Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

A central conflict in the book is between violent and nonviolent resistance to an evil or destructive force. Associated with that conflict is the distinction between positive and negative ethics. Negative ethics require abstaining from doing harm, one example of which is the Ten Commandments, which prohibit certain harm-causing actions. Positive ethics go further and require action to prevent harm: The book mentions the Good Samaritan passage in the Bible as an example. Both sides of the resistance were trying to practice positive ethics and prevent great harm. However, only Le Chambon’s nonviolent actions successfully combined both ethics. This success was largely the result of Trocmé’s personal adherence to nonviolence, which arose from the death of his mother, his meeting of Kindler during World War I, and his interpretation of the Bible.

When Trocmé was arrested, his parishioners rallied around him. In addition to giving him affection and gifts, they gave him spiritual support, asking what harm or evil he’d done to justify his arrest:

The French word mal means both ‘evil’ and ‘harm,’ and the rhetorical question meant: ‘We know that the laws of Vichy and the Nazis have been broken by you and by us, but we have done no evil because we have done no harm to our fellowman; in fact, we have tried to help those whom the law was designed to hurt’ (22).