- Le moine, le prêtre et le général. Les frères Lalande ou le dépassement de soi
At the beginning of June 1940, a seriously wounded French army officer, Captain André Lalande, was carried aboard the last transport ship leaving Narvik in northern Norway, where Allied troops had engaged the Wehrmacht since April. Now the German invasion of France itself demanded the evacuation [End Page 168] of the expeditionary force and the redeployment of those soldiers still able to fight. Lalande would not participate in the ensuing French debacle, but both of his brothers would survive the defeat only to be taken prisoner by the Germans. These two brothers, imprisoned in the Reich until 1945, were not themselves professional military men like André. Bernard was a Catholic priest, and Jacques was a Benedictine monk.
Jean-Pierre Guérend, an intimate of one of the Lalande brothers, offers the "trois portraits croisées" (p. 152) of a monk, a priest, and a general to illustrate how three devout French Catholics helped shape the postwar world. According to Guérend, the parents of the Lalande brothers instilled in their three sons (who also had five sisters) a common Catholic faith and call to service. In different ways, the author insists, each brother found his vocation in a form of self-sacrifice. Guérend introduces Antoine Lalande, their father, as both friend and follower of Marc Sangnier, the founder of the early-twentieth-century Christian democratic Sillon movement and a fellow native of the Corrèze. Their mother, the former Marie-Thérèse Gaume, numbered a Jesuit and three nuns among her siblings. Apparently, she did not desire a monastic, priestly, or military vocation for her sons.
Maternal wishes aside, Bernard entered the seminary at Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1928; Jacques (the eldest) presented himself at the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Maurice de Clervaux in Luxembourg in 1929, and André (the youngest) won acceptance to Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, in 1931. While his brothers pursued a wartime apostolate in the Stalag, André recovered from his 1940 wounds and fought alongside the Free French at the 1941 desert battle of Bir Hakeim. As a colonel, he became a prisoner of the Viet Minh after the 1954 surrender at Dien Bien Phu and subsequently played an uncomfortable role in the counterinsurgency in Algeria. This youngest of the Lalande brothers finished his career as President Charles de Gaulle's chief military adviser between 1967 and 1969.
The contemplative Jacques's life did not unfold in total isolation from the world. After the war, he helped transform the Clervaux monastery into an international meeting place for youth connected with the burgeoning Pax Christi movement. He also took temporary leave of his Benedictine brothers to study psychology in his native land and serve as a chaplain to delinquent youths. Bernard, a recipient of the Legion of Honor like André, played a more lasting and significant role in the Catholic peace movement, assuming a leading role in Pax Christi and serving as personal secretary to two successive postwar archbishops of Paris, Cardinals Emmanuel Célestin Suhard and Maurice Feltin. He also participated as a theological expert at the Second Vatican Council, publishing an acclaimed commentary on Pope John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in terris. In the autumn of his career in the 1970s, he relocated to Rome to devote himself to his work on the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. [End Page 169]
The author worked closely with Bernard in Pax Christi; of the three brothers, this one receives the most revealing portrayal, showing how he contended at various times with both the reticence of his clerical superiors and the radical temptations of the international peace movement. Guérend's depiction of Bernard and his brothers is more one of warm admiration than critical, scholarly detachment, although it makes abundant use of family...