Political Battlefields in French Musical Education: Provincial Conservatories under the Nazi Occupation and Vichy Regime

The Armistice of 22 June 1940 terminated hostilities between German and French forces, but inaugurated four years of government by the newly formed Vichy Regime and German Occupation. These forces swiftly reshaped nearly all aspects of French daily life, including the state’s many musical institutions, including the uniquely extensive and influential French conservatoire system. By the time of the Armistice, the Conservatoire de Paris had expanded to include forty-two conservatoires and écoles de musique. These schools created an often-fraught relationship between state and municipal leadership. Tension compounded under Vichy and the Occupation as wartime constraints and political policy generated new conflicts. While publications in the past two decades have paid much attention to the Conservatoire de Paris and other institutions in the capital city, provincial institutions have yet to enjoy the same scholarly attention. This research presents the wartime history of the École de Bayonne, Conservatoire d’Orléans, and Conservatoire de Lille from the occupied zone and the École d’Avignon, Conservatoire de Toulouse, and Conservatoire de Lyon from the initially unoccupied zone, from the signing of the Armistice the liberation in August of 1944, drawing comparisons on the basis of student enrollment and expulsion, faculty and administrative retention or dismissal, classes conducted, and documentation of oversight and instances of repression. An additional examination regarding the 1942 move to total occupation and revelation to many of the Vichy Regime’s participation in the Holocaust provides further comparison. Archival documents from both the state and municipal level reveal a high degree of variance between these provincial institutions and the situation in Paris. Indeed, while institutions within the same zone faced the same authority and oversight, they often exhibited different reactions and responses. This supports a theory that the provincial conservatoires and écoles de musique displayed allegiance to municipal and local political leanings, which provides rationale for their compliance, discontent, or outright defiance in the face of harsh regulations. The resulting study expands and adds new dimension to Vichy-era institutional studies of cultural institutions.PhDMusic: MusicologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155200/1/jhgrimm_1.pd