1943, Lübeck prison

This song’s famous source melody, Ce n’est qu’un au revoir (also known under the titles Chant des adieux and Choral des adieux), is itself an adaptation of the traditional Scottish tune Auld Lang Syne composed by Robert Burns in 1788. Sung in every language represented at the World Scout Jamboree – an international gathering of Scouts held every four years since the summer of 1920 – the song has been widely circulated internationally. It has been adapted into French many times; the French lyrics became standardized around 1920 using a text by Father Jacques Sevin, who was very involved in the Scout movement. He was also the one who gave the song religious overtones not present in the Scottish version.

The sources presented here documenting the French version show the Scout movement’s influence on the song’s dissemination during the interwar period. The score comes from a Scout leader songbook, and the recording is a performance by the Alauda Choir – a Scout choir conducted by Gustave Daumas – in an arrangement by Carlo Boller. The popularity of Ce n’est qu’un au revoir carried through the Second World War, largely due to the Vichy government’s establishment, in 1940, of a Youth Secretariat and a Youth Movements Office, with the aim of “rebuilding the nation.” The appointment of former Scout leaders to senior leadership roles within these government bodies and movements contributed to Scout choral repertoire being passed on to the Vichy youth movements.

Many accounts from Nazi camp survivors highlight the song’s widespread circulation among prisoners. It is said to have been most often sung at the fateful moment of deportation from France toward unknown destinations, sometimes leading the authors themselves to bitter reflections in hindsight when reminded of this memory, as seen in journalist and Resistance fighter Marcel Conversy’s Quinze mois à Buchenwald [Fifteen months at Buchenwald]: “Yes, we’ll meet again my brothers, / It’s only goodbye for now. This statement reeks of awful doubt, of the words of comfort spoken to the dying. No, my brothers, my friends, my companions, for many of us, it is a final farewell to life that we have just sung.” Beyond the version transcribed by Oddon, there is at least one other known case of this song being transformed by French prisoners: Penbreuil known as Le Barbu (bearded one) and Ohion known as Le Facteur (mailman) made up a song to the tune of Chant des adieux in January 1942 at the Fort de Villeneuve-Saint-Georges (Val-de-Marne), “in memory of our fellow sufferers, imprisoned at La Santé who, with each departure for the fortresses of Germany, sang Ce n’est qu’un au revoir.”

Like Penbreuil and Ohion, Oddon and her companions used this melody to create a new song looking to the future, thus standing out significantly from the more common prison versions of this well-known song. Although most prisoners sang Ce n’est qu’un au revoir nostalgically while saying their goodbyes to France, the group around Yvonne Oddon rewrote the lyrics while at Lübeck: in a passionate goodbye to the German prison, the new song carries a message of hope for freedom. It also imagines harsh justice against “our worst [political] enemies” (Hitler, Laval, and Mussolini) and “the cowards, instigators, and traitors to the country” as a reward for the Resistance fighters’ tireless struggle. In fact, Chant du départ notated by Oddon got its title from the famous song of the French Revolution by Marie-Joseph Chénier and Étienne-Nicholas Méhul, which the Resistance fighters sang frequently (the title of Béatrix de Toulouse-Lautrec’s account, La Victoire en pleurant – Triumph While Crying – is an example of a twist on the song’s opening lines “Triumph while singing”). The original formula “my brothers” in Ce n’est qu’un au revoir having been systematically replaced by “my sisters,” Chant du départ comes across both as a song of resistance and of feminism, by emphasizing the need for brotherhood – or rather sisterhood (i.e. kinship) – in order to triumph. As a sign of the importance of these values, the first four lines of the song (which reference victory, kinship, and the freedom to come) are repeated verbatim at the end of the song.

[Sources: references 3, 13, 30, 34, 44, 52, 55, 61, 67, 70, 120 in the bibliography]

Comparative transcription