Anthropology: What A Piece Of Work Is Man

Lintel inscription at the Musee de l'Homme, Paris (Palais de Chaillot):

Within these walls, dedicated to marvels,

I receive and protect the the works

Of the artist's extraordinary hand,

Equal and rival of his thoughts;

One is nothing without the other.

The Museum of Man (Musee de l'Homme), a division of the French National Museum of Natural History, is of relatively recent creation, having been founded in connection with the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. The foundation took place under the leadership of Paul Rivet, and the new museum inherited much of the collection of the - often financially troubled - Musee d'Ethnographie whose home at the Trocadero Palace had been demolished in 1935.

The contents of the museum are not the main point of interest here, however. More relevant is the fact that Rivet, outside his academic work, had been active in antifascist politics and had been a founder of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, set up in 1934 in response to right wing political violence (1), and many of his staff seem to have been of a similar bent. This would condition their remarkable response to the German invasion of 1940. Rivet, nevertheless, would survive the war; others would not.

Paul Rivet

Initially, French popular resistance to the Nazi invaders was feeble. Not only was the decrepit collaborationist regime of Marshal Petain allowed to exist at Vichy, preserving a pretence of the continuance of a French state, but one of the potentially most potent forces of resistance was silent. The Communists, many of whom had fighting experience from service in the Spanish Civil war just a couple of years previously, stayed aloof from the fight against Nazism under instruction from Moscow, and would not enter the fray until the Germans abrogated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by launching Operation Barbarossa.

But there was resistance, and one of the earliest groups to organise was to be found amongst the anthropologists and linguists of the Musee de l'Homme. Rivet, the director, hung a copy of Kipling's If from the front door as a cryptic protest against the armistice in June 1940, before he was relieved of his duties by the Vichy apparatus for publishing open letters berating Petain. Amongst the staff, a resistance operation was set up in response to Charles de Gaulle's famous radio broadcast from London.

Boris Vilde

The cell was founded by Boris Vilde, an ethnologist of Russian extraction, Anatole Lewitzky, the head of the comparative technology department, and librarian Yvonne Oddon. The group expanded with the addition of various other staff members including the ethnologist Germaine Tillion and her mother, Emilie, art historian Agnes Humbert, and the artist and Breton ethnologist, Rene-Yves Creston. To disguise their activities they set up a dummy literary group, Les Amis d'Alain-Fournier, supposedly dedicated to the author of Le Grand Meaulnes, who had been killed in the First World War before he could produce any other work.

Yvonne Oddon used the library service to pass messages for the group, while Germaine Tillion became the group's contact with Colonel Paul Hauet, chairman of the National Union of Colonial Soldiers, who had used his contacts to set up an "underground railway" to the unoccupied zone and North Africa, and also to spy on German movements. This connection allowed the group to assist Allied airmen and other fugitives, but Boris Vilde was frustrated in his attempts to establish useful links with Great Britain. The group also published five issues of a clandestine newspaper called simply Resistance, the last produced by Agnes Humbert after most of the group had already been arrested.

Operating without external assistance and at a time before the Communists deigned to join in the struggle, the Museum of Man group were one of the first meaningful organised resistance groups, but they were eventually penetrated by an agent of the Sicherheitsdienst, Albert Gaveau, who had gained Vilde's confidence. They were also compromised by the activities of Jacques Desoubrie, an agent of the Geheime Feldpolizei who had attached himself to the circle of Charles Dutheil de la Rochere, an associate of Hauet. In the early part of 1941, the group was largely rolled up and many of its members paid the price for their activities. Vilde and Lewitzky were amongst the many who were executed, while Oddon and the Tillions were shipped off to Ravensbruck concentration camp; the younger women survived, but Emilie Tillion died en route.

 Germaine Tillion

Agnes Humbert was sent to work in a rayon factory in Krefeld, where the appalling conditions resulted in death and severe illness for many workers, but she too survived to write one of the first memoirs of the resistance, Notre Guerre, though her health was permanently affected (2).

 

Agnes Humbert

The artist, Creston, managed to evade direct implication and was eventually released after calling in some favours from other Breton nationalists who had chosen to collaborate with the Germans. He later supplied information to the British which was helpful in the preparation of Operation Chariot, in which the obsolete destroyer HMS Campbelltown was sacrificed to blow up the dock gates at Saint Nazaire, Creston's home town.

Rene-Yves Creston (3)

The Museum's erstwhile director, Paul Rivet, went on the run from the Gestapo and managed to flee to Colombia, where under the sponsorship of President Santos he founded an Anthropological Institute; on his return to France, he sat as a socialist deputy from 1945-51.

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The resistants of the Musee de l'Homme attracted my attention initially because of the apparent incogruity of these academics and librarians setting up one of the first organised groups in France. But resistance to tyranny can come from any direction, sometimes from people who one would normally not think of as allies.  La Rochere, Colonel Hauet's friend mentioned in passing above, was an ultra-conservative Catholic monarchist, and Creston was a Breton nationalist. Whilst many of the museum crew were clearly left-leaning, they were not, however, operating under the instructions of the Communist Party. If they had been, they would have done nothing, because the Communists at that time were ostentatiously neutral, wretchedly subservient to the realpolitik of the Soviet Union.

Take from that what you will.

Notes
(1) The history of fascist violence in pre-war France is fascinating for, if nothing else, the light it throws on the founder of L'Oreal, Eugene Schueller. For this and other cosmetics wierdness, see this article by Malcolm Gladwell.
(2) As the BBC article in the link makes clear, Humbert was a remarkable woman, who organised soup kitchens for German civilians after coming out of the death factory at Krefeld, and made a point in her book of showing the German officer who oversaw her trial as a fair and decent man, whilst also taking part in "Nazi hunts" and denazification procedures in post-surrender Germany.
(3) For an artist/designer, Creston seems to have been a bit camera shy - that tiny picture of him cuddling his dogs is the only one I have found.

EDIT:Music link retired 2/1/2013