FIRST, THE PURGE
Paris’s hundred shades of soot and grime suited its spirit and matched its troubled spirit. Unlike London or New York, Paris had faltered, it had sinned. In 1944 the monuments and buildings of Paris may have been riddled with bullet holes, but its physical scars were insignificant in comparison with London’s open wounds, where whole neighborhoods had been wiped from the map during the Blitz. Paris had been spared because France had capitulated, yet the pain ran deeper for the cowards than for the brave. Paris owed its untouched beauty to mental defeat; in 1944 Paris was in ruins, in many more ways than one. And so was everyone who had run away or stayed without fighting. Not to mention those who had collaborated with the enemy.
In early August 1944, a thousand collaborators had fled France, including the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline1 and the editor Jean Luchaire, Simone Signoret’s former boss, and they were now all living in Sigmaringen Castle, standing by the Danube river 150 miles west of Munich, waiting for the apocalypse. Others naively thought that they could just hide and bide their time until the people’s wrath had abated. On September 14, the anti-Semitic writer Robert Brasillach was finally found hidden in his mother’s attic and arrested for “conspiring with the enemy.” The Communists wanted his head and he knew it. The Communists were the most ardent advocates for revenge, a sentiment they instilled into their readers, day after day, with inflammatory editorials. Of the thirteen newspapers now authorized to be printed, they represented almost half of the national press with, among others, L’Humanité, Libération, Ce Soir, and Le Front National. In this way they managed to work the people up to an incandescent rage. The actress Arletty was kept under house arrest following her love affair with a “Fritz” and was allowed out just to reshoot a few scenes of Les enfants du paradis. Her neighbor at the Ritz, Coco Chanel, now sixty and in a relationship with Hans Günther von Dincklage, was also arrested but was released a few hours later. Churchill was a friend from the time when Coco had been the Duke of Westminster’s mistress, and there was speculation that he had intervened. As soon as she was released, Coco and her German beau packed and left for Switzerland. They would not set foot in France for the next eight years.
There were dilemmas. What to do with the grande dame of literature, Colette? At seventy-one, she was among the many tricky cases the French conscience would have to deal with. Colette had been writing for collaborationist publications such as La Gerbe and Le Petit Parisien while hiding her young Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket, in her flat. She probably wrote for collaborationist newspapers in order to have friends in the right places should she need their help to free friends in danger. Luckily for Jean Cocteau, the Communists considered him a member of a persecuted minority because he was a homosexual. His mingling with Nazi officers at high-society events was forgotten.
The purge (or épuration, as it was known in France) became a murky affair, and the discrepancy in punishments opened up a national debate on the nature of revenge and justice. Never more public than among writers and journalists, the debate tore friends apart. On September 9, 1944, the first issue of the Communist-leaning Les Lettres françaises printed on its front page a manifesto signed by more than fifty French writers, among them Paul Valéry, François Mauriac, Paul Éluard, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, André Malraux, Jean Paulhan, and Raymond Queneau. “Let us remain united in victory and freedom as we were in sorrow and oppression. Let us remain united for the resurrection of France and the fair punishment of the imposters and traitors…”—except nobody agreed on what represented fair punishment. Camus, at first, sided with the Communists, demanding a ruthless purge, while others such as Mauriac and Paulhan asked their colleagues to “forgive and forget.”
Apart from those few who had joined the Resistance early and actually risked their lives—those noblest were the most forgiving—the majority of French intellectuals and the population at large were of two minds about collaborators. The more passive they had been during the Occupation, the more revengeful they proved toward alleged collabos. The personal shame they felt at their inaction made them all the more aggressive. The Occupation had been a laboratory of moral ambiguity as in no other period in France’s contemporary history. The coexistence, for four long years, of heroism, passivity, cowardice, and duplicity is, three-quarters of a century later, something France is still trying to come to terms with.
Sartre tried to explain the phenomenon to his British friends in a short essay written in the autumn of 1944.
Somebody who was asked what he had done during the Terror in 1793 replied: “I lived…” It is an answer we could all give today. The same daily and ordinary necessities made us all share the same space. We bumped into the German occupants everywhere, on the streets, and in the métro where we literally rubbed shoulders. Of course, we kept our resentment and our hatred for them intact but those feelings had become somehow abstract. With time, an indescribable and shameful solidarity had emerged between Parisians and those foreign troops. A solidarity that wasn’t in any way sympathy, but rather a biological habituation.2
In other words, the enemy had become too familiar to really become an object of hate. Besides, by sustaining even the minimum economic activity in the country, everyone was contributing to serve the enemy. A subtle venom poisoned every enterprise. Every choice was bad and yet one had to make decisions. Downing tools and ceasing all activity was not an option, or the whole country would have perished. “The enemy were like leeches, sucking our blood; we lived in symbiosis.”3
And what to say of those who had left France in 1940? Had it been nobler to leave or to stay? To leave at once and join de Gaulle in London was one thing, as Sartre’s schoolmate the philosopher Raymond Aron did; but to flee to New York like André Breton and many other non-Jewish Surrealists? Those who stayed never quite forgave those who left, though the reunion between old friends was very moving at first.
Raymond Aron came back from London and fell into Simone de Beauvoir’s arms at the Café de Flore. He had joined de Gaulle in London from the very beginning in 1940. In the evening, at the terrace of the Rhumerie, boulevard Saint-Germain, Aron would tell Beauvoir and Sartre about their life under the Blitz. Beauvoir discovered “historical events that were ours but that we hadn’t really known about. Our joie de vivre was tempered by the shame of having survived.”4
“A country that fails its purge is about to fail its renovation,” warned Albert Camus in an editorial. On learning that the thirty-five-year-old anti-Semitic writer Robert Brasillach had been sentenced to death, Camus felt deeply disturbed. Although leading figures of the daily press and radio had been executed, no other creative writer had been sentenced to death. Camus signed a letter along with Paul Valéry, Jean Paulhan, Cocteau, Vlaminck, and Colette in which they asked de Gaulle to pardon the writer. However, even de Gaulle had to yield to the Communists’ demands occasionally. They had asked for five thousand collaborators’ heads, as a fair retribution for their sacrifice, and they would get Brasillach’s. For many people in France the Communists had the moral high ground, as they had paid with their blood in greater quantity than the Catholics, the Socialists, and the Gaullists—or so went the legend they had successfully built. They had branded themselves “the Party of the 75,000 Shot,”5 a gross exaggeration6 but one that would not be challenged by historians until decades later. On February 6, 1945, Robert Brasillach faced a firing squad of twelve men without flinching, a red scarf around his neck and a picture of his mother in his inside pocket. To the young soldiers who were about to shoot him he said “Courage!” and then, as the first bullet hit him in the chest, he managed to shout “Vive la France!”
Simone de Beauvoir had attended Brasillach’s trial and, unlike her friend Camus, had not signed the petition asking for his pardon. She had too many friends who had been denounced by collaborators like Brasillach and who had not yet returned from Germany. She did not possess the force or the heart to forgive. In his writing, throughout the war, Brasillach had called for people to be shot and killed. Did not he deserve the punishment he not only wished on others but also efficiently encouraged?7 For Simone, Brasillach was the hangman, not the victim. Sentencing him to death was not inhuman, but just. Reflecting on this particular case in his memoirs, de Gaulle considered that Brasillach’s talent had been an aggravating factor. Talent enhances one’s responsibility.
PHILOSOPHER REPORTERS
Encouraged by Sartre, Beauvoir decided to quit teaching once and for all. At the age of thirty-six, she was embarking on a full-time writing career, a longtime dream. Beauvoir felt a little lonely, though. Camus had sent her “petit Bost” to cover the war on the eastern front for Combat. He had, in fact, poached almost all of Beauvoir and Sartre’s former students to write for Combat. “In the morning, when I opened the newspaper, it felt like reading my own private correspondence.”8
Albert Camus aimed even higher when he thought of asking Sartre himself to go on a five-month American tour for Combat. The U.S. State Department had invited a dozen French writers and reporters on an official visit to the United States, as a way of “getting to know each other,” a way of making new friends. Camus called Sartre at the Café de Flore one morning: “Would you like to go on behalf of Combat?” Sartre almost jumped for joy. “I never saw him so happy,”9 wrote Simone de Beauvoir later; “American literature, jazz, and films had nurtured our youth.” Later, Camus also offered Beauvoir the chance to report from a two-month trip to Portugal and Spain.
French journalism was more interested in understanding and influencing the world than in simply reporting the facts, and this would, from now on, be its greatest asset and greatest liability, proving joyfully and viciously partisan. Communist newspapers such as Ce Soir, edited by the résistant, novelist, and poet Louis Aragon, and L’Humanité, the Communist Party publication, used all their might to promote their ideology and to attack all those who did not think like them, including Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir.
Like Camus, many writers and philosophers had become journalists. The French press was filled with editorialized pieces rather than plain reportage. This made news highly politicized, cerebral, intelligent, literary, and often personal, which Parisians welcomed. Newspapers might have been limited to one sheet for lack of paper, but in the little space they had, they went right to the point. Mostly written by résistants who had risked their lives to keep the country informed during the war, the French press was highly regarded, not only at home but also abroad. “Everything Camus writes today in Combat is incised with meaning,” wrote Janet Flanner. “The new Republic has started off with something the old did not have—the most intelligent, courageous and amateur press which venal, literate France has ever known. The new press of Paris alone lives up to the Resistance slogan ‘Les Durs.’ It is indeed hard, and pure.”10
Albert Camus’ editorials and partisan journalism infuriated as many readers as they attracted. Using the collective and unanimous “we,” he would write: “What did we want? A virile, clear-sighted and respectable press.” For him, journalism could never be impartial and should not claim to be. “Information cannot be passed on without a critical analysis.” Camus demanded a personal tone and style of his journalists. It was right to distinguish between opinion pieces and reportage; however, one should know that objectivity did not exist. In his eyes, a journalist was nothing less than a day-to-day historian. In the first weeks of Combat, Camus set out clear ethical and moral principles for his team of journalists.11 He now rejected Marxism. What he wished for France was both a collectivist economy and liberal policies. He did not explain, though, how the two systems could work together.
Édith Thomas, too, had embraced journalism. Her comrades had asked her to become the editor of Femmes françaises, a Communist weekly aimed at French women readers. Like the good soldier she was, Édith had accepted her new mission without a word. But the truth, which she confided to her diary, was that she did not believe men and women should have different publications, nor should they be addressed differently. As a Communist and résistante, she found the gender differentiation old-fashioned and condescending to women. First, she started to hire good writers, whatever their political inclination. She asked Jean Paulhan, who had gone back to his tiny office at Gallimard, to recommend someone for the review section. He replied: “Dominique Aury is the woman you need.” In the autumn of 1944, the thirty-seven-year-old Aury was on the editorial committee of Gallimard; she was a writer mostly interested in religious history and seventeenth-century poetry. With Jean Paulhan, she shared a passion for the Marquis de Sade. Like Paulhan, but unlike Édith, the demure-looking thirty-seven-year-old woman was viscerally anti-Communist. Édith did not mind as long as she was talented. And she was. Édith assigned her to write the magazine’s literary reviews. There were, however, many submissive minds on Édith’s editorial committee, wives of eminent Party members who did not know anything about journalism and were more interested in criticizing Édith’s eclectic editorial choices than anything else. “Too much mediocrity, too much suspicion, too many lies,”12 Édith wrote in her diary on a damp and cold December evening. The day after, she quit her job and was hired almost immediately at Le Parisien Libéré, a non-Communist daily newspaper edited by résistants. Édith kept seeing Dominique Aury, though. Dominique had resigned from Femmes françaises on the same day as Édith, out of solidarity.
Apart from the feverish preparations for Sartre’s trip to New York and Beauvoir’s trip to Portugal and Spain, scheduled a few weeks later, Christmas 1944 was a little dull for the Sartre and Beauvoir family, and New Year’s Eve at Albert Camus’ apartment was somewhat subdued. Camus’ wife, the beautiful Francine, had finally returned from Algiers, and things were not going very well between them. Camus was as passionately in love with Maria Casarès as ever and was not going to give her up. Sartre was drinking heavily, while Francine played Bach on the piano until two in the morning. As the party drew to an end, Albert walked toward Simone with a warm smile and a book with a red and black cover in his hand. He wanted her to read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which had appeared in the United States in 1940 but had not yet been published in French. Back in her room at the Hôtel La Louisiane, as the first light of the new year filtered through the curtains, she put Koestler’s book on her small bedside table. After a few hours of sleep, she started reading. “I did not put it down until I had reached the end. I read it in one breath.”13
THE HOMECOMING
Among the exiles making their way back to Paris in the winter of 1944–45 were Samuel Beckett and Janet Flanner, the latter taking over for A. J. Liebling as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, or rather resuming the job she had held for twenty years until the war broke out. Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne had opened the door of the flat on the rue des Favorites with a mixture of dread and longing. It had been four long years since the day they left their Paris home in a rush, fleeing the Gestapo. Unsurprisingly, their home had been broken into, and some pieces of furniture, personal effects, and kitchen utensils were missing. Depressed by the sight, Beckett and Suzanne booked themselves into the Hôtel Libéria, 9 rue de la Grande Chaumière, next to the art school and opposite Beckett’s favorite restaurant, Wadja.
Janet also chose to stay in a hotel, more exactly at the Hôtel Scribe with her fellow foreign correspondents. She knew that she could have a hot bath there every morning between eight and ten, and this alone was incentive enough to live there for a while. The day after her arrival she had bumped into Ernest Hemingway, who confessed breaking the news to her former girlfriend Noeline about Janet’s current Italian lover.14 Noeline, the formerly statuesque blonde, was now a shadow of herself. The war had ravaged her looks. Devoured by regrets, Janet had decided to stay three nights a week with Noeline.
Paris was rainy, cold, muddy, and hungry. As Janet Flanner typed on her old Remington, “nourished by liberation, warmed by the country’s return to active battle, Paris is still, physically, living largely on vegetables and mostly without heat.”15 A week’s ration for a family of three was half a pound of fresh meat, three-fifths of a pound of butter, and one-third of a pound of sausage. No wonder the attacks against de Gaulle’s cabinet at the Consultative Assembly in November focused on supplies rather than high politics. Eight hundred thousand of the most skilled French factory workers were still slave laborers in Germany and could not fill the now open but empty factories. In Paris, a dozen métro stations were closed for lack of electricity, and gas for cooking was rationed to ninety minutes at lunchtime and an hour at dinnertime—that meant no gas to heat one’s morning ersatz coffee of burnt barley, which explained why everyone went to cafés to get a petit noir. In December 1944, Parisians, in their overcoats, sipped their carrot and parsnip stew, the only vegetables available in any quantity.
Things were better for the happy few who could get into the restaurant of the Hôtel Scribe. Jacques-Laurent Bost had just come back from Holland and as a war correspondent could take Simone de Beauvoir there for lunch. They had fresh eggs, white bread, jam, and Spam.16 A feast. Simone discreetly filled her pockets with sugar, the new gold. Apart from lunch at the Scribe, spending long hours in bed reading and making love, staying in cafés for hours rubbing shoulders with your neighbors, and drinking slightly more than usual in the evening were the best ways to keep warm and cheat hunger in the first months of 1945. Parisians had never felt colder or hungrier since the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870, when their grandparents had eaten rats, cats, and mice to survive. Paris’s streets were covered with snow; ski clothes, if you had them, had replaced pajamas as nightwear.
Parisians had been waiting for the return of another kind of exile. In early spring, the Allies had crossed the Rhine; their speed was now breathtaking. They were about to reach many of the concentration camps. War prisoners were slowly making their way back home, soon followed by the first deportees. On April 22, 1945, Janet Flanner took the métro from Opéra to the Gare de Lyon. She had been briefed that the first contingent of women prisoners would arrive later that day by train. There were three hundred of them, who came in exchange for German women held in France. They had been interned at the camp of Ravensbrück, fifty miles north of Berlin. The name did not really ring a bell with Parisians, but it did with the American reporter. Janet took her place among the crowds awaiting their loved ones with timid smiles and welcoming bouquets of lilacs and other spring flowers. Gendarmes were keeping them a few feet away from the entrance to the platform, where Charles de Gaulle was standing. A solitary and commanding figure, he was the incarnation of heroic Free France welcoming back to its bosom all those betrayed by cowardly Vichy France—a poignant task. His own niece, the twenty-four-year-old Geneviève de Gaulle, a résistante from the very first hours of the armistice in 1940, interned at Ravensbrück in 1944, was not part of the convoy. All he knew was that she was still alive. Janet Flanner looked at her watch as the train slowly ground and screeched into the station; it was exactly eleven o’clock in the morning.
The women were leaning out the windows of the train. Seeing their faces, the crowd, now allowed on the platform, froze in fear and horror. Their flesh had a gray-greenish halo and all had red-brown circles around eyes that seemed to see but not take anything in. De Gaulle walked toward them and started shaking their hands. The crowd began moving, now anxiously searching for their loved ones among the poor, wretched women. “There was almost no joy; the emotion penetrated beyond that, to something near pain.”17 De Gaulle knew that the Ravensbrück Kommandant had carefully selected these three hundred women because they were the most presentable. Eleven had died en route. “As the lilacs fell from inert hands, the flowers made a purple carpet on the platform and the perfume of trampled flowers mixed with the stench of illness and dirt.”18 Many of the women suffered from dysentery and were covered with typhoid lice.
This painful homecoming heralded a long series of such returns. As the Allies and the Red Army were about to free the concentration camps one after the other, a whole new horror, the dawning realization of the Holocaust, was about to engulf the free world. Not a day passed without Beauvoir and Picasso thinking about their many dear disappeared friends. Alfred Péron, Samuel Beckett’s best friend, had survived concentration camp life and was now in transit from Mauthausen to Switzerland, looked after by the Red Cross. On May 1, he died of exhaustion.
The Gaullist administration realized very quickly that the reception facilities of the Gare d’Orsay19 were not up to the task. Deportees were in such poor health, exhausted and disoriented, that they needed a specific reception and accommodation center. De Gaulle requisitioned five luxury hotels on the Left Bank, among them the Hôtel Lutétia, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an Art Nouveau palace that had been occupied by the Abwehr during the war. It had 350 rooms, which would be used as dormitories, with a total of a thousand beds, for the deportees just back from Germany. Volunteers from different Resistance associations, boy scouts and youth movements, as well as doctors and nurses working extra shifts, ran the deportees’ center at the Hôtel Lutétia night and day. Sometimes coaches arrived in the middle of the night with two thousand deportees at a time. The fittest were registered, asked questions, seen by a doctor, and sprayed with DDT in a nearby bakery that had been repurposed for the task, before being ushered to a room where they could rest. Volunteer teenagers helped the weakest directly from the coach to a room and a bed. The deportees would then be fed in a meticulous way, with the small quantities of food their bodies could stand after years of starvation. Some were extremely contagious. A chambermaid and a teenager looking after the deportees’ clothes died after contracting typhus.
The eighteen-year-old Juliette Gréco did not volunteer, but she did, like thousands of Parisians, go to the Lutétia every day from the end of April through the summer, in the wild hope of finding her mother and older sister Charlotte, who had disappeared three years earlier, arrested by the Gestapo. Simone de Beauvoir, too, went to the Lutétia, to try to obtain some information about her former students and friends, deported to Germany. So many had died or did not survive their transfer back home. Her petit Bost had returned to the front to report on the liberation of the camps and had entered Dachau an hour after the U.S. Army. He had been unable to file his copy, he wrote to her. He felt completely paralyzed in front of his typewriter. “Once again, I felt ashamed of being alive. Death was haunting us, but I thought, with disgust for myself, that those who do not die accept the unacceptable.”20
Finally, one afternoon, Juliette Gréco saw both her sister and her mother in the crowd at the Lutétia. None of the women spoke. Juliette took Charlotte by the hand and walked her to her little hotel room on the third floor of 16 rue Servandoni, while their mother was looked after by family friends. “For the first few weeks, I fed my older sister milk and tiny pieces of food the way you do a kitten.”21 Gréco had been told that when they liberated Dachau, U.S. soldiers, thinking they were doing the right thing, had distributed bread, sausages, and Spam to deportees, who had died just after eating them. Getting accustomed again to freedom, life, and its pleasures would take a long time.
THE FIRST FREE SPRING IN FIVE YEARS
In April 1945 the first rays of sunshine finally heralded a new spring, the first free spring in five years. Seated at café terraces, Parisians could feel the warmth of the sun on their cheeks. The month of April was dazzling, wrote Simone de Beauvoir, returning from her trip to Portugal and Spain. She had brought back in her suitcases a hundred pounds of groceries—ham, chorizo, Algarve cakes, sticky sugar, eggs, tea, real coffee, and real chocolate—and was handing them out generously to friends, lovers, and strangers. She had purchased many clothes, too, folkloric sweaters, Spanish scarves, and multicolored fishermen’s shirts from Faro in Portugal, one for Camus, one for le petit Bost, and one for Michel Vitold, a talented thirty-year-old Russian-born actor and her current lover. She kept for herself the most treasured acquisition: brown crepe-soled shoes. People stopped her in the street, not because they recognized her but because they wanted to know where she had found such wondrous shoes.22
American films started to reach Paris’s cinemas. Howard Hawks’s 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, gave many Parisians their smile back, at least for an evening. But the film that really struck everyone was the three-hour epic Les enfants du paradis, penned by Prévert, directed by Carné, and interpreted by Arletty, Pierre Brasseur, and the new young stars from the French theater Jean-Louis Barrault and Maria Casarès. Its making and its story embodied perfectly the moral contradictions the French had endured and were still facing.
Prévert wrote the central part of Garance for Arletty, who was still France’s biggest star even after her scandalous love affair. Garance and Arletty were one and the same woman, the epitome of the Parisian: strong, independent, witty, impudent, mysterious, the kind who casts spells, whose laugh ricochets, the kind who loves life and whom life loves. Prévert’s dialogues were instant classics. At one point, Garance tells the mime artist, Baptiste, who is desperately in love with her: “I am what I am. I love those who love me. That is all. When I feel like saying yes, I do not know how to say no.” The film had such an impact with audiences because it encapsulated the moral maelstrom felt by so many in France. It was easy to see in Garance and Arletty a metaphor for France, a woman who gave herself a little too freely even if her heart remained pure and faithful. How ironic that Arletty had been arrested for sleeping with the enemy. With typical impudence, Arletty had told the young résistants who had interrogated her: “My heart belongs to France but my arse is international!” (“Mon coeur est français, mon cul, lui, est international!”).
The death of President Roosevelt in April 1945 caused more personal grief among the French than the deaths of their own recent great men. Janet Flanner heard a café waitress “naively touching the sublime” when she said of his death: “C’est ennuyeux pour toute l’humanité” (“It is troublesome for the whole of humanity”).23 The Paris press wrote of the American president with sober magnificence, sincere superlatives, and spirited Gallic headlines: VIVE ROOSEVELT! (Libération-Sud) and “The great voice which directed American political destinies has been silenced, but its echo continues in French souls” (Le Monde).
Two events improved the general mood considerably. On April 30, Hitler’s death, followed a week later by Germany’s unconditional surrender, triggered scenes of jubilation in the streets of Paris. All those who, like Janet Flanner, had not been lucky enough to witness the elation of the Liberation in August 1944 were determined to experience V-E Day celebrations as intensely and fully as they possibly could. For Janet, it was a way of catching up with history and of being reunited with her French family.
Janet went first to the place de la Concorde: “The babble and the shuffle of feet drowned out the sound of the stentorian church bells that clanged for peace, and even the cannon firing from the Invalides was muffled by the closer noise of feet and tongues that were never still.” Simone de Beauvoir and a group of a dozen friends were there too. There were two noticeable absentees from Beauvoir’s little troop, though. Sartre was still in the United States and Bost was still in Germany. “We got off the métro at Concorde, there was a human tide, we could hardly walk. We were in fact carried by this human wave. A force seemed to be pushing us all toward Opéra.”24 The tricolor flags were flapping in the wind, and “La Marseillaise” could be heard from every street corner.
Simone and her friends passed just below Janet Flanner’s hotel room windows at 1 rue Scribe. From her observation post, Janet would see, later that day, the Parisians “filling avenues from curb to curb.” Some had brought the little food they had at home for improvised frugal picnics, but the marching Parisians were mainly living “on air and emotion.” Neither Janet nor Simone mentioned in her diary whether she had heard the French-born soprano Lily Pons25 sing the French national anthem from the balcony of the Opéra for the crowds that night. Lily Pons, the New York Metropolitan Opera’s star soprano since 1931, had deeply moved New Yorkers in December 1942 when she sang “La Marseillaise” during the performances of Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment, waving a flag with the Cross of Lorraine. Pons was, along with Marlene Dietrich, among the few artists who had put their careers on hold for the whole of 1944 in order to tour France, Europe, and the Middle East entertaining Allied troops.
After writing down her impressions of the day, Janet went out again around midnight and walked toward the Champs-Élysées. The crowds had thinned and only the young remained, “long lines of boys and girls, arms high and holding hands, like long lines of noctambulistic paper dolls.”26 The young dominated the day and night. “It was the new post-war generation, running free, celebrating peace with a fine freedom which their parents, young in 1918, had certainly not known.”27 Looking at her much younger companions, Simone de Beauvoir noted: “The war is finished but it remains in our arms like a cumbersome and big corpse and it seems that there is nowhere we can bury it.”28
The morning after, Beauvoir, still in bed, started contemplating the newspapers spread on the floor in front of her. She had bought all the now historic editions she could lay her hands on. While the Paris Herald Tribune had chosen the one-word headline VICTORY, French newspapers seemed instead to be focusing on the demise of the Nazi enemy. The Gaullist Les Nouvelles du matin dedicated its whole front page to a drawing of a female figure symbolic of France with wings, laurels, and Allied flags under the headline LA GUERRE EST FINIE. As for the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné, it could not help celebrating the victory with a cartoon of Hitler, dead and at heaven’s gates, pinning a Star of David on God’s chest to start a New Order.
CROSS-FERTILIZATION
With the end of the war, the urge to travel, discover, understand, and embrace a new free world brought a fresh wave of foreign artists and writers to Paris. A cross-fertilization began to take place, transcending all kinds of boundaries and connecting philosophy and journalism, intellectuals of different nationalities and artists of different disciplines. Christian Zervos, the arts editor and founder of Cahiers d’Art, was hoping to relaunch his magazine with a bang: Picasso had promised a double cover,29 but the painter was playing hard to get. Zervos, from his office and art gallery at 14 rue du Dragon, was nonetheless plowing on, relying as always on his personal flair to commission articles and art reviews from unlikely people and yet-unknown talents. He was interested in a couple of Dutch painters, the brothers Bram and Geer van Velde, and had asked an Irishman named Samuel Beckett to write a text on them. Beckett liked a new challenge and he particularly loved the van Veldes’ art, especially Bram van Velde’s. Eleven years older than Beckett, Bram was “a painter almost as unsuccessful and devoid of support from the exhibiting establishment as Beckett himself was from the publishing.”30 He and Bram even resembled each other: tall, thin, bony, and taciturn. The brothers had their paintings exhibited at both the Édouard Loeb art gallery and Galérie Maeght, and Zervos was hoping to interest the public, or at least the connoisseurs, in their art. Beckett called his essay “La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon” [The Painting of the van Veldes or the world and the pair of trousers].31 The title referred to a joke he would use again in 1957 in his play Endgame about the tailor who unfavorably compares the botched job God made of the world in seven days with the perfect pair of trousers he crafted in a somewhat longer period.
His art review was not an art review. His opening line said it all: “To start with, let’s talk about something else.” And what about? The doubts of the art amateur, and the mistakes of art critics. “There is no painting, just canvases. And those canvases, not being sausages, are neither good nor bad,” wrote Beckett, before adding, “what you will ever know of a painting is how much you love it, and perhaps, if it interests you, why you love it.” Beckett unusually mentioned politics in his essay, saying that the van Veldes were more interested in the human condition than in painting.
Walking up the boulevard Saint-Germain, Henri Cartier-Bresson had noticed Beckett coming out of Zervos’s gallery and had thought to himself, “good face, funny walk.”32 Cartier-Bresson had not had the heart or the courage to follow his fellow war correspondents and photographers to Germany. Circumstances had made him play at being “war reporter” during the liberation of Paris, but he did not wish to go to the front. He did not view himself as a “tourist in disaster land” or a “voyeur aristocrat”33 like others. He was not interested in war as such. In 1945, he chose to focus on the faces of those who were making or about to make history in Paris: Jean Paulhan, Édith Piaf, Simone de Beauvoir, Christian Dior, Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky, among many others. Cartier-Bresson himself, though only thirty-seven, was going to make headlines. The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) had thought him dead for months and had planned to organize his life’s retrospective. But Cartier-Bresson was alive and well, and after recovering from the shock of that news, MoMA decided to go ahead anyway and planned the event for 1946. It would be the first of many retrospectives for Cartier-Bresson. Despite his relatively young age, his extensive traveling in the 1930s had made him a veteran photographer who had seen and photographed more than most artists. He had shared a flat with the black poet Langston Hughes in Mexico and dated a Mexican woman, Guadalupe Cervantes. He had lived in New York in Harlem, co-renting with the writer Paul Bowles and dating an African American woman. Everywhere he had gone, he had blended into the landscape and melted into the local crowd, taking pictures all the way. In other words, the Museum of Modern Art had a wealth of material to choose from for the exhibition.
The world’s greatest chameleon artist, Picasso, the man with seven lives, was yet again reinventing himself and his art. He looked different: he had cut his famous shock of black hair. “One cannot be and have been,”34 said Picasso, greeting his old friend Brassaï on Saturday, May 12, 1945. Picasso now said tu to his friends and sometimes declared, by way of explanation, “We’re all the same age now, are we not?”35
Young artists who had somehow pupated during the war and were now hungry to act and create, looked up to older artists they felt had not only resisted but had held high the banner of universalism in arts. The twenty-one-year-old dancer and choreographer Roland Petit went to see Prévert with an idea for a three-ballet show called Le rendez-vous. A defector from the Paris Opéra Ballet, Petit had formed a dance company and wanted the very best for his show: Prévert would write the story line, Joseph Kosma would compose the music, Mayo would design the costumes (all three had been among the talents behind Les enfants du paradis), Picasso would create the giant stage curtain, and Roland Petit wanted Brassaï to make three décors with giant reproductions of his black-and-white photographs. Petit, with the impetuousness of youth, gave them three weeks to do it. And so they did. On June 15, Le rendez-vous opened at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt and the young Marina de Berg made a strong impression in the part of “The world’s most beautiful girl.” There were many well-known figures in the stalls: Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Cocteau, and Marlene Dietrich all sat in the same row. This was not a coincidence. As Beauvoir explained: “We went out furiously to every opening, every cultural event. The fact that we all met then and there, together, despite our political differences, proved the solidarity that we so ardently wished to continue. Those openings and premières became demonstrations.”36 Fittingly, as Picasso’s beige and mauve curtain went down at the end of the show, applause, boos, and shouting erupted in equal measure. “Since Picasso had joined the Communist Party on October 5, 1944, his work had the same effect on a certain fringe of the public as the muleta on a bull.”37 Although he had joined the Party out of friendship rather than belief, he was influencing the young generation to do the same. Juliette Gréco, who dreamed of becoming a tragedian, enrolled in the Communist Youth Movement just like tens of thousands of other young people in the country. She immersed herself in the work of authors approved by the Party. Some had talent: Aragon but also Federico García Lorca and that young woman she sometimes bumped into on the rue Saint-Benoît, Marguerite Duras.
Sartre had delayed his return from the United States after meeting the beautiful Dolorès Vanetti, a friend of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist working as the French cultural attaché in New York. Vanetti was of Italian Ethiopian origin and had been educated in France before fleeing to New York with her American husband in June 1940.38 The couple were friends of the French exiles André Breton, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp, and also John Dos Passos, among others, and Sartre got to meet them all through her. “Dolorès gave me America,”39 Sartre later wrote. Among Dolorès’s friends he particularly warmed to Alexander Calder, whom he visited at his studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. Sartre was fascinated by the artist’s mobiles and Calder by the philosopher’s wit and ideas.
Calder so missed Paris, where he had spent his formative years in the late 1920s and early 1930s, that he dreamed of going back and living there with his family. He just needed a Parisian project to make his dream come true. Perhaps Sartre could take part? Marcel Duchamp suggested he put on a show at his friend Louis Carré’s art gallery. No sooner said than done. Calder started producing a series of small-scale works that he could ship via the new international airmail system. On July 16, Calder packed thirty-seven miniature mobiles into six small cartons and sent them to Louis Carré for his consideration. Carré’s appetite whetted, he asked Duchamp and Calder for more in a telegram: WOULD ALSO GLADLY EXHIBIT MOBILE SCULPTURES AVAILABLE ALL SIZES AND COLOURS.40 Thinking ahead, Calder suggested that Sartre might write the catalog, to which Carré replied, “Excellent idea!”
Calder’s friend Richard Wright was just leaving New York with his family to spend the summer in Montreal, having heard nothing yet about their application for French passports. He wrote in his diary: “Montreal is the closest I can get to Paris.” Richard and his wife, Ellen, had been taking French lessons in Brooklyn twice a week and wanted to put their newly acquired language skills to use. He was receiving mail from his French publishers. Albin Michel was going to publish Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children, and Gallimard had picked up Black Boy. Three of his books were to hit Paris bookshops within a year. Surely, they would create a stir and trigger some important debates, or so he imagined. Wright was understandably hoping that their success with the French public would pave the way for his triumphal arrival in Paris.
The Bastille Day celebrations in Paris, the first free July 14 since 1939, lasted three days and three nights. It was Picasso’s favorite day of the year. Seldom a landscape artist, he made an exception for the occasion and painted, on a very small canvas, the riverbank with Notre Dame in the background and French flags floating in the wind. “The extreme smallness of the painting made me think of Hokusai, who masterly painted on rice grains,”41 wrote Brassaï in his diary. Another event earlier that week made Picasso and many Parisians emotional. The Louvre had finally reopened on July 10 with its first postwar exhibition called, simply, “Great Masterpieces.” Its collections were only now completely repatriated from their different hiding places. Not one piece had been damaged, thanks to their savior in chief, Jacques Jaujard, and the thousand anonymous keepers who had guarded them with their lives.
Three weeks earlier, Georges Salles, the new head of the Louvre Museum, had invited Jacques Jaujard. He wanted his famous predecessor to come and greet an old acquaintance. On Sunday, June 17, the two men walked down to the museum’s warehouse, where a white poplar case marked with three red dots was waiting, surrounded by a close guard of five men and one woman—Louvre workmen, art historians, and curators. Everybody shook hands. Georges Salles looked at Jacques Jaujard and then nodded at the curator Germain Bazin to open the case. Jacques Jaujard squatted down to get a closer look. Waterproof layers of protection were carefully removed, one by one, until the last one, a thin sheet of fire-retardant fabric woven from asbestos fibers, appeared. Germain Bazin stopped and looked up at Jaujard and Salles before tearing it open. Jaujard nodded again. The face of the Mona Lisa slowly appeared. No words were exchanged between the men—the only sound came from the clicking of photographer Pierre Jahan’s camera. Jahan was almost dancing around them and around her, taking the historic picture that would immediately travel the world. La Joconde was finally home.
ONE FINAL TRAITOR TO JUDGE
There was one thing left to do before Parisians could close the chapter of their history that the war had occupied. They had to judge an eighty-nine-year-old fellow Frenchman who had led them collectively to the brink of infamy. His name: Marshal Philippe Pétain. In a dramatic and ironic clash of events, Pétain’s trial opened the day Charles de Gaulle ruled that the French poet Paul Valéry, who had just died, would be given a state funeral, the first for a poet since Victor Hugo in June 1885. Paris-based foreign correspondents found themselves filing copy on two great Frenchmen at once, but two great Frenchmen who had taken very different paths in 1940. The soldier had chosen ignominy while the poet had joined the clandestine Resistance and his fellow littérateurs of the Comité National des Écrivains. While in Vichy, Pétain had dismissed Valéry from his Paris university post. De Gaulle reinstated him.
Janet Flanner, Anne-Marie Cazalis, and Albert Camus were among the thousands of silent Parisians who lined the streets just before midnight as Paul Valéry’s body was escorted from the church of Saint Honoré d’Eylau near the Arc de Triomphe to the beat of muffled military drums. Valery’s body lay on a torchlit outdoor catafalque wrapped in the French flag and situated between the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower. The poet was guarded by his students while Parisians paid their respects. Two huge floodlights at the feet of the Eiffel Tower projected a big V during the night. V for Valéry, V for victory. The man who had been an ambassador for French letters in the world, conveying the image of a Cartesian and classic France, was given a republican apotheosis.
After a short night, Janet Flanner rushed back to Pétain’s trial at the Court of Justice, ensconced on the Île de la Cité between Notre Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle (holy chapel) built in the 1240s. It had taken her some time to get used to the French justice system’s own peculiar customs and sartorial traditions. “The red and black robes recalled the face cards in the trial scene of Alice in Wonderland, but in the Paris trial scene there was no gentle humor, no awakening from a dream.”42 The courtroom could seat six hundred people, far too few considering the world’s interest. The French Ministry of Information had chosen to resort to a system of allocating tickets to the foreign press by lottery.
The presiding judge asked all the French politicians present at the trial to answer two crucial questions: “Do you think Marshal Pétain has committed treason and what do you think treason consists of?” For Janet Flanner, “of all the testimony of the big political figures, what Léon Blum had to say against Pétain was the most intellectual, clear (if complex), and unequivocal.”43 And Blum’s definition was best: “An absence of moral confidence was the base of the Vichy government, and that is treason. Treason is the act of selling out.”44
The trial was in its final stage when the news of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reached Paris. Sartre and Beauvoir were horrified but declined to make their disgust public. Communist newspapers were hardly moved by the events in Japan. Albert Camus was the only French journalist to express the absolute revulsion he felt at the events, in an editorial published on August 8 in Combat. “The world is what it is, that is to say not much … Civilization has just reached the ultimate stage of savagery … We will soon have to choose between collective suicide or an intelligent use of science.”
On August 14, the day the Pétain trial ended, the BBC reported riots in front of the Court of Justice. In fact, all was calm and quiet on the boulevard du Palais. Calm, like any August in Paris. For the first time since 1939, Parisians had been able to resume their summer transhumance, leaving the capital to go back to their families’ bastions in the countryside or at the seaside. Most of them awaited the verdict on the radio. It took seven hours to reach, and when it came, at four in the morning, it seemed to satisfy the country. Death for high treason. Charles de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on the island of Yeu, twelve miles off the Atlantic coast.
When Alexander Calder heard the news on his transistor radio in his studio in Roxbury, where he was doing some welding for his Paris show, he paused for a moment and thought of Sartre and his Parisian friends. There were a few other bastards in France like Pétain who deserved to be sent far, far away. Thank God for de Gaulle, he thought, and he resumed his welding. Spurred by the restrictions on parcel size imposed by the U.S. Postal Service, he had begun creating large works for Louis Carré’s gallery that were collapsible and could be reassembled upon their arrival in Paris, the place he longed for.45