The Knight-Monks of Vichy France

After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, the Vichy regime set up a school in an Alpine chateau at Uriage to train a new elite leadership. This tightly knit, quasi-religious community, the Ecole Nationale des Cadres, saw itself as the linchpin of a spiritual revolution that would restore the Catholic Church's prestige, neutralize the poison of permissive liberalism and usher in a ``new Middle Ages,'' a communitarian, hierarchical France. Among the school's ``knight-monks'' or alumni and their close associates were many influential figures such as Hubert Beuve-Mery, founder of the newspaper Le Monde. In a dense, provoctive study, McGill University history professor Hellman strips away the image of Uriage as an idealistic academy, exposing its authoritarian, intolerant, anti-liberal, anti-democratic and racialist policies and agenda. Photos. (May)