Call of June 18: the Museum of Man enters resistance

The Musée de l'Homme, located in the Palais de Chaillot, opposite the Eiffel Tower, was completely renovated and redesigned in 2015. REUTERS / Jacky Naegelen

Text by: Sébastien Jédor Follow

Among the very first resistance networks to respond to the call of June 18, 1940, that of the Musée de l'Homme, in Paris. It is based on the anti-racist ideals which presided over the opening of the museum three years earlier, in 1937, and its influence will be considerable.

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Escapes of prisoners, intelligence and propaganda ... The network of the Musée de l'Homme is one of the first underground resistance organizations in France. Founded by a librarian, Yvonne Oddon, and two ethnologists of Russian origin, Boris Vildé and Anatole Lewitsky, it had a hundred members in October 1940. A commitment in line with that of the founder of the museum, Paul Rivet, who will have to go into exile in Colombia to escape the Gestapo.

"  Resistance to the Musée de l'Homme is part of a certain logic since anthropologists, ethnologists of the time, from the 1930s, with Paul Rivet, the director of the Musée de l'Homme at their head, published a review which was called "Races and racism", were obviously in the promotion of equality between men, recalls André Delpuech, the director of the Musée de l'Homme. And Paul Rivet had seen for himself what was going on there, in Germany, with the rise of the Nazi regime. So quite logically, by their intellectual approach, the anthropologists of the museum, from the summer of 1940, positioned themselves against the German invasion and against the Vichy regime. This is how the Resistance network was structured in the early hours of the German occupation.  "

The managers of the Musée de l'Homme network were arrested on denunciation in early 1941: seven men were shot a year later, and three women were deported. Today, anti-racism remains one of the cardinal values ​​of this militant museum. A tribute will be paid to the resistance fighters in an exhibition at the end of the year.

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