#vichy

The French fighter Dewoitine D.520 is on display at an exhibition dedicated to aviation week in Vichy. April 1942.

Love the desk, Jacques Adnet, not quite clear on the context of designing modernist steel furniture in nazi-occupied France.

[few minutes later update: Adnet's French wikipedia page says he stayed to make sure the war would not extinguish the beacon of French design genius that lights the world. Does not say who the clients were for custom furniture in 1940.]

Adrien Sée(1880-1942).

Unfortunately, I was not able to find any photographs of his wife

Warning: mention of violent suicide and Auschwitz

This is, sadly, a true and tragic story. Adrien Sée was born in Colmar on 10 July 1880. About ten years later, he and his family settled in Nancy. He first obtained a degree in literature, then in law. He earned a doctorate in law, devoting his thesis to the subject of the passport. He then entered the judiciary, serving first as a deputy judge in Chartres in 1904 and 1905, and a few years later, in 1911, he was appointed deputy public prosecutor in Beauvais.

When the First World War began, Sée was assigned to military justice as an auxiliary and served as rapporteur to the War Council of a division. “I saw him again in Verdun in 1916: he was overseeing German prisoner-of-war camps; then in Wiesbaden in 1918, where he had attained the rank of officer,” recounts Grenier — now director of the École de Rome and former professor at the Collège de France — who had known him in Nancy before becoming his brother-in-law.

After the armistice, Sée served as public prosecutor successively in Vitry-le-François, Pontoise, Rambouillet, and then in Paris in 1925. When Georges Lefebvre met him, he was serving as Attorney General at the Court of Appeal in Orléans, where he had been appointed in 1935. He was removed from his post in 1940 because of his Jewish origin. The lawyers of Orléans, out of deep respect, visited him and offered to admit him to their bar — an honourable gesture which he accepted. But it was in Orléans that he and his wife were arrested, on 22 or 23 September 1942.

Lefebvre described him with these words: “Adrien Sée had joined the Société des Études Robespierristes, and we had formed a relationship whose warmth makes the atrocity of his disappearance all the more painful. Conscientious and diligent, he was at the same time benevolent, kind, and smiling.” Indeed, although he was not a professional historian, he was deeply interested in the French Revolution and had studied under Aulard.

Thanks to him, we possess a publication containing extracts from the judicial dossier of the revolutionary Jean-Nicolas Pache as you can read here Le procès Pache (extraits du dossier) : Pache, Jean Nicolas, 1746-1823, défendeur : Téléchargement gratuit, emprunt et streaming : Internet Archive. This essential work was used by several later authors, including Pierquin, in composing biographies of this long-forgotten revolutionary. The most important and reliable modern study is undoubtedly that of Aurélien Larné, who produced substantial research on Pache’s years as mayor (a work I have been unable to acquire, as it is too expensive).

Adrien Sée also reconstructed, in about twenty pages, the lives of an almost forgotten revolutionary couple who were well known in their own time: Xavier and Sylvie Audouin (Pache’s son-in-law and daughter). His text, Les Malheurs de Sylvie et les prisons de Xavier Audouin, recounts their revolutionary activities, their ordeal during the White Terror, and Xavier Audouin’s life under the Consulate and the Empire. Thanks to his work, many of their joint acts, as well as letters addressed to well-known figures (including one from Xavier Audouin to Lucien Bonaparte), have been located. He did, however, emphasize Sylvie Audouin primarily as a loyal wife and daughter, without highlighting her political positions, such as her signature supporting the trial and execution of Louis XVI.

His biographical sketch of Xavier Audouin omits certain key facts: for example, that Audouin played a role in one of the major measures of the period, the judicial reform as he said : “We propose to relieve the Revolutionary Tribunal of the procedures that stifle conscience and prevent conviction; secondly, to add a law enabling jurors to declare themselves sufficiently informed. Only then will traitors be unmasked, and terror will prevail.”

It also seems clear that the Audouin couple had no children until at least 1795, and thus no elder daughter unlike Sée said . Moreover, Sée fell into the “black legend” surrounding Robespierre (at least in 1910 — perhaps he corrected this later, given his membership in the Société des Études Robespierristes). For a more accurate understanding of the causes of the Pache family’s arrests, Michel Eude’s work is more reliable. Nevertheless, Sée did valuable research and, without him, I would never have been able to write so many posts about the Pache family.

He also wrote a study of the Chevalier de Bouffiers, published as a small volume in 1930.

Madame Sée was no less accomplished. Lefebvre writes of her: “Madame Sée, a native of Nancy and a student at the Faculty of Letters, possessed a lively and active intelligence. She, too, was interested in history and published, around 1930, an important volume on women’s fashion during the Empire and the Restoration.”

It was this couple whom Nazism and the Vichy regime sent to their deaths — deported and murdered at Auschwitz. They might still have contributed so much to the world, as so many victims might have. Had they not been deported, they would surely have continued to write. Instead, they are gone. Worst of all, it seems their relatives never learned the truth of their deaths, only rumours. As Sée’s brother-in-law recounted: “They were last seen in Compiègne, on the 28th, on a train bound for Germany. Since then, we have heard nothing. It is more than likely that they were killed upon arrival. I heard it said that my sister-in-law threw herself from the train taking her to Germany, but I could not discover the source of this information, which seems highly doubtful. All hope of ever seeing them again must obviously be abandoned.”

May the Sée couple rest in peace. Like so many other victims, they could have contributed even more positive things to society if it weren't for the people who sent them to their deaths to appease the ideologies of Vichy and Nazism. We thank them forever for their writings, which have helped many history enthusiasts and scholars alike. Without them, I myself would never have been able to gather so much information about the couple Audouin and to share them with you. I wish to find the book of madame Sée.

Here is the tribute from Lefebvre and Gustave Laurent: