50 French people beatified at Notre-Dame de Paris

It is the story of a national trauma. The Compulsory Labor Service (STO) was set up by the French state on February 16, 1943: all able-bodied young men from classes 1920, 1921 and 1922 were requisitioned to go to work in Germany.

Two of them, beatified on December 13 among 48 others, illustrate this brutal uprooting. Jean Lépicier, pastry chef in Angers, in Maine-et-Loire, received his requisition order on March 23, 1943. He was engaged, involved in his parish and in the Christian Workers’ Youth (JOC). In the Franciscan convent of Carrières-sous-Poissy, in Yvelines, André Boucher has been Brother Xavier, since his religious vows taken three years previously. He was studying to become a priest when he was called to the STO in April. What to decide?

Agree to leave, hide, take up arms? The pressure from the French administration is real. Refusal of the STO is accompanied by fines and a prison sentence. Sometimes people threaten to take a member of their family instead of the refractory party.

And escaping the STO is not easy either: hiding, obtaining false papers, requires knowing mutual aid networks which will develop because of the shock caused by this massive requisition. For those who would like to join the armed resistance, the maquis are far from the number and the degree of structure that they would have in 1944.

600,000 young men

In the month preceding his departure, Jean Lépicier participated in a spiritual retreat with his comrades from the JOC, concerned like him by the STO. They think about the decision to make. Because the Church of France is divided, explains Raphaël Spina, historian. Unlike other episcopates, the French bishops do not arrive at a clear and unanimous condemnation of the STO, entangled in a culture of hierarchical authority, a more or less strong loyalty to Marshal Pétain, apoliticism or fear of Bolshevism.

The measure is extremely unpopular. The STO tears nearly 600,000 young men from their families. On the farms, there is a shortage of hands; in the cities, production slowed and tensions against Vichy increased. On their return, many are met with a heavy silence. Neither resistance fighters, nor prisoners of war, nor deportees, they do not fit into any recognized category. Some will be greeted with suspicion. This lack of status contributed to making STO a national trauma that was poorly digested for a long time, about which families spoke little.

On September 14, 1943, André Boucher and other brothers from his convent left by train for Cologne. They will be assigned to handling in the station. Jean Lépicier will end up in the same city, in a machine tool factory. Housed in barracks near their workplace, they rub shoulders with Russian and Polish forced laborers, sometimes women with children.

Practitioners to the end

A letter from André Boucher to his loved ones tells them that he and his brothers in misfortune are preparing a Christmas for “the Russian children in the camp”. The French prisoners receive a meager pension, benefit from their Sunday, two weeks off and can request leave. They live under the threat of Allied bombing.

In November 1943, Jean Lépicier wrote: “I got to know the jocistes of Cologne where there is a trained section but we don’t talk about it because it’s forbidden. They told me that there was a mass every Sunday at 10:30 a.m. for the French. » These vigils, masses or study circles, organized by these young French Catholics supported by a few priests, prisoners of war or those who came clandestinely to Germany, worried the Nazi regime. In December 1943, they were banned. Those who continued this “Catholic action” were arrested: this was the case of André and Jean on July 13, 1944. They were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp (Germany). The first died there on March 15, 1945; the second, on the 20th. This fidelity to their apostolate, discreet but tenacious, earned them recognition as “martyrs of the apostolate”.

Our collective memory of the STO remains complicated, summarizes Raphaël Spina. “No one, after 1945, could understand how we could have left without being forced by force, but as a result of state, social, psychological pressure. » Neither a prisoner of war nor a deportee, how can we qualify the former STO recruits? A memorial and legal battle led in 2008 to their recognition by the State as “victims of forced labor in Nazi Germany”. This beatification gives faces to a collective ordeal that France has not finished exploring.