Pierre Schaeffer and Jeune France:

Cultural Politics in the Vichy Years

Philip Nord

How are the work and legacy of Jeune France ( JF) to be evaluated?
The organization was founded in the fall of 1940 by a veteran Catho-
lic scout, Pierre Schaeffer, with the backing of the Vichy regime’s
Secrétariat-Général à la Jeunesse (SGJ). JF’s raison d’être? The regen-
eration of French culture in an era of moral decay. The Catholic non-
conformist Emmanuel Mounier, the editor of Esprit, signed on as JF’s
cultural adviser. JF’s Christian and nonconformist antecedents, its
redemptive project, and its Vichyite credentials would all seem to point
to a simple conclusion: JF was a functioning cog in Maréchal Pétain’s

Philip Nord is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton Uni-
versity. His books include Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment, The Republican Moment:
Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the
Nineteenth Century, and a volume edited with Nancy Bermeo, Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons
from Nineteenth-Century Europe. He is currently completing a study of the French state and its trans-
formations during the years 1930–50.
 The term nonconformist was coined to characterize the dissident spirit of a cohort of young
intellectuals who in the early 1930s rejected what Mounier called “the established disorder.” The
nonconformists worked hard to cast themselves as “neither right nor left.” They did not embrace
either of the principal alternatives to the existing order of things: fascism or communism. They
did, however, espouse the cause of revolution, although the revolution they hankered for was
not understood in political terms. It was rather conceived as a spiritual transformation, uplifting
and redemptive, the harbinger of a new humanism. See Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-
conformistes des années 30: Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris, 1969).
Recent work has added an important layer of complexity to the idea of nonconformity. Olivier
Dard makes the case that nonconformism was a two-pronged phenomenon, part spiritualist but
also part “realist.” The realists, in Dard’s account, started from the same premises as did the spiri-
tualists, a rejection of the status quo and of the major political (fascist and communist) responses
to it. But they were less preoccupied with uplift than with practicality. The realists were techno-
crats in the making, apostles of a reorganization of the French state and economy in the name of
competence and expertise. In the event, Dard goes on to claim, this second current of noncon-
formism turned out to be the more consequential of the two, its representatives maneuvering
their way into positions of policy-making influence first under the late Third Republic and then,
to yet greater effect, under Vichy (Le rendez-vous manqué des relèves des années trente [Paris, 2002]).
The present essay will suggest that the spiritualist wing of the nonconformist movement also had
its successes, though not so much in the late 1930s as under Vichy and in the postwar.

French Historical Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Fall 2007)  DOI 10.1215/00161071-2007-012
Copyright 2007 by Society for French Historical Studies
686 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

National Revolution. It was, in the words of its harshest critic, an early

incarnation of that “totalitarian project” of state-sponsored culture
that would find its fullest expression in the état culturel of the Gaullist
Fifth Republic.
JF, however, has its defenders. In after years, a number of JF vet-
erans made a point of minimizing their Vichy affiliations. “Mais oui,”
Schaeffer conceded to a postwar interviewer, he had been a Pétainist,
but he then went on to conclude with a self-justifying flourish: “We
were almost forty million, minus those you know about.” The poet
Claude Roy, a core member of Schaeffer’s team, claimed that JF mem-
bers had never been more than “uncertain Vichyites.” In any event, it
was pleaded, JF had been a cultural entity and, as such, without parti-
san agenda. “Ideology never mattered,” according to the theater direc-
tor and JF official André Clavé.
From this angle, it is easy to understand why JF lasted less than
two years. Could Vichy superiors, authoritarian and centralizing, have
long tolerated an organization of such doubtful loyalties? Under offi-
cial pressure, Mounier was pushed out of JF in 1941 and ended up
doing prison time in a Vichy jail. Vichy hard-liners, still not mollified,
shut down JF once and for all in 1942, and well they might have, for
JF, it turns out, harbored its share of résistants. Jean-Marie Soutou, a
Mounier acolyte and member of JF’s Lyon branch office, worked with
Amitiés Chrétiennes to hide Jews, using JF facilities for the purpose.
Clavé was deported for Resistance activity. As for Schaeffer, he fin-
ished the war a senior figure in Resistance radio. In August 1944, from
an improvised studio, it was he who called for the ringing of Paris’s
church bells to announce the liberation of the city. On this account, JF
appears less a handmaiden of Pétainism than a sometimes unruly arts
organization composed of halfhearted regime loyalists and nonparti-
sans, with a leaven of outright résistants mixed in. JF’s legacy was not
at all totalitarian but quite the contrary: a body of poetry, theater, and
criticism bespeaking a creative nonconformity that would light the way
for independent-minded artists in the postwar period.
The present essay argues a middle position. JF was a Pétainist
operation at its origins, an orientation that colored much, but not all,
of the work it sponsored. The JF crew was young, restive, in pursuit of

 Marc Fumaroli, L’état culturel: Essai sur une religion moderne (Paris, 1992), 118–50.
 Schaeffer as quoted in Marc Pierret, Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer (Paris, 1969), 132. See
also Claude Roy, Moi, je: Essai d’autobiographie (Paris, 1969), 353; and Roger Leenhardt, Les yeux
ouverts: Entretiens avec Jean Lacouture (Paris, 1979), 121.
 Clavé as characterized by Francine Gaillard-Risler, André Clavé: Théâtre et résistances, utopies
et réalités (Paris, 1998), 60; Leenhardt, Yeux ouverts, 120.
 Gaillard-Risler, André Clavé, 58, 60.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 687

a purifying regeneration, and such attitudes manifested themselves in

a sometimes insubordinate determination to buck a too stodgy system.
The regime, as it grew more centralizing and fascistic over time, lost
patience with such willfulness, all the more so as JF activities came with
a spiritual, churchy flavoring that Vichy’s hard-liners could not stom-
ach. They bore down on the organization, in the end crushing it. JF
acolytes scattered across the political spectrum, adopting a variety of
positions from communism to a wait-and-see passivity, but few indeed
were those who stuck with Pétain to the end. What then of JF’s legacy?
In the postwar, JF artists and writers did not jettison the regenerative
ambitions of old. The battle against the vulgarities of commercialism
went on, but with a difference. Right-wing authoritarianism was no
longer a feasible ally in a struggle that now took a nonpolitical or left-
inflected turn. But however the postwar turning is to be characterized,
JF veterans, innovative and daring, carved out a place for themselves at
the heart of 1950s culture in France.

Origins
Pierre Schaeffer, JF’s founder, was a man of many parts: an engineer,
a practicing Catholic, and a lover of theater. He graduated from the
Ecole Polytechnique in the early 1930s and joined state radio late in
the decade as an electro-acoustical technician. The intervening years
were spent in part in the service of what must be counted as Schaeffer’s
first love, scouting. At the Polytechnique, he had joined an elite Rover
unit of the Catholic Scouts de France. Schaeffer later wrote an evo-
cation of the troop, the Rois Mages, and of its animating personality,
Clotaire Nicole, who was killed in a climbing accident as a young man.
Clotaire Nicole, as the book was called, was in part a meditation on the
scouting experience, on the exhilaration both physical and spiritual
of an outdoor life spent hiking, cycling, and mountaineering, but it
was above all a paean to the charismatic Nicole, the very model of the
scout chef de troupe who exemplified “the plenitude, the virility, the joy
of a life consecrated to Christ.” Extracts first appeared in the pages of
La revue des jeunes in 1934. The volume in its final version (with a pref-
ace by the Rover scout chaplain general Father Marcel Forestier) did
not come out until 1938 under the imprimatur of Le Seuil, a fledgling
publishing house of nonconformist orientation, run by Paul Flamand
and Jean Bardet. As for theater, Schaeffer had firsthand knowledge of

 Pierre Schaeffer, Clotaire Nicole (Paris, 1943), 40.

 Véronique Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience de recherche et de décentralisation
culturelle, novembre 1940–mars 1942” (thèse de troisième cycle, Université de Paris–III, 1974),
688 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

the doings of Léon Chancerel’s Comédiens-Routiers, an acting troupe

made up of former scouts. Schaeffer had even tried his hand at a play
of his own, Le mystère des Rois Mages, which was staged with an all-scout
cast at the Saint-Etienne-du-Mont cloister in 1934.
It was Schaeffer’s experience as a radio man, though, that first
brought him into the Vichy orbit. The regime prided itself on its special
concern for youth. It created a separate secretariat for youth affairs,
as well as a special radio program, Radio-Jeunesse, which debuted in
August 1940. The radio show was Schaeffer’s brainchild, and it was an
unusual project indeed. Schaeffer recruited a small band of core col-
laborators: Flamand and Roy, who have been encountered before, plus
four new faces, Pierre Barbier, Roger Leenhardt, Daniel Lesur (better
known today as Jean Yves Daniel-Lesur), and Albert Ollivier. The team
undertook to package Pétain’s message for a young listenership. Réponse
des jeunes, an eight-show series dedicated to this purpose, was launched
in October. The maréchal had delivered a speech to the youth of the
nation. Radio-Jeunesse enlisted Alfred Cortot, the pianist, to read the
address for its series. Barbier and Ollivier, joined by Maurice Jacque-
mont, wrote the commentary, which purported to be the voice of French
youth and was in turn declaimed by scout performers or recruits from
the Vichy youth corps, the Compagnons de France. What was distinc-
tive about Radio-Jeunesse was its mix of inspirational content and inno-
vative presentation. For uplift, there were Pétain speeches, readings
from Charles Péguy, poetic interludes organized by Roy, or updates
on youth initiatives, whether in the arts or elsewhere. Jean Desailly got
started on the program with a brief spot on the itinerant theater group,
La Roulotte, that included an interview with the troupe’s director,
André Clavé.10 But such material was not always delivered by standard-
issue announcers. Radio-Jeunesse featured choral singing, spoken
choirs, and various forms of collective address. There should be no sur-
prise here. These were modes of expression that scout theatricals had
experimented with in the 1930s, and Schaeffer’s team counted more
than one former Comédien-Routier among its number. Jacquemont,

16; Sylvie Dallet, Bibliographie commentée de l’oeuvre éditée de Pierre Schaeffer (Paris, n.d.), 26, 31; [Paul
Flamand], Sur le Seuil, 1935–1979 (Paris, 1979), 7–8. Le Seuil’s first best seller was in fact a scouting
novel, Guy de Larigaudie’s posthumous Etoile au grand large (1943).
 Leenhardt, Yeux ouverts, 121; Dallet, Bibliographie commentée, 26.
 Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 16–17; Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche Pierre
Schaeffer, Montreuil-sous-Bois (hereafter CERPS), carton Libération, Radio Paris, 1944–1945,
dossier Jeune France, subdossier Association “Jeune France,” Activités, Pierre Schaeffer and Paul
Flamand to Minster of the Interior, Dec. 1, 1941, 4. The CERPS archive contains two boxes labeled
Libération, Radio Paris, 1944–1945. The archive has now been shut down pending relocation.
10 Pierre Barbier, “Radio-Jeunesse,” Cahiers d’histoire de la radiodiffusion, no. 27 (1990): 65;
Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 127; Gaillard-Risler, André Clavé, 59.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 689

for one, had worked with Chancerel, and so too had Radio-Jeunesse’s
choir director, Olivier Hussenot.11
Schaeffer’s interlude at Radio-Jeunesse, however, did not last long.
Wider horizons soon opened thanks to well-placed connections in the
Vichy hierarchy. Schaeffer’s involvement in the Catholic youth move-
ment provided him a critical contact at Vichy in the person of Georges
Lamirand, some years older than Schaeffer but otherwise not so differ-
ent in profile or belief.
Lamirand, like Schaeffer, was an engineer. In the interwar
decades he combined a career in business with an ongoing commit-
ment to Catholic youth affairs. Lamirand’s rising reputation as a youth
spokesman owed more than a little to the patronage of Robert Gar-
ric, the founder in 1920 of the Equipes Sociales. The Equipes brought
together laborers and young bourgeois Catholics in a spirit of com-
mon endeavor, preaching a kind of “go-to-the masses” Catholicism that
proved attractive to Lamirand, who rose to become the organization’s
vice president. It was through Garric, it seems, that Lamirand first met
Maréchal Hubert Lyautey.12 Lyautey, as the long-serving resident gen-
eral of Morocco, had won notoriety as an innovative administrator,
a Catholic, and a military man of high principle who set a model of
leadership and moral responsibility. He wanted to pass on this legacy to
future generations and, late in life, gathered around himself a cohort of
young disciples, Garric and Lamirand among them, who met on a regu-
lar basis in the early 1930s at his Rue Bonaparte apartment.13 Lyautey
turned out to be a helpful benefactor to Lamirand, encouraging him to
put down on paper his reflections on the engineer’s mission in the man-
agement of factory personnel. The result was Le rôle social de l’ingénieur
(an allusion to Lyautey’s celebrated article of 1891, “Le rôle social de
l’officier”), published in 1932 with a preface by Lyautey. Lamirand pre-
sented himself in the book as a crusader for social peace, a chef who
purified himself through moral and physical discipline, placing the
men before ­ himself all the better to command them.14 Lamirand, of
course, imagined himself not just a leader of men but a leader of youth
as well. In the 1930s he became a regular collaborator at La revue des
jeunes, edited by Father Forestier and Garric, and the journal may have
been the vehicle that first brought Schaeffer and Lamirand together.

11 Dallet, Bibliographie commentée, 34.

12 See Lyautey’s introduction to Georges Lamirand, Le rôle social de l’ingénieur (Paris,
1937), v.
13 Rémi Baudouï, Raoul Dautry, 1880–1951: Le technocrate de la République (Paris, 1992),
131–33.
14 Lamirand, Rôle social, 49, 211, 232.
690 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

In 1940 Lamirand’s high reputation among a certain faction of

the Right drew the attention of Vichy authorities who, in September,
appointed him secrétaire-général à la jeunesse (Garric went on to become
director of the Secours National, a state-subventioned charitable body).
Lamirand’s chance also proved to be Schaeffer’s. Tiring of radio work,
Schaeffer sought out the youth administrator’s backing for the creation
of a multipurpose arts organization. Lamirand agreed to supply the
funding and so JF got off the ground.
Schaeffer was joined at JF by most of the team he had worked with
at Vichy radio: Barbier, Flamand, Jacquemont, Lesur, Ollivier, and
Roy, all of whom attended the JF’s start-up meeting.15 Who were these
men? Roy had been a member of the ultra-right Action Française. Fla-
mand and Ollivier were veterans of the nonconformist Ordre Nouveau.
Nonconformists came in many hues, but the Ordre Nouveau variety
harbored a particular animus against democratic institutions. The
group’s press organ ran the headline “Don’t Vote” on the eve of the
Popular Front elections of 1936, elaborating on the exhortation in the
article that followed: “It is forbidden to vote, just as it is forbidden to
spit.”16 Barbier, Lesur, and Jacquemont, on the other hand, were not
so much militants as artists. Jacquemont was an ex–Comédien-Routier
who had broken away to form an itinerant theater group in partnership
with Barbier. Lesur was a composer and keyboard master who taught
counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum. Yet in the troubled 1930s, it can
be argued, culture and politics were never that far apart.
The claim is most difficult to sustain in the case of Lesur. He was
a member of a musical group that included André Jolivet and Oli-
vier Messiaen. The group sought a middle way between academic and
avant-garde styles, aiming to fashion a musical idiom that was recog-
nizably modern but at the same time timeless in its meditative spiritu-
ality. Lesur remained fairly conventional in his musical means, but not
so Messiaen and Jolivet, who turned to non-Western sources, Hindu
and African, for rhythmic inspiration. The cultural rock on which the
three chose to build, however, was as much religious as aesthetic. All
were committed Catholics. Lesur was himself a skilled organist with an
appointment to the Benedictines, and he and his partners all looked
to medieval forms—the canticle, Gregorian chant—for models. The
group did indeed enter into a formal partnership, constituting a musi-
cal association in June 1936 under the name Jeune France. This first

15 Véronique Chabrol, “Jeune France, un ‘maillon manquant’ pour l’histoire de la décen-

tralisation théâtrale,” Cahiers de l’animation, no. 53 (1985): 88.
16 Edmond Lipiansky and Bernard Rettenbach, Ordre et démocratie, deux sociétés de pensée: De
l’Ordre Nouveau au Club Jean-Moulin (Paris, 1967), 36.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 691

Jeune France, like its successor, imagined a France gripped by a “crisis

of civilization.” What the nation needed was a new, spiritual art that,
hovering above the earthbound musical partisanship of the day, would
uplift and regenerate. From this angle, the Jeune France of 1936 looks
much like a musical homologue to the beyond-politics, “neither-right-
nor-left” nonconformism espoused by the likes of Mounier, and so it
has been argued by the best-informed scholar in the field.17
The cultural politics of the Comédiens-Routiers were of a similar,
confessional turn. In April 1929 a chance encounter brought together
Chancerel with Father Paul Doncoeur, the founder of the elite branch
of Catholic scouting, the Routiers or Rovers. Doncoeur invited Chan-
cerel to put on a Christmas play, the parts to be assigned to a cast of
Rover scouts. Chancerel rose to the challenge and was ready to go in
time for the upcoming holiday season. So began, in the humble setting
of a country barn, what came to be known as the Comédiens-Routiers.18
The enterprise was remarkable on several accounts. The players were
all amateurs, young men, often no more than teenagers.19 Chancerel
was a fervent believer in l’esprit de troupe, whether scout patrol or acting
ensemble, a commitment that informed his novel insistence on choral
training. Comédiens-Routiers learned to sing, to chant, and to recite
in unison, the emphasis falling as much on rhythm as on clear articula-
tion.20 Chancerel wanted his troupers to fuse into a single, expressive
whole, but more: he wanted the actors and the audience to fuse, for
Chancerel conceived the theater as a communion akin to the sacred
Mass, priest and congregants drawn together in holy celebration.21
Chancerel venerated classical Greek tragedy, but his repertorial tastes
ran more to sacred material: Noëls, Nativity scenes, Easter cycles. At
times, the sacred spilled into the epic national. Chancerel composed a
life of Jeanne d’Arc, performed in the spring of 1938 at Domrémy. A sec-
ond Chancerel text, Terre de France, Royaume de Marie, debuted later that
year for an outdoor, pilgrim audience at Lourdes. The play, enacted by
scouts (although not in this instance Comédiens-Routiers), dramatized
in a series of tableaux the Virgin’s special attachment to France. And
at times Chancerel’s theater of faith and nation descended onto less

17 See Jane Fulcher, “The Politics of Transcendence: Ideology in the Music of Messiaen in
the 1930s,” Musical Quarterly 86 (2002): 449–71. Many thanks to Jane Fulcher for her help with the
preceding paragraph.
18 Hubert Gignoux, Histoire d’une famille théâtrale (Lausanne, 1984), 133.
19 Denis Gontard, La décentralisation théâtrale en France, 1895–1952 (Paris, 1973), 86; David
Bradby, Modern French Drama, 1940–1990, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1991), 13; François Bloch-Lainé,
Profession: Fonctionnaire; Entretiens avec Françoise Carrière (Paris, 1976), 24.
20 Gignoux, Famille théâtrale, 146, 181, 183, 191–93, 225.
21 Jacques Copeau, “La représentation sacrée,” Art Sacré 18 (1937): 109–10.
692 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

uplifting terrain. A Terre de France tableau excoriated the “dullness” and

“gray” of Protestantism, the maleficence of the philosophes, the hateful
deeds of 1793. A Nativity play included a scene of Mary preparing the
infant Jesus’ new bed as a chorus of scout angels recited the verse:
Joseph cut down a beech tree
For his cradle of wood
The Jews will trim a beech tree
For to build him a rood.22

But such sentiments come as no surprise from a man who penned a

tribute to Antonio Salazar (the founder of the Catholic corporatist
Estado Novo in Portugal) or who drew inspiration from the classics of
the French nationalist school: Maurice Barrès, Paul Déroulède, Charles
Maurras.23
Schaeffer’s initial team was very much anchored in the various non-
conformist, Catholic, not to say ultra-right currents that had roiled the
political waters of the 1930s. This was JF’s world, and as the organiza-
tion expanded its range of action, its ties to this exalted, often obstrep-
erous milieu only deepened. The Action Française link furnished JF
with a second round of recruits in Jean de Fabrègues (active in Lyon)
and Maurice Blanchot, who joined the literature section of the Paris
branch. From Ordre Nouveau came the Sciences Po graduate Xavier
de Lignac, alias Jean Chauveau. Lesur recruited Jolivet and Maurice
Martenot, the latter a pioneer of electronic music and the inventor
of the so-called Martenot waves. Schaeffer’s Catholic connections
brought on board Hussenot and Clavé, both theater men. Clavé in turn
recruited his friend Maurice Delarue and in due course Jean Vilar.24
This was a disparate crew, to be sure, but certain common threads
held them together. France, it was agreed, was snared in the toils of a
civilizational crisis that was at once cultural and political in character.
Commercial forms were eating away at the national culture; parliamen-
tary democracy had corrupted public life. The nation stood in need of
a spiritual rebirth generative of a culture of quality that would answer
to genuine human needs (and not just the factitious desires excited by
mass entertainments), and it needed a political rebirth as well, though
on this score there was less consensus as to how to proceed. For many,
like Chancerel, Salazar was a figure of reverence. The political Left
was on the whole anathema, though Mounier for a passing moment

22 Gignoux, Famille théâtrale, 152–53, 173–74.

23 Ibid., 111–12.
24 Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 27–29; Lipiansky and Rettenbach, Ordre et
démocratie, 77; Gaillard-Risler, André Clavé, 62.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 693

was prepared to endorse aspects of the Popular Front program. All of

Schaeffer’s team, however, shared a common hankering for genuine
authority, for a spiritual leadership, backed by energetic and disinter-
ested elites (such as themselves), that would set the nation’s house in
order. JF partisans might have liked to style themselves “neither right
nor left,” but they were in fact more right than left, and a lurking
authoritarianism, however concealed by a rhetoric of moral serious-
ness, is not hard to decipher in their all-too-vehement critique of Third
Republic manners and mores.
The ex-scout Schaeffer, ever the manager of men, took care with
the structuring of his new association. JF was divided into two branches,
one headquartered in Lyon, which he himself took charge of, a second
based in Paris and directed by Flamand.25 Around each branch orbited
smaller satellite offices: regional delegations or so-called Maisons
Jeune France. Chancerel ran one such establishment in Toulouse. An
attempt was made to establish a branch office in French North Africa
under the leadership of Leenhardt. The North African section never
amounted to much, but Leenhardt proved a high-quality recruit. In
the 1930s he had been a regular at Mounier’s Esprit, though he was too
much the pacifist to follow the review’s anti-Munich line in 1938. It was
nonetheless via Mounier, who knew Schaeffer, that Leenhardt entered
Schaeffer’s gravitational pull, serving under him first at Vichy radio, as
we have seen, before moving on to JF.26 To cap off the entire JF opera-
tion, Schaeffer set up a twelve-man comité directeur, in effect a board of
trustees, composed in equal parts of artistic personalities and Vichy
officials of varying degrees of seniority. The body in fact played little
role in JF’s actual functioning, but its composition, at least in terms of
the six Vichy officials, gives a fair indication of where Schaeffer felt he
could or had to turn for protection: Lamirand; Garric; Louis Garonne
(an SGJ administrator); François Valentin (a Catholic youth militant
turned veterans administration official); the secrétaire-général des beaux-
arts Louis Hautecoeur; and the former neosocialist, soon to become
Vichy secrétaire-général à l’information, Paul Marion.27
It is hard to see what is uncertain in the Vichyism of all this. JF’s
center of gravity was anchored in a world of Catholic activism that at
one end shaded into a Mounier-style nonconformity and at the other

25 Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 19.

26 Leenhardt, Yeux ouverts, 107, 119; Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 20; Dallet,
Bibliographie commentée, 34.
27 Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 180. The six artists were Cortot, Copeau, the
playwrights Paul Claudel and Jean Giraudoux, the architect Auguste Perret, and Georges Desval-
lières, a founder of the Sacred Art movement.
694 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

into the more fascist militancy of a Jean de Fabrègues. These men were
no friends of liberal democracy, but quite the opposite. All the talk of
leadership, of the bond between a chef and his troop did not make them
fascists, but it did bespeak a deep yearning for a spiritual communion
intended to cleanse a nation rotted by individualism. Affixing a precise
political label to the men of JF is no easy matter, but this much can be
said: they were fellow travelers of an authoritarianism that spoke the
language of faith and nation; they looked to like-minded men in the
Pétainist regime for patronage; and they got it. As for the maréchal him-
self, he was to many in JF an object of veneration, above all to the core
group that had seen service at Vichy radio.
But it may be that JF, however Vichyite in origin, was less so in
practice. There is an element of truth in this claim, but not as much as
some JF veterans would like to believe.

Jeune France at Work

Schaeffer’s acolytes might have disagreed on certain points but not on
the sorry state of interwar French culture. It had fallen into decadence,
a victim of official neglect and, above all, of rampant commercialism.
Boulevard theater demoralized the stage. Public taste had degener-
ated, ruined by “the laxities of cinema and radio.” As for music, how
could one expect listeners, reared on a diet of May Milton and Tino
Rossi, to resonate to the healthy simplicities of a farandole or bourrée?
What France needed was “a powerful ear-rinsing,” a cultural house-
cleaning that would revitalize taste and prepare a new renaissance of
French civilization.28
But how was this to be achieved? Here differences cropped up in
JF ranks. Flamand’s branch looked to the regenerative power of indi-
vidual artistic creation. In May 1941 it sponsored an exhibition of paint-
ings at the Braun Gallery in Paris under the title Les Jeunes Peintres
de Tradition Française. The show was organized by Jean Bazaine, the
chief of JF’s plastic arts section in the northern zone. Bazaine selected
figurative work executed with a cubist-style abstraction. This was mod-
ern, avant-garde art, no doubt, but why then the insistence on “French
tradition” in the exhibition’s title?
The question admits of two answers that are not incompatible but
emphasize quite different aspects of the JF project. In the interwar

28 On theater, see CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Jeune France, “Réalisations et pro-
jets,” 1941, 1; on radio and cinema, see the JF brochure, Principes, directions, esprit (Lyon, 1941),
cited in Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 43; on music, see CERPS, carton Libération,
dossier Jeune France, “Animateurs de la Jeune France,” Aug. 1941, 8. See also Serge Added, Le
théâtre dans les années Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1992), 208.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 695

years, the Paris art scene had been dominated by the so-called Ecole de
Paris, a loose grouping of Montparnasse-based painters (Modigliani,
Soutine, and Zadkine among them) who were often of foreign or Jewish
extraction.29 Such painters were not represented in the Bazaine exhi-
bition. The Germans would not have allowed it to be sure, but would
JF, which by statute excluded foreigners and Jews from membership,30
have wanted it otherwise? The “Frenchness” of the exhibition may
have been enhanced by the presence of a number of artists of Catholic
background—not least Bazaine, but also Alfred Manessier and Lucien
Lautrec (both JF members themselves). The Catholic connection was
not just incidental, for it left an imprint on the work the artists did,
canvasses of a “primitivizing” and spiritual simplicity. The exhibition’s
modernism thus was a conservative one, French and Catholic in its
identity politics, “cubo-abstract” in its aesthetics.31 But the supposed
Frenchness of the Braun Gallery show was a marker in a second sense,
not just of an exclusionary rootedness but of a nationalism that was
meant as a provocation to the occupier: French art still lived, the Ger-
man presence notwithstanding. It is worth mentioning in this connec-
tion that the score of artists on display included at least one commu-
nist, Edouard Pignon.32
Set before the public work of challenging composition and rig-
orous spirituality: such was the Braun Gallery’s agenda, and it repre-
sented one way, as a JF document put it, of regenerating “a popular
taste . . . perverted by mercantile productions.”33 In Schaeffer’s south-
ern zone, however, a different set of strategies was pursued. Individual
artists might still have a preeminent role to play, but not in isolation
from the wider culture that nurtured them.
Along these lines, JF in collaboration with Mounier’s Esprit spon-
sored a colloquium, “Poésie et chanson,” which met at Lourmarin
in September 1941. The meeting brought together the young stars of
French poetry: Pierre Emmanuel, Loÿs Masson, Pierre Seghers. Leen-
hardt, one of the organizers, made a point of inviting Henri-Irénée
Marrou to participate. Marrou is best remembered as a groundbreak-
ing historian of late antiquity, but in this context what mattered was his
status as a music critic (he wrote for Esprit) with a profound passion for

29 Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven,
CT, 1995), chap. 6.
30 Michel Bergès, Vichy contre Mounier: Les non-conformistes face aux années 40 (Paris, 1997),
55–56.
31 On the exhibition, see Michèle C. Cone, French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art, before, dur-
ing, and after Vichy (Cambridge, 2001), 85–88.
32 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L’art de la défaite, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1993), 216–23.
33 CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Jeune France, “Réalisations et projets,” 1941, 6.
696 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

popular song. Marrou in fact went on to compile an “admirable miscel-

lany” of French chansons populaires published in 1944.34
The Marrou link is interesting on both aesthetic and political
grounds. Marrou’s volume, Le livre des chansons, argued the case that
French lettered culture across the ages had drawn its strength in
dynamic exchange with more plebeian currents. German folklorists
might vaunt the self-sufficient creativity of the Volk. Highbrow pundits,
like Thierry Maulnier, might argue the opposite, that it was the elite,
not the people, who were the wellsprings of national creativity. Both,
Marrou believed, were wrong. Yet in modern times, he lamented, that
vitalizing connection between high and low culture had been broken as
literate elites turned in on themselves and grew overrefined, and as the
humble, in vain pursuit of a self-improving embourgeoisement, for-
sook their cultural roots. The “unity” of French culture, however, might
yet be resurrected, and Marrou’s anthology was meant to contribute to
this end, restoring to the folk their musical birthright while awakening
the poets and songsters of the present day to the inspirational power
of popular song.35 This was the emergent perspective Marrou brought
to the Lourmarin gathering, deepening its commitment to cultural
community understood in part as the artistic fellowship of the poets
present but also as the imagined community of a national culture once
sundered but made whole again by artists in touch with vernacular tra-
ditions. The quest for wholeness in a community of culture: it might be
thought there was little of the political in such a project, but to Marrou
there was. His 1944 volume critiqued German völkisch-ness; it refused
the snobbery of Maulnier, a fascist intellectual close to Vichy. There
was, indeed, a Resistance impulse at work in such a double rejection,
an impulse Marrou did his best to make explicit in dedicating Le livre des
chansons to Jean-Marie Soutou, by then an active résistant (as was Mar-
rou himself ). There is even some evidence, slim to be sure, that such
attitudes were already stirring among the poets who gathered at the
Lourmarin colloquium in 1941. At the end of a day’s session, the poet
Max Pol-Fouchet later recollected, a number of participants (unidenti-
fied) descended into the streets to raise their voices in shouts of “Vive
de Gaulle.”36
Marrou did not like the word folklore, because it suggested some-
thing dead, and he wanted a tradition not so much preserved as
renewed. Schaeffer, however, did not shy away from the term. He was

34 Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 174; Leenhardt, Yeux ouverts, 123–24.

35 Henri Davenson [Henri-Irénée Marrou], Le livre des chansons (Neuchâtel, 1946 [orig.
1944]).
36 Michel Winock, “Esprit,” des intellectuels dans la cité (1930–1950) (Paris, 1996), 231.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 697

an unabashed partisan of traditional arts and crafts, of peasant dance

and French country music. His was not the Lourmarin style, however,
which sought to reconnect the lettered to a rooted Frenchness they
had forgotten. It was rather the activist’s, which reawakened through
hands-on work and animation. In both northern and southern zones
JF opened teaching workshops or maîtrises that apprenticed young aspi-
rants in the techniques of their chosen craft, from ceramics to the plas-
tic arts to theater. There was an artisanal dimension to the enterprise,
keeping alive and passing on the knowledge of master craftsmen to a
new generation, but it also had a scouting flavor. Maîtrises organized
campfires that mixed uplift—readings from Péguy and the Catholic
playwright Paul Claudel—with scout-style sing-alongs and folkloric
dancing.
The idea was to create a new culture, “a culture for the total man,”
that would shunt aside the moviegoing, newspaper-reading superficiali-
ties of the present day.37 Mounier in fact gave some serious thought to
JF curriculum development, and from the texts he deemed appropri-
ate for teaching purposes it is possible to discern the outlines of the
totalistic humanism he and his JF colleagues dreamed of. Mounier rec-
ommended biographical readings above all, proposing a list that began
with Roland and the crusading Saint Louis and ended with “Père de
Foucault, Péguy, [and] one or two colonizers.”38 The exemplary man
was a man of action: a hero who risked all in the service of France and
its Catholic faith. These lessons once learned, the graduates of JF teach-
ing were meant to bring them to the nation as a whole.
Performance, indeed, was very much at the heart of the JF project.
In 1940, under the auspices of Lamirand’s SGJ, a youth labor service
corps was set up, the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, run by an old scout,
General Paul de La Porte du Theil (seconded by Father Forestier, who
served as chaplain). JF turned more than once to the Chantiers for
assistance. It recruited several score Chantiers kids for a theater train-
ing course that culminated in a monthlong practicum with Hussenot’s
theatrical maîtrise headquartered at Uriage, also the site of a Vichy-
sponsored leadership school. Vichy, as might be expected, celebrated
the May-time fete of Jeanne d’Arc with great fanfare. For the first such
occasion, JF staged a series of productions across the south, including
a recitation by a chorus of JF-trained Chantiers youth. Some of this,

37 CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Jeune France, subdossier “Organisation des activités
culturelles générales à Jeune France,” rapport d’Emmanuel Mounier, 3. See also Chabrol, “Jeune
France—une expérience,” 96, 119.
38 CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Jeune France, subdossier “Organisation des activités
culturelles générales à Jeune France,” rapport d’Emmanuel Mounier, 11.
698 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

of course, was done to impress Lamirand himself. When the minister

spoke in the southern zone, he could count on JF to organize accom-
panying youth performances from folkloric dance on down.39
Schaeffer and company’s emphasis on performance extended
well beyond youth theatricals. It has been estimated that in 1941 JF
organized or funded up to half of all theater productions in France.
During its brief year-and-a-half existence, Schaeffer’s group involved
itself in a staggering 770 plays and performances of all kinds.40 Indeed,
what is remarkable is not just the extent but the variety of JF’s activi-
ties. Emile Ducroux asked Schaeffer for funding to set up a school of
mime in Paris; Schaeffer helped out and had reason to congratulate
himself in later years, for among Ducroux’s first students was a young
Marcel Marceau, who went on to elevate French mime to international
renown.41 JF was no less generous to itinerant theater. Clavé’s La Rou-
lotte was a beneficiary of such largesse, as was Jean Dasté’s La Saison
Nouvelle.42 On the whole, JF favored revivals, with a particular emphasis
on the classics from the ever accessible Molière to the “violent heroics”
of Lope de Vega.43 But there were original productions as well: Barbier
and Schaeffer’s ten-tableau celebration of the life of Jeanne d’Arc, Por-
tique pour une jeune fille de France (with music by Messiaen among others),
which played throughout the southern zone in May 1941. In July the
first French production of Claudel’s Jeanne au bûcher (an oratorio with
music by Arthur Honegger) premiered at the Lyon opera house under
JF auspices. And in August, Vilar’s adaptation of Hesiod’s Les travaux et
les jours opened at Melun, an event memorable for its opening proces-
sion, a cavalcade of rural folk sorted by métier, wearing the clothes and
shouldering the tools of their various trades.44 Thanks to JF’s particular
exertions, provincial theater flourished under the Occupation. But was
JF theater in consonance with the values of the National Revolution?
The answer to this question must be yes.
JF’s two most celebrated presentations—Barbier and Schaeffer’s
Portique and Claudel and Honegger’s Jeanne—dealt with a Vichy icon,
Jeanne d’Arc, and the treatment in both cases was worshipful and
patriotic. France had never seen anything like the Portique before. On
May 11, 1941, JF organized simultaneous stagings of the pageant across

39 CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Jeune France, “Animateurs de la Jeune France,” Aug.
1941, 11, 13; Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 92–93, 161–63.
40 Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 142; Chabrol, “Jeune France, ‘un maillon
manquant,’” 92.
41 Pierre Schaeffer, Les antennes de Jéricho (Paris, 1978), 274.
42 Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 144; Added, Théâtre dans les années Vichy, 207.
43 Lignac as quoted in Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 153.
44 Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 169; Added, Théâtre dans les années Vichy, 213.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 699

unoccupied France. The audiences were huge—twenty thousand in

Toulouse, twenty-five thousand in Marseille, thirty-five thousand in
Lyon—and the settings were appropriate to the crowds: a public square
in Toulouse (where Chancerel was in charge), a bicycle arena in Mar-
seille. These were France’s “first experiences with stadium theater,” or
at least that is how JF, in a bragging mood, characterized its efforts
in a government report.45 They were plein air extravaganzas played
out under the stars and, in the case of the Lyon production, under
the maréchal ’s stars, for to the tricolors decorating the local mise-en-
scène were pinned the seven étoiles of a maréchal de France. The regime’s
involvement in the productions was substantive as well as symbolic. The
army contributed logistical support, and additional performances were
organized for Chantiers de la Jeunesse audiences.46
Claudel’s Jeanne, unlike the Portique, was no pageant. It accented
less the spectacle of Jeanne’s life than her martyrdom, her agony at the
stake as she gave up a life consecrated to the unity of France. But in
other respects, Claudel’s effort bears some comparison to Schaeffer’s.
The Lyon presentation boasted a huge cast of several hundred, plus a
full orchestra. The show, after its July opening, then went on tour, and
the chosen venues were large outdoor locales like the Roman amphi-
theater at Arles or the arena, also Roman, at Nîmes (the show was also
presented at Vichy’s leadership school at Uriage). And as with the Por-
tique, the Vichy state lent a hand. Jeanne au bûcher was mounted in col-
laboration with the Commissariat à la Lutte contre le Chômage, which,
it seems, supplied a number of the cast members involved.47
These were not propaganda plays. No mention was made of con-
temporary events in either production. But both relied on the collabo-
ration of Vichy institutions. Both memorialized the life of a Catholic
maiden who sacrificed herself for the nation. And both—grand in scale,
staged out of doors in often antique settings—aspired to a theater of
mass communion that would bind and transform through spectacle.
This was just the sort of theater that the good scouts of Chancerel’s

45 CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Jeune France, subdossier “Réalisations de Jeune

France, compte-rendu,” n.d., 8. The Portique just beat out by a couple of months Jean-Louis Bar-
rault’s production of a double bill (Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women and André Obie’s Huit cent
mètres) at the Roland-Garros stadium in July. The Obie play, a dramatization of a celebrated race
from the 1924 Olympic Games, was a natural for Barrault, ever preoccupied with the expressive
possibilities of the body. The Vichy regime, a firm believer in the power of sport to reinvigorate
the nation, saw its own interest in Barrault’s venture and agreed to provide funding. See Added,
Théâtre dans les années Vichy, 83–84; Bradby, Modern French Drama, 24–25.
46 Added, Théâtre dans les années Vichy, 215; Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 166.
47 CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Jeune France, subdossier “Réalisations de Jeune
France, compte-rendu,” n.d., 9; Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 168–69; Bergès, Vichy
contre Mounier, 127.
700 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Comédiens-Routiers, so numerous in JF ranks, had aspired to; it was

also a theater that Vichy might well be pleased to claim as its own.
JF decried the corrosive effects of commercialism. France in the
1930s was living a crisis of civilization, but the defeat of 1940 and Vichy’s
advent opened a path to cultural redemption. French theater might
now hope to recapture its former grandeur, as Dasté put it, thanks to
“the national revolution that Maréchal Pétain has proclaimed to us.”48
Pétain’s revolution was worth the candle, provided it made possible a
cultural renaissance, and the men of JF set about with a passion to make
that new birth happen. There is much that was archaizing—folkloric,
artisanal, rusticating—in the projects they undertook. Old forms were
dusted off from chant to mime; theatrical classics were dredged up for
a fresh airing. The aim was not to return to a lost world, however, but
to make that world live again in the present, and in pursuit of this end
JF artists innovated with abandon. Stadium theater, cubist abstraction,
electronic music, all were experimented with, but within limits. The
new culture had to be truly French, anchored in national traditions,
and it had to connect. Connection, however, did not mean pandering.
The Braun Gallery exhibitors wanted to challenge the viewing public,
although it was less challenge than accessibility that most JF produc-
tions sought after. The object was to bring a culture of quality, of genu-
ine spiritual substance, to all classes, whether through the animating
efforts of maisons de la culture or the enchantment of spectacle. There
was a confessional, Catholic tonality to much of JF’s output, and indeed
the organization made its institutional home in the Catholic wing of
the Vichy regime. It was sponsored by Lamirand’s SGJ; it placed itself
under the protection of Catholic Action veterans in the administration
like Garric and Valentin; it collaborated with La Porte du Theil’s Chan-
tiers; it maintained a branch office at the Ecole des Cadres at Uriage,
which, like JF itself, was a haven for Mounier loyalists.
This is not to say that the fit between JF and Vichy was perfect. JF
was never collaborationist. The Braun Gallery show was intended not
just to inspirit a stultified public but to let the occupier know French
culture still existed. Nor was JF fascist, despite the occasional fascist,
like Fabrègues, in its ranks. Yet by the same token JF was no Resistance
hotbed. Seditious cries were heard at the Lourmarin colloquium. Clavé
had been involved in anti-German work from early on in the Occu-
pation, and so too had Soutou. But just as Fabrègues’s presence did
not make JF fascist, Clavé’s and Soutou’s did not make it résistant. JF
worked within the Vichy regime’s gravitational field. In the system of

48 Added, Théâtre dans les années Vichy, 233.

PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 701

faith-based bodies that circled the Pétainist sun, Schaeffer’s JF occu-

pied a middle orbit, closer in than Uriage’s but not so close as La Porte
du Theil’s Chantiers de la Jeunesse.

Finale and Aftermath

The Vichy regime shut down JF in March 1942. The organization’s fate
at first glance would seem to confirm claims of JF’s at least implicit
oppositionalism, but the evidence in fact points to a more compli-
cated conclusion. Vichy’s hardening line left less and less room for JF’s
religion-inflected experimentalism. It was not JF that changed so much
as the regime itself, which grew hostile where once it had been welcom-
ing. What is certain is that JF veterans scattered to the four winds, some
heading into communism, others into the Resistance, and others still
continuing to labor, although no longer with much gusto, from within
the Vichy apparatus. Yet JF’s formal demise did not mean the dissolu-
tion of its project of cultural renovation. JF graduates, now as individu-
als or in small groups, continued the artistic experiments of old; they
continued in Vichy’s waning years and on into the postwar. The result
was a creative burst that had a shaping impact across a range of media
from theater to radio to film. In some instances this creativity took a
formalist turn that kept the political at bay; but in others, the old pur-
suit of connection, of a living, national culture that brought together
French men and women from all walks of life, perdured, although now
with the original, confessional impetus mantled in a serve-the-people
leftism.
JF’s Vichy troubles began with the appointment of Pierre Pucheu
as the minister of the interior in the summer of 1941. Pucheu was a
hard-nosed type, a business executive and an ex-fascist militant. He
disdained the Boy Scoutish earnestness of Vichy’s Catholic wing; he
was a centralizer who wanted to roll the regime’s ramified youth appa-
ratus into a single, hierarchical whole; and he was an authoritarian
determined to batten down on wayward elements in the regime. Mou-
nier—a Catholic of refractory temperament with links to a variety of
Vichy-sponsored youth organizations—was a natural first target for
Pucheu’s persecutory zeal. Mounier was banned from Uriage in July
and drummed out of JF in the early fall. The minister then turned on
Schaeffer himself, who was warned in November about the sloppiness
of his books and his lack of ideological zeal.49 Schaeffer shot back with a

49 Unsigned letter from an unidentified Vichy official to Schaeffer, Nov. 29, 1941, cited in
Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 191–92.
702 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

letter to Pucheu, cosigned by Flamand, protesting JF’s heartfelt Pétain-

ism: “We defy anyone to find a single act, a single written document,
a single word from one of our animateurs that would justify casting the
least doubt on our faithfulness to the National Revolution.”50 Such pro-
testations, however, did not help. Schaeffer was fired the next January,
and JF itself did not long outlive his departure. The fate that befell JF
in due course overtook most of its institutional allies: Uriage was sup-
pressed in December 1942; Lamirand left the SGJ the following March.
The Chantiers alone survived the life of the regime. The Catholic pres-
ence at Vichy was never effaced, but it weakened over time, a victim of
growing hard-line influence in the Vichy administration’s senior ranks.
JF’s demise left its membership at loose ends. A number began to
reconsider past allegiances, and a saving remnant over time ended up
in the ranks of the Resistance.51 How did this come about, and to what
extent did a dawning Resistance commitment mean a repudiation of
past beliefs?
The first move of several JF old hands was to return to radio work.
In December 1941 the literary programmer at Vichy radio undertook
to freshen up the station’s cultural offerings. He canceled the fusty Au
service des lettres françaises and cast about for a format a little more inter-
esting. He turned to Claude Roy, who assembled a “literary team” that
included some familiar figures—Barbier, Leenhardt, Ollivier. These
were Radio-Jeunesse people now back on the air after the JF interlude.
They were not, however, such enthusiastic Pétainists as they once had
been. Roy’s radio crew concocted a series of programs evoking the life
and work of France’s great writers, enlivened by readings from the texts
of the artists themselves. These experiments in radiophonic biography
were spiced with dissident asides—invocations of out-of-favor writers,
criticisms of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (Vichy’s man at the Nouvelle revue
française)—or so Roy claimed in later years. What is certain is that he quit
the show in the spring of 1942, when Pierre Laval returned to power.52
Roy now pitched yet further away from the regime and, via the solicita-
tion of friends, wound up the following winter joining the Communist
Party. Roy’s stunning about-face, however, did not mean a total aban-
donment of former beliefs. Whether as an Action Française militant or
as a Communist Party member, he was repelled by what he called “this

50 CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Jeune France, subdossier Association “Jeune France,”
Activités, copy of a letter from Schaeffer to Minister of the Interior, Dec. 1, 1941, 4.
51 Jean-Pierre Azéma has coined the term vichysto-résistant to describe this peculiar trajec-
tory ( Jean Moulin: Le politique, le rebelle, le résistant [Paris, 2003], 451).
52 Roy, Moi, je, 391–92; Pierre Barbier, “Les nouvelles émissions littéraires de la radiodiffu-
sion nationale,” Cahiers d’histoire de la radiodiffusion, no. 34 (1992): 90–91; Leenhardt, Yeux ouverts,
134.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 703

abject world of almighty money.” And as a communist, Roy remained

no less staunch a nationalist than before. Indeed, Roy encountered in
party ranks a number of “former Maurrassian ‘nationalists’” like himself
who had embraced wartime communism as a saving creed that allowed
them “to breathe at last, free to be at one and the same time socialists
and ‘patriots.’” Roy’s memoirs cited a near half dozen examples, includ-
ing that of his former JF comrade in arms Maurice Blanchot.53
Schaeffer’s own story bears some resemblance to Roy’s, though
without the communist denouement. JF’s demise left Schaeffer at loose
ends. He spent much of 1942 in Marseille writing, but in the fall, ever
the radio man, he took charge of a Vichy-backed sound experimenta-
tion project in Beaune. The veteran theater director Jacques Copeau
(who was well known in the region) worked alongside Schaeffer as a
technical adviser. Together with a team of actors and engineers (includ-
ing JF old hands like Hussenot and Ollivier), Schaeffer and Copeau
explored the possibilities of voice reproduction, recording both indi-
vidual voices and choral groups including a recitation of Péguy’s
“Présentation de Notre-Dame de Beaune.” Radio officialdom got wind
of such efforts and took an interest. Such attentions translated into the
creation of an experimental studio in Paris, Rue de l’Université, with
Schaeffer himself named as director.54
Schaeffer’s Studio d’Essai is remembered on two accounts. First,
for its dissident activities: Schaeffer changed camps in 1943, casting his
lot with the Resistance. The precise timing of the turnabout is not clear.
In the late summer, Schaeffer made Studio d’Essai facilities available
to record readings by Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and Jean Tardieu—
Resistance poets all who had contributed to the clandestine Editions
de Minuit volume L’honneur des poètes, published the preceding July.55 At
about the same time, Jean Guignebert, the head of the radio industry’s
Resistance organ, the Comité de Libération de la Radio (CLR), made
contact with Schaeffer. Schaeffer may have joined the CLR then; it is
certain that he was an active member no later than January 1944.56 The

53 Roy, Moi, je, 193, 461–63. Blanchot, after leaving JF, went to work alongside Drieu at the
Nouvelle revue française, but Blanchot’s growing disillusionment with Vichy (which found eventual
expression in growing communist sympathies) made the relationship untenable. See Jeffrey Mehl-
man, “‘Pour Sainte-Beuve’: Maurice Blanchot, 19 March 1942,” in Genealogies of the Text: Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France (Cambridge, 1995), 174–94.
54 Pierret, Entretiens, 134–37; Christian Brochand, Histoire générale de la radio et de la télévision
en France, 3 vols. (Paris, 1994), 1:596–97; CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Notes pour la com-
mission d’épuration, Jan. 9, 1945, “Note pour M. le Président de la Commission d’épuration de la
radiodiffusion française,” 2.
55 Dallet, Bibliographie commentée, 36.
56 CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Programmes, “Activités de Pierre Schaeffer de 1940 à
1944,” 3; Dallet, Bibliographie commentée, 36.
704 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

dating of Schaeffer’s switch—sometime in the latter half of 1943—does

not provide many clues as to why it was made. The Allied invasion of
North Africa and the subsequent German occupation of the southern
zone had taken place in November 1942; the youth labor draft, the Ser-
vice du Travail Obligatoire, was imposed in February 1943, a humili-
ating sacrifice of young French workers to the voracious manpower
appetites of the Nazi war machine; and yet Schaeffer did not turn. Why
then, so late in the game, did he at last give up on Vichy? Schaeffer
wrote a wartime letter to Guignebert that hints at a possible motive.
He made a clean breast of his Vichy past; it was Guignebert’s right to
know. But Schaeffer was now with the Resistance, and so too was his
entire crew at the Studio d’Essai. They had no personal ambitions, just a
common commitment “to make the voice of the French nation, a view-
point of artistic quality and probity, resound to the four corners of the
earth.”57 The nation, quality, probity: these had always been Schaeffer’s
lodestones, and by mid-1943 it was no longer Vichy but the Resistance
that seemed to him their surest guarantor.
What this line of interpretation implies is that Schaeffer, even as
he changed camps, remained constant in his aesthetic choices, and this
is evident in his running of the Studio d’Essai. He was as always on the
lookout for a distinctive radio style, for speaking modes and program
genres suitable to the medium. In this connection, Schaeffer is cred-
ited with inventing the literary interview, the one-on-one intimate chat
between host and artist that went on to become a staple of cultural
programming in France and elsewhere. This is the Studio d’Essai’s sec-
ond claim to fame. And who was the first writer chosen to illustrate the
potential of the new format? An old JF favorite, Paul Claudel.58
But Schaeffer’s Studio d’Essai, important as it was, did not consti-
tute the sole or, in the end, even the most dynamic pole of attraction
for onetime JF acolytes. That accolade must go to Pierre-Aimé Tou-
chard’s Maison des Lettres and to its associational spin-off, Travail et
Culture (TEC). On the first Armistice Day after the defeat, November
11, 1940, student demonstrators protesting the Occupation clashed with
German forces on the Champs-Elysées. Vichy authorities, now anxious
about the political volatility of Paris’s substantial student population,
set up a network of youth centers, one for each of the university’s four
faculties. The Maison des Lettres, the best remembered of these bodies,

57 CERPS, carton Libération, dossier Notes pour la Commission d’épuration, “Note pour
M. Marc,” June 1, 1944, 4.
58 Jean-Noël Jeanneney, ed., L’écho du siècle: Dictionnaire historique de la radio et de la télévision en
France (Paris, 1999), 100.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 705

was founded in 1941 under the direction of Touchard, a longtime col-

laborator at Mounier’s Esprit. The organization busied itself managing
a range of student services including a ciné-club run by André Bazin that
became a gathering place for Latin Quarter film buffs, among them the
young Alain Resnais. Bazin, like Touchard, was a Mounier disciple.59
The year 1943 proved a turning point for the Maison des Lettres.
In the spring, Touchard began to bring in a new crowd, many of them
colleagues from Esprit: Clavé, Delarue, Jean-Marie Serreau, Edmond
Humeau. The first three, it will be noted, were JF men (as was Leen-
hardt, whom Bazin invited in 1943 to lecture on film). A number were
also active in the Resistance: Clavé, soon to be deported, Serreau,
and Humeau, an employee at the Commissariat à la Lutte contre le
Chômage who, from December 1942 on, had begun a double life as
a Resistance operative. This is not to say that the Maison des Lettres
became at a stroke a Resistance stronghold, but it was a “democratic
space,” a venue for clandestine plottings, whether cultural or political
in nature.60
In September 1944, just weeks after the Liberation, such plottings
hatched an altogether new organism, TEC. Touchard was named TEC’s
president, but its animating spirit was Delarue. In the present context,
three points bear making about TEC’s orientation and activities. The
organization was at pains to demonstrate its Resistance bona fides. No
sooner had Clavé returned from the camps than he was named TEC’s
honorary president.61 Clavé’s presence is at the same time a reminder
of TEC’s JF lineage. The organization was directed by a JF alumnus,
and its senior membership included a number of personalities once
active in JF ranks: Flamand, Serreau, and the actor and theater director
Jean-Louis Barrault.62 Such filiations left an imprint on the way TEC
went about its business. The association set itself the task of bringing
French culture, a culture of quality, to the people through animation
and hands-on instruction. To this end, TEC assembled a quite remark-
able teaching corps: Bazin for film, Lautrec for the arts, Marceau for
mime. Serreau and the theater director Charles Dullin organized a pro-
gram they described as “culture through dramatic initiation.” Barrault,
long a believer in the pedagogical possibilities of improvisational act-
ing, launched a school providing “education through dramatic play.”

59 Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York, 1978), 49–60; Gaillard-Risler, André Clavé, 106.
60 Gaillard-Risler, André Clavé, 106; Roger Leenhardt, Chroniques du cinéma (Paris, 1986),
156.
61 Gaillard-Risler, André Clavé, 159.
62 Ibid., 157; Andrew, André Bazin, 85–86; Benigno Cacérès, Histoire de l’éducation populaire
(Paris, 1964), 154.
706 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

This was not schooling as usual, de haut en bas, but interactive instruc-
tion that inspired through participation and exchange. The dynamic
experimentalism of TEC’s program and the prevailing spirit of demo-
cratic camaraderie were very much of the Resistance moment. TEC had
a progressive sheen that was buffed by growing communist involvement
in the organization.63 As the Cold War took hold, such involvement
metamorphosed into quasi control, tight enough, it seems, to prompt
at least one Mounier disciple, Bazin, to quit altogether (though not
before he had gotten a job there for a young acolyte of his own, Fran-
çois Truffaut). TEC’s communist finale, however, ought not obscure its
less leftist, more spiritual origins, its debt in personnel and practice to
Mounier’s Esprit and to Schaeffer’s JF.
By war’s end, Roy, Schaeffer, and the entire TEC crowd all had com-
mitted themselves against Pétain. The Resistance or near-Resistance cre-
dentials they earned in consequence enabled them to survive the Lib-
eration, whatever they might have done in Vichy’s early years. Indeed,
JF alumni did not just survive but prospered in the new postwar order.
Lesur became an inspector of music; Lignac wound up as the press
secretary to Charles de Gaulle; Ollivier, back in radio at the Liberation
and then recycled through Gaullist politics, rose to become a program
director at state radio; and Soutou, the most eminent of all, entered the
diplomatic corps, achieving the rank of ambassador. Yet it was more as
creators than movers and shakers that Schaeffer’s former cohorts made
their mark, and they did so across a broad range of media.
For a brief moment at the Liberation, Schaeffer found himself sec-
ond in command at national radio. In 1945, however, he was called up
before a purge commission to account for his wartime conduct, and
not long thereafter, still on the state-radio payroll, he departed for the
United States en mission. As for Schaeffer’s Studio d’Essai, it experienced
a momentary shutdown but was then revived as the Club d’Essai in 1946
under the direction of the Resistance poet Tardieu. The club, true to its
experimentalist origins, played a critical role in disseminating Ameri-
can jazz to French audiences. And Tardieu, true to Schaeffer, called the
latter back to the Club d’Essai in 1949 to start up a sound research labo-
ratory. Schaeffer worked with found sounds—recordings of door creaks
and cats’ meows—to assemble what he called a musique concrète. This was
meant to be a human music, not machine-generated but resonant of
actual aural experience, yet it was supposed to be avant-garde, rejecting
conventions that placed a premium on performance and, as Schaeffer

63 Cacérès, Histoire, 155; Pascale Goetschel, Renouveau et décentralisation du théâtre (1945–

1981) (Paris, 2004), 76; Pascal Ory, L’aventure culturelle française, 1945–1989 (Paris, 1989), 55.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 707

put it, the canonical “DoReMi” of Western tonality.64 Schaeffer’s lab

matured into a groupe de recherches de musique concrète, equipped with its
own training studio that welcomed eager-to-learn newcomers. Among
the first was a Messiaen student, Pierre Boulez, at the beginning of a
career that would establish him as France’s most celebrated musical
personality of the postwar era.
Just before Schaeffer left France in 1945, he had occasion to call
on an old JF comrade to help out with the rebuilding of state radio.
The friend he turned to was Roger Leenhardt, who was then invited to
put together a program of his own devising, something new that would
engage listeners in a recovering nation. Leenhardt, in turn, enlisted
Claude Roy and Nicole Védrès, both big talkers, and the trio went on to
launch a movie-review show, Le tribunal des ondes, which featured spirited
exchanges on the most recent releases.65 It is more as a movie man than
a talk-show host, however, that Leenhardt is best remembered, and his
contributions in this domain were several. He was a pioneer critic who
went beyond the standard plot summary and character analysis to write
a new kind of criticism dedicated to parsing what Leenhardt called the
“grammar” of filmmaking. Yet Leenhardt’s formalism was coupled with
a keen sensitivity to the national contexts in which movies were made.
He admired American genre cinema—the western, the gangster flick—
because it had a genuine connection to American life. It was a living
realism Leenhardt looked for in pictures, and that is why he was so
partial to Marcel Pagnol’s Provençal comedies: they lacked technical
perfection, but they had “deep roots in the land,” a genuine “authen-
ticity.”66 Leenhardt, though, was more than just a critic. He was a film-
maker himself, a specialist in short subjects (he even organized a short-
subject film festival) whose commitment to the form was an inspiration
to aspiring cineasts like Chris Marker, a member of the Esprit circle
who hung out at TEC working as Bazin’s assistant. But Leenhardt also
made the occasional foray into feature-length film. His first effort in
this domain, Les dernières vacances (1948), tells the coming-of-age story
of two cousins, a boy and a girl, who spend a summer together at a
family-owned country house that is soon to be sold. The intimacy and
simplicity of the tale, the consistency of style (Leenhardt both wrote

64 Schaeffer interview with Tim Hodgkinson, silvertone.princeton.edu/paul/music242/

shaefferinterview.html (accessed Mar. 9, 2007).
65 Schaeffer invited Leenhardt to join state radio, but it was Guignebert, then state radio
director, who gave Leenhardt the leeway to create his own show (Leenhardt, Chroniques du cinéma,
111).
66 See, e.g., Leenhardt’s review “Continuité du cinéma français,” America, Cahiers France–
Amérique latine, Dec. 1945, rpt. in Leenhardt, Chroniques du cinéma, 133–36.
708 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

and directed the movie), gave the film an immediacy that spoke to the
heart of at least one audience member, Louis Malle, who, legend has it,
determined then and there to become a filmmaker himself.67 In Leen-
hardt’s orbit circled a constellation of younger talents—Bazin, Marker,
Resnais, Malle. The first three went on to become founders of New
Wave cinema; Malle’s connection to the enterprise was more distant.
But members of the New Wave or not, all had central parts to play in
the renovation of French cinema in the postwar era.
It was not just French cinema that got an overhaul in the post-
war but French theater as well, and here too JF men had a hand. Since
the 1920s theater reformers had inveighed against the dominance of
the Parisian stage, above all its boulevard incarnation, which purveyed
unedifying dramas of sex and adultery to a public of jaded bourgeois.
Critics, Copeau foremost among them, dreamed of rousing provincial
audiences with less artificial fare, with a theater of communion that
would connect to uncorrupted tastes. Under Vichy, no one had done
more than JF to reawaken the provincial stage, and the effort did not
end with the war. Jeanne Laurent, a junior official in the arts adminis-
tration at the Liberation (she had served in the post throughout the
Vichy years), made the cause of la décentralisation théâtrale her own. She
got help from the former TEC chief turned inspecteur-général des spec-
tacles, Touchard, as well as from an adviser in the theater business, Ray-
mond Cogniat, a onetime JF member.68 Building on local initiatives,
Laurent’s team went on to assist in the creation of five state-funded
provincial companies: the Centre Dramatique de l’Est, the Comédie
de Saint-Etienne, the Grenier de Toulouse, the Centre Dramatique de
l’Ouest, and the Centre Dramatique du Sud-Est. Clavé was the animat-
ing force at the first, Dasté at the second. Chancerel, while the director
of JF’s maison de la culture in Toulouse, had established amicable rela-
tions with the troupe that went on to become the Grenier company.69
The theater edifice Laurent worked so hard to erect was capped by the
Théâtre National Populaire (TNP). The TNP was not a regional theater
but one based in Paris, and yet in modus operandi it was not so differ-
ent from its provincial cousins, directed as it was from 1951 on by Jean
Vilar. Vilar enjoyed a reputation second to none as a man of the pro-
vincial stage, not so much for the work he had done in wartime under
JF auspices as for the demiurgic dynamism he brought to bear on cre-

67 Chabrol, “Jeune France—une expérience,” 255; Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais, arpen-
teur de l’imaginaire: De Hiroshima à Melo (Paris, 1980), 46; Pierre Billard, Louis Malle, le rebelle solitaire
(Paris, 2003), 76–78.
68 Goetschel, Renouveau, 59 and n.
69 Ibid., 76.
PIERRE SCHAEFFER AND JEUNE FRANCE 709

ating the Avignon theater festival, inaugurated in 1947 and still going
today.70
Postwar regional theater, and the TNP as well, for that mat-
ter, wrapped itself in the communitarian rhetoric of the Liberation
moment. This was a theater that spoke to the people, supplying a cul-
tural good essential to the nation’s spiritual reconstruction. In a formu-
lation made famous by Vilar, it was “a service public. Just like gas, water,
electricity.”71 Conservative critics did not much care for the leftist ring
to such talk; Vilar and company, as they saw it, dealt in ideology more
than theater, in Brecht more than artistic creation. Brecht’s plays did
break onto the French scene in the 1950s, via the exertions, in fact, of
the JF veteran Serreau, but on the regional stage, Brecht was a rarity
until late in the decade.72 Early on, the preference went to the classics,
to the inevitable Molière first and foremost. Clavé’s repertoire—which
ran from Shaw’s Saint Joan, through an adaptation of Graham Greene’s
The Power and the Glory, to Claudel’s L’otage—revealed his own taste for
a theater of “strong spiritual content.” The JF past, with its Claudelian
obsessions, was receding, but its erasure would take time.73
JF lasted less than two years, but it cast a long shadow over postwar
culture in France. The organization was Pétainist at its origins, even
if its Pétainism wore thin over time. The connection is consequential,
though, for it suggests that Vichy’s cultural project, however folkloric
and backward-looking in important respects, had an experimentalist
dimension as well. It is this innovating impulse that lived on after the
war, playing itself out in radio, cinema, theater, and music, inspiring
a younger generation of creators to carry forward its anticommercial
redemptive purpose. In this sense JF was not just a discrete phenome-
non, an avatar of the Vichy moment, but a pivot that connected the
nonconformist aspirations of the 1930s to the experimentalist realiza-
tions of the postwar. It has long been acknowledged that the economic
and administrative reforms of the Liberation era owed much to Vichy
antecedents.74 The same line of argument has purchase in the cultural
domain, as the example of JF attests.

70 On Vilar, see Emmanuelle Loyer, Le théâtre citoyen de Jean Vilar: Une utopie d’après-guerre
(Paris, 1997).
71 The declaration dates from 1953. It is reproduced in Jean Vilar, Le théâtre, service public
(Paris, 1986), 173.
72 Pascale Goetschel, “Politique culturelle et décentralisation théâtrale sous la quatrième
République,” Historiens et géographes, no. 358 (1997): 219.
73 Gaillard-Risler, André Clavé, 215.
74 Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York, 1972);
Richard Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1981).