And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (3 page)

The period would be best remembered, however, for three remarkably original works. In early 1923, Raymond Radiguet published his World War I novel
Le Diable au corps
(The Devil in the Flesh), which tells of an affair between a teenage boy and a woman whose husband is fighting in the trenches. A high school dropout, Radiguet became the toast of the Left Bank, with Cocteau as his champion, but he died of typhoid in December 1923, just months after his twentieth birthday. Meanwhile, Marcel Proust’s fin de siècle masterpiece,
À la recherche du temps perdu
(In Search of Lost Time),
was finally published in its entirety in 1927, five years after his death. For many critics, both French and foreign, it remains France’s greatest literary work of the twentieth century. At the time, however, a still greater sensation was
Voyage au bout de la nuit
(Journey to the End of the Night) by the irascible doctor Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, better known as Céline. Published in 1932, this raging and misanthropic novel defied the conventions of French writing, much as Joyce’s
Ulysses
had those of English literature ten years earlier, testing readers’ comprehension with ellipsis, vernacular, street slang and vulgarities in a revolt against French literary style and bourgeois society. The novel was favored—but failed—to win the Goncourt, angering Céline, who took little solace when it won the Renaudot Prize.

While
Voyage
was a literary tour de force, however, it was also semiautobiographical and, in that sense, a mirror on the period. Like many men of his age, Céline had been deeply scarred by World War I, although he had spent only a few months in the trenches before he was wounded and demobilized. After the war, he traveled widely, then became a doctor, working for the League of Nations in the mid-1920s before setting up a private practice among the poor of Montmartre. Having previously written only two unpublished plays, he was totally unknown in literary circles when
Voyage
came out. In the novel, it is Céline’s alter ego Bardamu who recovers from war wounds before setting out on travels, first to Africa, then to the United States, where he works in a Ford factory, and finally back to Paris, where he becomes a doctor. Everything he has witnessed, from colonialism and industrial capitalism to urban squalor, disgusts him.

In this dyspeptic view of humanity, Céline was not alone. The disastrous political and psychological legacy of the Great War was felt by other artists and writers, many of them veterans, whose initial response to the threat of a new war was to become outspoken pacifists. For instance, just as Céline’s novel was anti-war, so was Vercel’s
Capitaine Conan
, which dwelled on the psychological damage caused by the recent war. In 1937, the writer Jean Giono even announced that, in the event of a new Franco-German conflict, he would rather be a living German than a dead Frenchman.

But if pacifism was at times hard to distinguish from defeatism, artists and writers were also being buffeted by the ideological winds blowing from Moscow and Berlin. By the end of the 1930s, many
writers and intellectuals, as well as some artists and musicians, felt called on to choose sides and take their places in the warring camps. The path that led some of them there had begun two decades earlier with the belief that, after the war to end all wars, art could produce something different.

The first proposal came from Dada, a semianarchic anti-war movement that was founded in neutral Switzerland by the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, who was just twenty at the time. Launched in 1916 in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire with a performance defined as “anti-art,” Dada sought to mobilize painting, design, theater and poetry as weapons against “capitalist war.” The idea spread quickly to Berlin, Amsterdam and New York, where in 1917 Duchamp famously presented an upturned urinal as a work of art—or, rather, “anti-art”—called
Fountain
and, in the process, gave birth to conceptual art. Dada also awakened interest in Paris, where André Breton, a young poet with big ideas, founded a Dadaist journal,
Littérature
. In 1919, Tzara himself moved to Paris and continued to issue manifestos and organize “anti-art” performances. But Breton was not a natural follower. In 1923, when he was twenty-seven, he broke with Tzara and, with the publication of the
Surrealist Manifesto
the following year, gave birth to a new movement, which he would lead, in France and in exile, for the next four decades.

Over time, Surrealism would be best known for its paintings, for the dreamlike or phantasmagorical images created by Dalí, Ernst, Miró, René Magritte, André Masson and Yves Tanguy. But Breton saw the movement as an all-encompassing way of life, one that involved connecting to an inner world—what he called “pure psychic automatism”—as well as transforming the outer world. Breton had studied medicine and neurology and, in treating victims of shell shock in World War I, he used some of Freud’s psychoanalytical techniques. Among the Surrealists, he promoted exploration of the unconscious through interpretation of dreams and through “automatic writing,” in which the unconscious guides the hand in a form of free association. Breton’s own writing included an experimental novel,
Nadja
, which revolved around madness, another subject of great interest to him. Also drawn to the movement were some of the leading poets of the day—Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos and Benjamin Péret—who saw Surrealism as a liberation from the French classical order. Satie, the avant-garde composer who
died in 1925, was soon part of the circle, demonstrating that all art—indeed, all life—could be surreal.

The Spanish director Luis Buñuel and Dalí illustrated this in two bizarre and provocative movies,
Un Chien andalou
(An Andalusian Dog) and
L’Âge d’or
(The Golden Age). In the case of
L’Âge d’or
, which was promptly banned by the Paris police chief after violent protests in some theaters, the movie was financed by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, aristocratic art patrons who delighted in shocking
la bourgeoisie
. The couple also backed Cocteau’s
Le Sang d’un poète
(The Blood of a Poet), a Surrealist movie that, typically, Cocteau denied was Surrealist. Indeed, there were other artists, among them the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Magritte, who, while using the language of Surrealism, rejected Breton’s authoritarian leadership and refused to join his movement.

Breton himself was more interested in poetry than politics, but he also defined Surrealism as revolutionary in the broadest sense. Hoping to reach beyond his tight Left Bank circle, he led his followers into the French Communist Party in 1926. If their aim was to liberate society, however, their timing was poor. Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin installed the one-man rule that began by smothering artistic freedom in the name of Socialist Realism and would soon terrorize millions. Abroad, Stalin’s agents increasingly forced foreign Communist parties to follow Moscow’s orders to the letter—and this included holding up the Soviet cultural model as an example for all. By 1933, Breton had had enough and began criticizing party positions. He and Éluard were promptly drummed out of the party as heretics. When Aragon chose not to follow them, he was in turn expelled from the Surrealist movement by Breton. In the escalating drama of French politics, this was merely a sideshow. But it presaged how culture—and, notably, the world of letters—would soon be sucked into the ideological maelstrom.

What mattered to most of the people of France was who governed the country—or, rather, whether France was actually governable. About this, there were serious doubts, particularly under the Third Republic. Its constitution, a reaction against Napoleon III’s imperial centralism, created a weak presidency and spawned endlessly squabbling coalition governments. Power lay with the Chamber of Deputies, which elected every prime minister and which, in the eyes of many French citizens, existed largely to make deals.
Leading the non-Communist left was a charming Jewish intellectual and former theater critic, Léon Blum. Floating somewhere in the middle were the Radicals, who usually joined conservative-led coalitions but were themselves divided between old-school leaders like Camille Chautemps and Édouard Herriot and a younger group led by Édouard Daladier; between them, these three alone served as prime minister on ten different occasions. On the right, Raymond Poincaré and André Tardieu also frequently passed through the revolving doors: each was prime minister three times. So also was Pierre Laval, who began his political career as a socialist and ended up as prime minister of France’s collaborationist government during the German occupation.
^*
Providing a rare voice of sanity was Paul Reynaud, who alone campaigned for rearmament, although he took over the government only in March 1940, too late to make any difference.

These, then, were the men leading France as it drifted toward calamity. “Why is France governed by seventy-five-year-old men?” the satirical weekly
Le Canard Enchaîné
famously asked. It answered, “Because the eighty-year-olds are dead.”
⁴
While the Soviet Union produced Stalin, Italy Mussolini and Germany Hitler, France had no fewer than thirty-four governments between November 1918 and June 1940.

How these governments handled the Depression only added to the paralysis. The French economy—though not necessarily the population—had fared well in the 1920s, spawning a stubborn faith in the importance of a strong franc and a balanced budget. And when the French economy appeared to survive the immediate aftershocks of the 1929 Wall Street crash, this faith was reinforced. But in 1931, the Depression reached France, and it was quickly aggravated by devaluation of the British pound and, later, of the American dollar. With the franc suddenly overvalued, French exports fell sharply and domestic unemployment began to grow. With the exception of Reynaud, France’s political leaders remained firmly opposed both to devaluing the franc and to fighting deflation with deficit spending; instead, to preserve a balanced budget, they cut back government expenditures, including military spending.

The consequences of this policy were disastrous: the Depression
lasted longer in France than in many other countries; social unrest fed political extremes; and the country fell behind in the accelerating European arms race. Finally, in September 1936, the franc was devalued, but by then the slump in industrial production was bringing inflation. In contrast, by the mid-1930s, Hitler was priming the German economy and financing his massive rearmament program almost entirely through huge deficits.

The weakness of successive French governments became an invitation for extremes to fill the vacuum. It could be argued that France had long been a nation at war with itself, with its history since the 1789 revolution punctuated by oft-violent confrontations like the 1848 workers’ revolt, the 1871 Paris commune and the 1905 separation of church and state. No less polarizing in intellectual circles was the Dreyfus affair. And, like other major political crises, it shaped the future. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment for spying for Germany. The case set off a wave of anti-Semitic hysteria, but also a response from a small group of intellectuals led by the novelist Émile Zola, who on January 13, 1898, published an open letter in
L’Aurore
under the headline
“J’accuse …!”
In it, he charged the French army of falsifying evidence against Dreyfus. The army’s outraged response forced Zola into exile in London for a year, but in 1906 Dreyfus was exonerated. If Dreyfus himself was now officially an innocent man, however, the end of the “affair” did not end anti-Semitism. In fact, anti-Semitism had even acquired a degree of respectability.

Among leading anti-Dreyfusards were two writers, Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, who would have enormous influence on intellectuals through the 1930s. Barrès began on the left, but he ended up promoting what became known as “ethnic nationalism,” a form of xenophobia in which anti-Semitism played a large role. Barrès died in 1923, leaving the intellectual extreme right in the hands of Maurras, a poet and critic who in 1898 had founded a nationalist, monarchist and anti-Semitic movement called L’Action Française. Maurras was also deeply anti-German, persuaded after World War I that the Germans would seek to avenge the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. And it was Maurras who in the early 1930s became the mentor of a generation of young writers, notably Abel Bonnard, Lucien Rebatet and Robert Brasillach, who all became outspoken advocates of anti-Semitism. Yet even Maurras was not extreme enough for many
of them. By the end of the decade, these and other “graduates” of L’Action Française had distanced themselves from Maurras’s Germanophobia and embraced the new Nazi model.

What upset many conservatives was the large influx of foreigners into France, a human wave unmatched in any other European country and comparable to migration to the United States over the same period. Put differently, the loss of lives in World War I and the low fertility among French couples after the war had been compensated by the arrival of large numbers of Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Belgians, Russians, Greeks and Armenians. As a result, the proportion of people living in France who had been born abroad rose from 2.6 percent to 8 percent of the population between 1900 and 1931. The Jewish population in France also more than tripled in four decades, from 90,000 in 1900 to 300,000 in 1940, with a good number of these immigrants living in the crowded neighborhoods of eastern Paris. This reinforced the view among French xenophobes that all Jews were somehow foreign and that wealthy and influential French Jews had infiltrated and taken over parts of society on behalf of some ill-defined alien interest. The reaction of many long-established French Jewish families, on the other hand, was to distance themselves from those impoverished foreign Jews who had just arrived from the shtetls of eastern Europe, who spoke no French and who, if given the chance, would leave for the United States. All this made France fertile ground for Fascism.