Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International

The Collège Cévenol was founded in 1938 by local Protestant activists and pacifists, and had been shaped from its beginnings by the area's long-standing traditions of resistance to political and religious oppression.

From the beginning, the Collège promoted education linked to principles of nonviolence and the development of mutual understanding and solidarity in a socially and ethnically diverse society.

The school's founders were also key organizers of the now-famous community effort, in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, to shelter and save Jewish refugees during the Second World War.

During its early years, from 1938 to 1971, the school was entirely private, and was associated with the Protestant Reformed Church of France, although it welcomed students regardless of their religious or non-religious orientation.

It was organized as an “établissement privé sous contrat d'association” (a private school associated by contract with the state), a category of French schools that are privately managed, but bound to the national system by contracts which provide basic funding and teacher's salaries, and require adherence to national curricula and other standards.

On February 9, 2014, President Andre Gast announced that the College would be closing its doors at the end of the school year, faced with mounting financial difficulties and declining enrollment.

The peasant fighters called “Camisards” who struggled against the French crown were also known as “Cévenols” after the rugged, mountainous terrain that facilitated the small group's ability to resist the much larger forces arrayed against them.

In May 1938, at a regional synod of the French église réformée (the Reformed Church of France, historically the primary Protestant council in France), pastor André Trocmé, then assigned to the Protestant church in Le Chambon, proposed the creation of a new secondary school.

On its first day, the school had four teachers and 18 students, and met in a room in the Protestant “Temple” or church of Le Chambon.

Because of its relatively remote and protected location in Le Chambon, and because it was founded by the same pastors who became the leaders of local efforts to save refugees from Nazi occupation forces and the French Vichy regime that collaborated with them, the Cévenol school played an integral role in the now-famous efforts of the local citizenry in hiding and protecting several thousand Jewish refugees, including many children, throughout the war.

By the late 1930s, Le Chambon had become the site of several “pensions” or boarding-houses that lodged children drawn from refugee camps in the south of France for victims of the Spanish Civil War.

During the course of the war, Le Chambon's remote location made it attractive for other children from more war-torn areas of France as well, and the student body (including Jewish children being hidden in Le Chambon) grew rapidly, from 40 students in 1939 to 150 in 1940, 250 in 1941, 300 in 1942, and 350 to the end of the war.

In this situation, André and Magda Trocmé, along with Edouard and Mildred Theis served as both teachers at the Cévenol school and leaders of the town's collective effort to protect the refugees.

In recognition of their courage and leadership, they, along with Roland Leenhardt (a future director of the school who was then a pastor in the neighboring village of Tence) and the people of Le Chambon, were later honored as “Righteous among the Nations” (sometimes translated as “Righteous Gentiles”), a secular award given by the State of Israel to distinguish non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis.

The American Association helped raise funds (from the Quaker American Friends Service Committee, among others) and organized work-camps at which the school's teachers and students, along with other volunteers, passed the summers living in large tents while they built the present school with their own hands, from clearing roads and digging trenches for pipes, to building a classroom building, dormitories, and fields for sports.

The “Batisco” or Batiment Scolaire (the main classroom building used today) was opened in 1953; the science labs in 1957; and a new, relatively comfortable girl's dormitory (Milflor) in 1959.

The school was open in both a material and an educational sense: it had no walls or gates, and students were encouraged and expected to govern themselves to a significant extent.

The school's pacifist and activist origins, its summer work-camps, remote location, and somewhat spartan living conditions for boarding students, encouraged a situation in which teachers and students lived, ate, and worked together in the same modest setting, relatively isolated from the aggressively consumerist and mediatic culture of the early Cold War.

Through the 1960s, students and teachers together developed a community that, within the limits imposed by the school's Protestant orientation, emphasized tolerance and independence vis-à-vis dominant ways of thinking.

Notable teachers during this early period included the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the writer and nonviolence activist Lanza del Vasto, one of the principal western followers of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Notable students from the early years include Alexander Grothendieck, one of the key mathematicians of the twentieth century and a dedicated anti-war activist who had escaped the camps as a child refugee in Le Chambon during the war, and Delphine Seyrig, an actress and activist now remembered for her roles in a series of important films in the 1960s and 1970s.

Primarily because it has never charged high tuition and has never aimed to become an exclusive school for the wealthy, the Collège Cévenol has never been financially independent and relies on state funding to survive.

Since that time, the school has gradually improved its funding and seeks to renew its unique history and culture in the conditions of the 21st century.

It continued to play a role in the local hosting and relief of refugees from conflicts in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

An Association des Anciens du Collège Cévenol (AACC) now provides organization for meetings and fundraising among alumni in France and Europe, beginning with a 70th Anniversary weekend held in Chambon in May 2009.

The work camps were three-week summer sessions organized for high school and college-age students who experienced the atmosphere of Le Chambon and the Collège during the very pleasant summer season in the mountains, worked at community service projects and basic maintenance or repair tasks at the school, and improved their French-language skills.

Draper, Allison Stark Pastor Andre Trocme: Spiritual Leader Le Chambon (Holocaust Biographies), Rosen Pub Group; 1st edition (September 2001) Flaud, Annik & Gérard Bollon, préface de Simone Veil.

Lecomte, Fracois and Trocme, Jacques, I Will Never Be Fourteen Years Old: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon & My Second Life, Beach Lloyd Publishers, LLC; first edition (July 1, 2009) McIntyre, Michael.

Ruelle, Karen Gray and Desaix, Deborah Durland Hidden on the Mountain: Stories of Children Sheltered from the Nazis in Le Chambon Holiday House; First Edition (February 1, 2007) Sauvage, Pierre, with Magda Trocmé, Philip Hallie, Hans Solomon, Hanne Liebmann, Rudy Appel.

Rose (Foreword) Syracuse University Press, March 15, 2012 Fiction, memoir, and young adult books Boegner, Philippe.