By Maxime Nuts
Published on
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Toulouse, at 139, route d’Albi. Every day, teachers and students of the Raymond-Naves high school walk past the commemorative plaque attached to the entrance of the establishment in tribute to this resistant from Toulouse.
But who among them really know the journey of this brilliant scholar, left-wing republican and committed humanist, died in the Auschwitz camp ? After several years of research, Pierre Petremann, former history and geography teacher of the said high school, has just published Raymond Naves.
A humanist in resistance (Loubatières editions), the first work devoted to this man “whose life was carried by his commitment to teaching and the fight for freedom “. Like his model Jean Jaurès, this associate professor of the Faculty of Letters (specialist in the Age of Enlightenment and Voltaire), sees knowledge as an essential factor of human emancipation.
He thus directs the Toulouse branch of the college of labor, a popular education organization created by the CGT, installed at the Labor Exchange. Trade unionist, he remains nonetheless socialist. But he does not hesitate to criticize certain orientations of his party such as the policy of non-intervention in Spain.
Of the, he gets closer to anti-fascist circles and befriends the bookseller Silvio Trentin, the local figurehead and François Verdier, the future leader of the Toulouse Resistance.
From the Socialist Action Committee to the Secret Army
But when in September 1939 he received his order to mobilize, the rigorous intellectual disappeared behind the reserve lieutenant, lucid and determined to protect his country.
The speed of the defeat and the spirit of surrender affected him deeply and led him to an inevitable resistance commitment. In the spring of 1941, he contributed to Vive la Liberté, a small student magazine with a few hundred copies. in which he refuses to endorse the policy of Vichy and his associates, like his former comrade trade unionist Ludovic Zoretti, who went to the National Popular Rally of Marcel Déat.
The same year, Eugène Thomas, a former deputy from the North, who took refuge with his family in Saint-Martory, in the Comminges, recruited him on behalf of the Socialist Action Committee (CAS), a small organization whose goal is to recreate a resilient SFIO, on the instructions of Léon Blum.
His sense of organization and his ability to convince and unite lead him to take regional leadership, as well as his military group. France in combat (later integrated into the Secret Army, later melted into the FFI) and the Brutus intelligence network, linked to London.
With these various responsibilities, he is led to be appointed head of the municipal delegation responsible for leading Toulouse at the Liberation. But on the morning of February 24, 1944, he was arrested by two Gestapo agents to be taken to Saint-Michel prison before being transferred to Compiègne then to Auschwitz.
Mathieu Arnal
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