill at the outset and accept his punishment. This is exactly what Trocmé intended to do in the 1940s, if he were drafted. Once again, he was lucky: he never received a draft notice because the local government officials were aware that he had four children.

Pastors Édouard Theis and André Trocmé detained in Saint-Paul-d’Eyjeaux, February 1943.

After his studies were completed, Trocmé began his pastoral ministry as a social Christian pastor working with miners in the north of France. He believed that the role of the church was “to fight for social justice.” Since he spoke German, he also preached about pacifism and conscientious objection in Germany in 1932 with Nazi youth in the audiences. When, in 1934, he decided to look for another parish (because his children were always sick in these mining areas), as a conscientious objector, he ran into trouble. It cost him two positions, one in France, and one in Switzerland.

Ironically, Trocmé had a much easier time dealing with the army than with the Protestant Church in France. Before June 1940, the Reformed Church allowed pacifists to serve as pastors if they did not preach pacifism from the pulpit. Such pastors had to make a commitment in writing “not to campaign for conscientious objection” and were forbidden “to communicate [their] pacifist convictions to anyone, especially young people.” In 1939, things became more complicated. Some pacifist pastors, even those with the support of their parishioners, were called upon by church officials to resign.

By June 1940, Trocmé had already been the pastor in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a backwater parish on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in south-central France, for six years. He tried unsuccessfully to become an ambulance driver for the International Red Cross, but since he was still eligible for the draft in his home country, the Red Cross could not accept him. Trocmé was unwilling “to silence [his] conviction that war and homicide are contrary to the will of God” and gained the support of his parishioners. He underscored the importance of pacifism in Christianity in his sermons and told his flock: “We have to find a way to resist Nazism without killing and we will find it in daily obedience to the Gospel of peace.” His sermons, however, endangered him with French patriots and eventually with Vichy collaborators and the Nazi occupiers.

On June 23, 1940, the day after the Franco-German Armistice was signed, in what was most likely the first public protest against collaboration with the Germans, André Trocmé delivered the now-famous pronouncement, authored with his co-pastor, Édouard Theis, in their small church in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. He called upon his parishioners “to resist whenever our adversaries demand that we act in ways opposed to Gospel teaching [and] to arm ourselves with the weapons of the Spirit [to] combat the violence brought to bear upon our consciences.”

Trocmé’s nonviolent resistance began when he went to Marseille and offered himself as a worker in one of the internment camps where foreign Jews were being held. He met with Quaker representative Burns Chalmers and Fellowship of Reconciliation leaders Nevin Sayre and A. J. Muste. They convinced him that the best thing he could do was to shelter the children they got out of the camps in his parish’s rural countryside. A miraculous rescue mission was born, and it would be financed by the Quakers and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The Vichy police and the Gestapo were on Trocmé’s trail. They were fully aware of his clandestine efforts to shelter Jews. He was eventually arrested and sent to a prison camp. Fortunately, he was released just before all the other inmates were sent to the death camps. Soon after his release, he learned that there was a price on his head. Church leaders persuaded him to go into hiding, where he remained from July 1943 until June 1944, when the liberation of France began.

Magda Trocmé.

André and Magda Trocmé fought the Nazis nonviolently from 1940 to 1945. They were prime movers in a nonviolent rescue mission that saved no fewer than 2,000 potential Jewish victims of Hitler’s purge. There were a dozen villages involved in the same rescue activity in this area on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. Given the Huguenot heritage in the region, the people had a long history of helping persecuted people, and the religious among them considered the Jews God’s chosen people. There were also geographical advantages for this rescue mission. Situated in the high Vivarais plateau, composed of small farms distant from one another, the area offered possibilities for hiding refugees that urban centers lacked. Other French villages also enjoyed similar advantages but did not participate in rescue activities.

Trocmé’s appeal for nonviolence in the name of the scriptural injunction against killing united the people of the area in a highly effective campaign against the Nazis and the Vichy authorities. In Le Chambon, social action took on the character of a religious revival: villagers and refugees met weekly to study the Bible and pray. Trocmé believed that this spiritual renewal gave rise to communal action: “It was there and nowhere else that we received from God the answers to the complex problems of lodging and hiding Jews. It was there that we conceived of nonviolent resistance.”

When André Trocmé found out that he had been named Righteous Among the Nations, he wrote a letter to Anny Latour, a historian of French Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, in which he said: “Why me, and not all the humble peasants of the Haute-Loire region who did as much and even more than I did? Why not my wife whose actions were much more heroic than mine? Why not my colleague, Édouard Theis, who shared all the responsibilities with me?” Trocmé believed that all those in the area who were part of the rescue mission “refused to obey for reasons of conscience” and were “no less conscientious objectors than those who preferred prison to murder.” This must have made sense to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, because they not only named Magda Trocmé and Édouard Theis “Righteous Among the Nations” but the village itself and the surrounding area “Righteous.”

After the war, André and Magda stayed in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Nevin Sayre and A. J. Muste arranged talks abroad for André so that he could raise funds to support the École Nouvelle Cévenole that he and Édouard Theis had founded in 1938. This school was an international, coeducational Christian school based on pacifism and nonviolence. In the spring of 1946, Trocmé participated in the first international meeting of the FOR in Stockholm and, in 1947, he became half-time pastor in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and part-time European Secretary of the International FOR.

In 1950, André and Magda left Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and established the FOR’s “House of Reconciliation” in Versailles that they managed for the next 10 years. They welcomed large groups, offering them hospitality (food and lodging) and informal discussions on peace, nonviolence, and conscientious objection. During those ten years, André and Magda became globetrotters, spreading the FOR’s gospel of peace, nonviolence, and conscientious objection. In 1957, with the help of the Mennonites, they founded the Association of Eirene, an international Christian service for peace in Morocco. In 1958, they attended the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Conference to speak out against the development of the H-bomb. They vociferously opposed the war in Algeria and campaigned for Algerian independence. André was proposed twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1950 and 1955. He retired from the FOR in 1959 and served as pastor of Saint-Gervais Church in Geneva from 1960 to 1969.

Three Righteous Among the Nations after their captivity, March 1943. From left to right: pastor André Trocmé, educator Roger Darcissac, and pastor Édouard Theis.

André Trocmé always praised the FOR. He judged their founders exceptional “by their intelligence, charity, and prophetic vision . . . They dominated their historical moment by their courage, their faithfulness, and their ability to forgive.” Three years before his death, he returned to his long-abandoned memoirs to inform his family (the intended audience for this manuscript) that his spiritual life was contingent upon the Fellowship of Reconciliation. “There’s a certain practical aspect to my ministry,” he wrote. “That’s why I have treasured my contacts with the FOR. There I discovered the only spring of living waters in this world that satisfied my thirst.”

In these final reflections, Trocmé enumerates the lessons he learned by “pitching [his] tent with the FOR: We must completely revise religious education. We must teach people that conformity and fear are the most serious sins . . . That non-conformity for reasons of conscience is the first duty of Christ’s followers . . . That the next most serious sins are complicity with injustice, exploitation, humiliation of others, [and] silence in the face of shameful actions by our society . . . That when human beings liberate themselves from the ‘what will others say about me’ syndrome to champion the rights of those without voices, they will be ready to practice the other Christian virtues of purity, goodness, patience, and forgiveness, [and will experience] the Gospel’s liberating power.”

Trocmé lists several FOR members, among them Nevin Sayre, Henri Roser, Jacques Martin, Philippe Vernier, A. J. Muste, and Martin Luther King Jr. “They became my models,” he writes. Then he asks, “What do they have in common?” His response: “Faith in the possibility of goodness on earth.” Trocmé’s reference to Martin Luther King Jr. establishes an immediacy for us today. Like Trocmé, King was a Christian pacifist who united the country in nonviolent action against racial oppression and eventually spoke out against the war in Vietnam. The moral conscience of both men was inspired by their belief in a loving God who forbids killing under all circumstances. In our secular 21st century, it may be difficult to understand such pacifism, and it may never be more important to do so.

Patrick Henry is Cushing Eells Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Mary Anne O’Neil is professor emerita of French at Whitman College and author of La France et la francophonie: Conversations with Native Speakers, From Babel to Pentecost: The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel, and Three Centuries of Girls’ Education: Regulations of the Ursuline Nuns of the Congregation of Paris. All references to André Trocmé‘s words in this essay are from their forthcoming translation of Trocmé’s memoirs, The Memoirs of André Trocmé: The Pastor Who Rescued Jews, which will be published by Plough Books in the fall of 2025.

1 reply
  1. Eugene Ciarlo W-1
    Eugene Ciarlo W-1 says:

    This wonderful piece emphasizes the great need for clear sightedness and peace in our time. It is reminiscent of Bishop Budde and those few brave souls who dare speak truth to the narrow mindedness and myopia of our time. Bravo. Adelante. Blessings upon you.

    Reply

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