CHRONOLOGY

1939
August 23	Soviet foreign minister Molotov and his German counterpart von Ribbentrop sign a pact of nonaggression giving Hitler free rein to attack the West.
August 24	Jacques Jaujard closes the Louvre: four thousand treasures are being packed for safety secretly.
September 1	Germany invades Poland.
September 3	France and Great Britain declare war on Germany.
1940
May	Hiding in Paris at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop, Arthur Koestler sends his manuscript Darkness at Noon to a London publisher.
May 10	Germany invades Belgium and northern France.
June 10	Mussolini’s Italy declares war on France and Britain.
June 11	The French government flees Paris.
June 14	The German army enters Paris.
June 18	In an address broadcast by the BBC, French general Charles de Gaulle calls from London for France to continue the fight, urging all young men and women to join him in résistance.
June 22	Jean-Paul Sartre and Henri Cartier-Bresson are held prisoner and taken to war prisoners’ camps in Germany.
June 23	Adolf Hitler poses for photographers in front of the Eiffel Tower.
1941
March	Jean-Paul Sartre is back in Paris after escaping his prisoners’ camp.
April–	Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty start Resistance group Socialisme et Liberté
September	but soon give up as many members prefer the more effective communist resistance groups. Sartre goes back to teaching philosophy at the Lycée Condorcet.
December	Germany declares war on the United States.
1942
January	Sonderführer Gerhard Heller, the Francophile and yet German censor of French literature, reads Albert Camus’ The Outsider and authorizes its publication.
September	The CNE, Comité National des Écrivains, the résistant writers’ group, has its weekly meetings at the flat of writer Édith Thomas.
November	The United States invades North Africa.
1943
June	Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Les mouches opens at the Théâtre de la Cité.
August	The same week, Jean-Paul Sartre’s seven-hundred-page philosophy treatise L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) and Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel, L’invitée (She Came to Stay), the semiautobiographical story of a ménage-à-trois, are released.
September	Picasso asks Hungarian photographer Brassaï, who lives in hiding in Paris, to take pictures of the works he has done under the occupation.
1944
June	On June 6, D-Day starts at dawn. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Georges Braque listen to the news together on the wireless.
August	The insurrection in Paris starts on August 16. Nazi commander von Choltitz signs his surrender on August 25 at 4:15 p.m.
September	L’épuration (the purge) of collaborators starts.
1945
January	Albert Camus, editor of Combat, sends Jean-Paul Sartre as a reporter to the United States for his first American trip and Beauvoir to report on life in Spain and Portugal.
July	Alexander Calder works on a mobile exhibition with the help of Marcel Duchamp and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he has just befriended.
August	Marshal Pétain’s trial for treason. Atom bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.
October	Sartre gives his lecture “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” at Club Maintenant. Women faint.
	Elections in France. The French decide to bury the Third Republic.
1946
January	Charles de Gaulle resigns.
April	Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a fast bestseller in France.
May	Richard Wright settles in Paris.
September	Simone de Beauvoir starts research on The Second Sex.
December	Boris Vian secretly publishes his first novel, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Spit on Your Graves), under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, “a black American writer.” Its sex scenes land its publishers in court.
1947
January	Beauvoir, on a four-month trip to the United States, meets and falls in love with Nelson Algren.
March	President Truman institutes the loyalty program.
April	Jazz club and bar Le Tabou on the rue Dauphine opens its doors, soon branded the “Existentialist den.”
June	Albert Camus’ La peste hits the bookshops in Paris.
	The U.S. secretary of state, George Marshall, outlines what would become the Marshall Plan in a speech to Harvard graduate students.
November	Norman Mailer and his wife settle down in Paris for a year on the GI bill.
1948
January	Alberto Giacometti exhibits his latest works, among them Man Walking. The catalog is written by Sartre.
February	The Czech coup shakes many Communists’ faith in the Party.
March	Sartre creates a political party, the RDR (The Democratic and Revolutionary Alliance), to unite the non-Communist Left and to promote an independent Europe.
June	GI bill students Art Buchwald, Richard Seaver, Ellsworth Kelly, and Lionel Abel settle on the Left Bank.
August	Theodore H. White goes to Paris to cover the implementation of the Marshall Plan.
September	Saul Bellow and his family arrive in Paris.
November	James Baldwin arrives in Paris with forty dollars in his pocket.
	Twenty-seven-year-old Garry Davis interrupts first session of the UN assembly to launch his movement “one government for one world.”
1949
January	The Kravchenko trial.
	Samuel Beckett finishes writing Waiting for Godot.
April	Saul Bellow finally starts writing Augie March.
May	Ellsworth Kelly finds his voice.
	Nelson Algren completes The Man with the Golden Arm and arrives in Paris for a four-month visit with Beauvoir.
	Juliette Gréco meets Miles Davis after his first performance in Paris. It’s love at first sight.
June	Release of the first volume of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
July	Fifteen-year-old Brigitte Bardot is chosen by Elle magazine to feature on its cover.
November	Release of the second volume of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which triggers a scandal.