Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The Armistice of 22 June 1940 achieved the cessation of hostilities between German and French forces, but divided France into occupied and unoccupied zones and inaugurated four years of control by both the German Occupation and the newly formed Vichy Regime. These forces swiftly enacted new principles that reshaped the state’s many musical institutions. At the Conservatoire National de Paris, France’s most prominent performing arts educational establishment, German Occupiers confiscated valuable instruments, Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws removed Jewish professors and students, collaborative events commandeered facilities, and the Service Obligatoire du Travail appropriated students to work in German factories. These demands extended beyond Paris to unsettle music education institutions across France, where they were met with varying degrees of cooperation or hostility. Provincial conservatoires, overseen for decades by the Ministre des Beaux-Arts to ensure unified national standards, created fraught intersections between state and local politics, even during peacetimes. Under Vichy and the Occupation, geographical distance, constraints on travel and communication, local political leanings, and distress over the future of the institutions generated new conflicts. Building geographically outward from existing scholarship, archival research illuminates the wartime histories of provincial conservatoires that complicates and adds new dimension to scholarship otherwise devoted to Paris. Operating under the premise that isolating factors created unique situations, this paper examines the effects of the Nazi occupation and Vichy government on provincial conservatoires from the 22 June 1940 Armistice through the 25 August 1944 liberation on the Conservatoire National in the highly contested city of the resistance, Lyon.