What do the Holocaust, a global brand of bottled water, and the just-signed Iran-US peace deal have in common? The once-small town of Evian-les-Bains, located on the shores of Lake Geneva in France, has been the stage for all three. It hosted the Evian Conference of 1938, in which 32 nations participated, but only two — the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica — agreed to take in Jews who were being forcibly evicted from Nazi Germany by Adolf Hitler. The US refused to increase its quota of Jewish immigrants from 10,000 to 30,000, and the few other Western countries present also declined to increase their intake.
Evian was a small hamlet until the 1790s. (wikipedia)
Evian was a small hamlet until the 1790s. Blessed with many natural springs and surrounded by Alpine forests and mountains, the town became a refuge for an aristocrat fleeing Auvergne and the French Revolution. Count Jean-Charles de Laizer stayed in Evian from June 1790 to September 1792 at the home of his friend Gabriel Cachat and drank the local water every day. Within three months, he noticed that the pain caused by his kidney stones had disappeared. Tests followed, and the water was declared beneficial for the treatment of kidney and bladder problems. In 1809, a company was created to commercialise the “magical” water, and the town quickly developed into a luxurious spa destination for the wealthy and famous. By the beginning of the 20th century, Evian-les-Bains had acquired a global reputation for salubrity, and the Hotel Royal (venue for G7 2026) in particular had become the preferred residence of figures such as the Indian ruler Jagatjit Singh, the Francophile Maharaja of Kapurthala, King George V of the UK, King Fuad I of Egypt, and Aga Khan III.
The Evian Conference, 1938
After the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Jews were stripped of German citizenship and systematically hounded out of Germany and German-occupied Austria. They were left stateless, much like the Rohingya in present times. Globally, Jews faced both overt and subtle hostility in a world still shaped by pre-modern religious and racial prejudices. Colonial Britain’s power was on the wane and, desperate to hold on to it, the British looked away even as Nazism flourished, as did the Soviets. The US, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was leading a country recovering from the Great Depression and widespread unemployment and likewise ignored the signs of the impending Holocaust. The nine-day conference, though organised at Roosevelt’s initiative, was marked by his own absence, with the US represented instead by his businessman friend Myron C. Taylor.
Golda Meir, who would later become Prime Minister of Israel in 1969 (and remains Israel’s only woman prime minister to date), was allowed to attend as a representative of British Mandatory Palestine , but only as an observer with no right to speak at the conference. Besides domestic concerns and racial prejudices, what led to the astounding failure of the conference to devise a plan to provide refuge to about 500,000 Jews was the lack of cohesion and unity among various Jewish factions. Taylor’s journal entry provides an insight: “the expectation that the Jewish organisations would present a stable immigration plan was unfulfilled when they proved unable to agree among themselves”. In the end, only the dictator Rafael Trujillo, keen to introduce a white element into the racial stock of the Dominican Republic, provided 11,000 hectares of land for Jews to settle. Of the roughly 800 who accepted the offer, only a small number remained, with most eventually moving on to the US.
The Evian Accords, 1962: France and Algeria
Algeria, across the Balearic Sea, was a French colony between 1830 and 1962. The Muslim majority in Algeria was subjected to a discriminatory system, the Code de l’Indigénat, which required them to carry permits at all times and was denounced for coercing them to relinquish their Islamic beliefs. The Algerian population fought for France during World War II. Once the war ended, the Algerian national movement demanded freedom, much like movements in other colonies, including India.
However, under pressure from the large French settler community in Algeria — the Pieds-Noirs — the French government refused to relinquish control over Algeria. This led to the outbreak of armed guerrilla warfare by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) on November 1, 1954, a day now known as Toussaint Rouge (Red All Saints’ Day). By 1958, the war had helped bring down the Fourth Republic and caused widespread damage to France’s civil and military infrastructure, both in metropolitan France and in Algiers. Conditions were changing, and French public opinion was increasingly favouring a peaceful solution. In 1959, Charles de Gaulle returned as head of the Fifth Republic and paved the way for a negotiated settlement. This landmark conference was held at Evian in 1962 and concluded successfully with the Evian Accords, which ended the war and formalised Algeria’s status as an independent nation.
Between the failed conference of 1938, which effectively abandoned Jews to their fate in Nazi Germany, and the recently concluded US-Iran peace deal, which has brought a sigh of relief through the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, Evian — the bottled water brand — has also evolved. It was acquired by the French multinational Danone in 1967 and has since claimed a pre-eminent position in the global bottled water market. It remains among the most prestigious brands in its category, dating back to the time when the Maharaja of Kapurthala imported truckloads of Evian water to his kingdom. Ronald Hoden writes in Forbes: “…they’re selling more Evian than they can bottle. No, the water won’t dry up—they’re using at most 10 percent of what’s in the rocks. But they literally ran out of bottling capacity”.
(HistoriCity is a column by author Valay Singh that narrates the story of a city that is in the news, by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal.)
