And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (5 page)

Moscow was no less active. Initially, its principal agent was Willi Münzenberg, a founding member of the German Communist Party who served as a Comintern agent in Paris and elsewhere in western Europe after 1933. Although many French intellectuals were already in the Communist Party, Münzenberg’s talent was to draw non-Communists into the anti-Fascist struggle, notably by creating seemingly respectable front organizations. These fellow travelers included exiled German and Austrian writers, as well as French intellectuals alarmed by Hitler’s rise to power. Malraux, a writer with a penchant for romantic adventure, did not join the Communist Party, but he nonetheless traveled to Moscow in August 1934 to attend the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. He annoyed his official hosts by rebuking them for imposing Socialist Realism on Soviet writers, noting that “your classic writers give a richer and more complex picture of the inner life than the Soviet novelists,”
¹²
yet he remained useful to Moscow. In June 1935, he helped to organize the First International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture, which was held in Paris. And while Moscow largely controlled its deliberations, the congress was able to present a dazzling panoply of writers—Gide as its honorary chairman, along with E. M. Forster, Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, Waldo Frank, Heinrich Mann and many others—as friends of the Soviet Union and foes of Nazi Germany.

There were tensions. Ilya Ehrenburg, a Russian journalist and Soviet agent involved in organizing the congress, had earlier written a provocative pamphlet calling Breton and the Surrealists
pédérastes
. On the eve of the congress, Breton met and repeatedly slapped Ehrenburg, which resulted in the Surrealists being excluded from the gathering. René Crevel, a poet who had been expelled from the Communist Party along with Breton and Éluard, tried to have this ban lifted; when his efforts failed, in despair, he committed suicide.
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Eventually, a statement by Breton was read to the congress by Éluard, but late at night, after most delegates had left. A more important
issue related to the fate of Victor Serge, a Belgian-born French-language writer who joined the Bolshevik Revolution and was now in a labor camp in the Urals. Ehrenburg worked to keep the Serge case out of debate, but several intellectuals, including Gide, signed a letter calling for his release, which Gide himself delivered to the Soviet embassy in Paris. One year later, Serge was freed and, although France under Prime Minister Laval refused him a visa, he was allowed to travel to Belgium.

Soon, though, the dominant reality for the European left was the Spanish civil war. Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy moved quickly to arm Franco’s Nationalist forces, but only the Soviet Union was willing to help the Republican government in Madrid. For that reason, even non-Communist leftists were ready to close ranks around Moscow. French anti-Fascist intellectuals, all the more embarrassed by the Popular Front’s refusal to help the Spanish Republic, felt called upon to act. Along with numerous British, American and Latin American intellectuals, a French delegation led by Aragon traveled to Madrid and Valencia in July 1937 to attend the Second International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture. A few French writers even volunteered to fight alongside the Republicans. Among these was Malraux, who, using old planes obtained in France, put together a rudimentary Republican air force called Escadrille España. Although the squadron’s military impact was minimal, it served as a symbol of widespread French sympathy for the Republican cause.

A more lasting protest against the horrors of the Spanish war came from Picasso. Although he never left Paris, as Spain’s most celebrated artist, he agreed at the start of the civil war to be named director of the Prado Museum. In early 1937, he was invited to paint a major work for the Spanish pavilion at that summer’s Paris International Exhibition. Although he was undecided on a theme, it was suddenly provided for him by the bombing of the Spanish Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian warplanes on April 26. By early July,
Guernica
, his mural-sized work in black, white and shades of gray, was displayed prominently in the Spanish pavilion; with its shocking evocation of death and destruction, it brought home what was taking place beyond France’s southern border. The massively obtrusive German and Soviet pavilions, facing each other almost menacingly beside the Seine, were in turn harbingers of what lay ahead. After the international exhibition,
Guernica
toured Europe and the United States to
help raise funds for the Spanish Republic. When the civil war ended with Franco’s victory, the painting remained in the Museum of Modern Art in New York until democracy was finally restored to Spain in the late 1970s.

German and Italian support for Franco eventually sealed the fate of the republic, but while the conflict continued, Moscow used it to smother anyone on the left who refused to toe the Soviet line. Its argument, successfully imposed on European Communist parties, was that any criticism of Moscow was commensurate to supporting Fascism. Its main victims were Trotskyites and anarchists fighting in Spain, a brutal sectarianism witnessed—and later denounced—by George Orwell and Arthur Koestler. But Moscow also hoped that, in the name of solidarity with the Spanish Republic, non-Communist leftists in Europe would not speak out against Stalin’s growing heavy-handedness at home. In one high-profile case, this approach failed dramatically.

Although Gide had never before been politically active, by the early 1930s he was openly expressing sympathy for Communism and admiration for the Soviet Union. Such was his international prestige that Moscow was understandably delighted when the writer, then in his late sixties, finally accepted an invitation to visit the Soviet Union in June and July of 1936, by chance just weeks before the opening of the infamous Moscow trials. The voyage began with Gide addressing Maxim Gorki’s funeral in Red Square and pledging to defend “the destiny of the Soviet Union.” Over the next four weeks, traveling in great comfort, with the Russian-born publisher Jacques Schiffrin as his interpreter, Gide was showered with honors as a valued friend of the regime. On his return to Paris, he immediately wrote his account of the trip,
Retour de l’U.R.S.S
. (Back from the USSR).

It was not what his Soviet hosts had expected. Gide’s message was clear: he had wanted to find confirmation of what, three years earlier, he had described as “my admiration, my love, for the U.S.S.R.”
¹⁴
He found some positive things to recount, and he expressed his conviction that the Soviet Union “will end by triumphing over the serious errors that I point out,”
¹⁵
but his final verdict was devastating. He noted that artists could only follow the party line. “What is demanded of the artist, of the writer, is that he shall conform; and all the rest will be added to him.”
¹⁶
His fiercest criticism focused on the total lack of
freedom in the Soviet Union: “And I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler’s Germany, thought be less free, more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized.”
¹⁷

Gide’s manuscript fell into the hands of Communist intellectuals, who hurriedly leaned on him to soften his attack on Moscow, arguing that it would damage the Republican cause in Spain. He nonetheless went ahead with publication. The book, which was quickly translated into English, naturally pleased the right, but it also shocked many non-Communists on the left, among them Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s young companion. In her memoir
La Force de l’âge
(The Prime of Life), she recalled, “We had never imagined the U.S.S.R. to be a paradise, but we had also never seriously questioned the construction of socialism. It was inconvenient to be required to do so at the very moment that we felt disgusted by the policies of the democracies. Was there nowhere on earth where we could cling to hope?”
¹⁸
In 1937, in response to all the hand-wringing on the left, Gide published a fresh, more nuanced reflection on the trip,
Retouches à mon retour de l’U.R.S.S
. (Afterthoughts, Back from the USSR). But by then, he had become a nonperson for much of the left.

He would not be alone for long. Both the Communist repression of the dissident left in Spain and, even more, the violent purges of the Moscow trials were eroding loyalty to the Soviet Union. Oddly, perhaps, Trotskyism did not catch on in France, even though Trotsky himself was in exile near Paris between 1933 and 1935.
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Rather, it was the turmoil in Moscow that cast a deep shadow over the European left. As early as October 1936, for instance, Münzenberg was summoned back to Moscow and, after fierce interrogation, he suddenly feared for his life. Arguing that he was needed to organize the Comintern’s operation in Spain, he somehow obtained an exit visa and resumed his work from Paris. His usefulness to Moscow, however, was waning and, in May 1937, he was expelled from the German Communist Party. He continued his anti-Fascist activities, using some of the front organizations he had himself created, but he wisely ignored another summons to Moscow. Instead, in 1938, he founded a German-language journal,
Die Zukunft
, and, while remaining an
anti-Fascist, he took to denouncing Stalinism. In 1938, Koestler, who had been close to Münzenberg, also left the German Communist Party in disgust at the Moscow trials.

Remarkably, in France, the violent sniping within the ranks of the left and between left and right was taking place in seeming oblivion to Germany’s massive military buildup and blatant territorial ambition. It was as if winning ideological arguments were more important than strengthening France’s resolve to defend itself. As early as October 1935, France had responded meekly to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, boosting Hitler’s confidence that he, too, could act with impunity. In March 1936, France did nothing when Germany remilitarized Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles; two years later, when Berlin annexed Austria in what became known as the Anschluss, France again declined to act. Even confronted by Germany’s growing military might and expansionism, France’s political establishment remained divided over rearmament, with its aged army high command insisting that the country was safe behind the two-hundred-mile-long Maginot Line of defenses running along its eastern border.

A young tank commander, Colonel Charles de Gaulle, was almost alone in calling for the creation of new armored divisions. In any event, among both intellectuals and politicians, memories of the carnage of World War I were still feeding pacifism and the belief that Hitler could be appeased. In 1936, a rare reminder that France was ignoring the approaching cataclysm came in a popular song by the bandleader Ray Ventura, “Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise.” In it, an aristocrat’s servants keep reassuring her by telephone that all is well: true, her favorite mare died, as the stables were destroyed when the château burned down, and her husband committed suicide, but don’t worry,
tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise
.

In Munich on September 30, 1938, France’s prime minister Daladier and Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain gave Hitler the green light to occupy Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. When Chamberlain arrived home, he waved the agreement and promised “peace for our time.” When Daladier returned to Paris, he later recalled, he quite expected to be lynched; instead, he, too, was acclaimed as a hero. A few writers on the left denounced the Munich Agreement, but they were in a minority. Pacifists were further reassured on December 6 by a Franco-German declaration pledging
peaceful relations. Even in March 1939, when Germany swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia, the consensus in Paris was that no Frenchman should be asked to die to defend the Czechs.

The British and French governments, however, were shaken and finally offered to guarantee the independence of Poland, the next country in Hitler’s sights. This, too, had little public support. In an article in
L’Oeuvre
in May 1939, headlined “To Die for Danzig?,” Marcel Déat said no one could stop Hitler from seizing the Baltic enclave. “To start a European war because of Danzig would be a little too much,” he said, adding, “We will not die for Danzig.” Even then, few people in France believed that their own country’s survival was at stake. The American ambassador, William Bullitt, was less sanguine. “In considering the question of the defense of the United States and the Americas,” he wrote to President Roosevelt in April 1939, “it would be extremely unwise to eliminate from consideration the possibility that Germany, Italy and Japan may win a comparatively speedy victory over France and England.”
¹⁹

Certainly, nothing in the social and cultural life of Paris in the spring and summer of 1939 could have persuaded Bullitt that France was ready for war. Costume and masked balls were as lavish as ever; nightclubs were putting on new shows; theaters and movie houses were full; plans were going ahead to open the new Musée d’Art Moderne; the fiftieth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower was being celebrated; and new books were being published, including Sartre’s
La Nausée
and Drieu La Rochelle’s
Gilles
. In April, the defeat of the Spanish Republic brought a flood of some 450,000 refugees into France, yet Franco’s victory had long been expected. Then, on August 23, 1939, to the astonishment of the French government, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression agreement, the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. One week later, Germany invaded Poland. On September 3, a few hours after Britain did so, France declared war on the Third Reich and began mobilizing its armed forces. The lives of the artists and intellectuals of Paris had finally—and abruptly—changed: within days, they were undergoing military training for a war they had hoped never to see. And, for a few brief months, ideological foes found themselves shoulder to shoulder in defense of France.