He also met another student, Henri Roser, whose militant pacifist and internationalist ideas shook French Protestant society of that time.
The same year he took charge of the editing of “Cahiers de la Réconciliation » (at the time a simple information bulletin which would be taken over and developed by Henri Roser from November 1927 on).
[1] In 1927, he took part in an "international reconciliation youth camp" in Vaumarcus, Switzerland, studied one semester in Berlin in 1929, where he got in touch with German pacifist Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze.
[3] In spite of his pacifist convictions, Jacques Martin performed military service in 1927-1928 - out of care for his father who had just been shaken by the loss of two sons.
[1] In the summer of 1934, the young couple was expecting its first child when a new call-in letter arrived for a new follow-up military training, which he again refused to attend.
His defence counsel was solicitor and socialist MP André Philip, who called upon leading intellectuals like Jean Guéhenno or Marc Sangnier and upon representatives of the French Human Rights League.
As early as 1928, Martin had temporarily given up on his career in church ministry because of the staunch opposition of institutional protestantism towards his pacifist and anti-militaristic positions.
In 1938, still unable to become a pastor, he accepted a position of administrative and human resources director in a silk stockings manufacturing plant in Ganges, Hérault.
In both of these meetings, Jacques Martin shared a very well-informed and accurate documentation which allowed pastors to prepare themselves for resistance to the anti-Semitic policy of the Vichy regime.
- Jewish Christian Friendships) whose first president was catholic theologian Henri-Irénée Marrou, while Jacques Martin was both the first vice-president and the AJC bulletin's editor.
While continuing with its commitments with the CIMADE, A.J.C., and Social Christians, Jacques Martin still didn't apply to become a pastor although the institutional opposition had then faded away.
Finally he felt the need to "bind the sheaf" and was ordained on 9 January 1966 by the French Reformed Church (after a last hesitation from the institution, as the candidate is already 60!)
Is our own so-called Christian civilisation not bearing more witness of a deeper and more serious rejection and blasphemy than the shouts of a versatile crowd or the calculations of a sanhedrin lost in its clericalism and its pride? ».
[7] With their two pastoral meeting held in Ganges, Jacques Martin and Elie Gounelle prepared their colleagues to exert solidarity towards the persecuted Jews.
A long preparation phase, a reflection were needed first, often in opposition with certain Protestant theological concepts, where Judaism was regarded as a mere preamble to Christianity, whereas there was a real spiritual problem, alongside a humanitarian situation from 1942 onwards ».
[8] For these meetings, Jacques Martin had gathered very significant documentation, first on the events on the ground which he had ample information about through the Cimade network and through other pastors operating on the ground like Henri Manen, then on the Vichy anti-Semitic laws through articles found in the Swiss Protestant Press and in internal French Protestant churches texts, like the Pomeyrol theses.