And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (51 page)

Gide, too, left France. He regretted offering an excerpt from his
journal to the collaborationist
NRF
, but he was not made to be a resistance leader. In May 1942, he moved to Tunisia, which, although Vichy-ruled, offered him a degree of detachment from the war. Then, six months later, after the Allies occupied Algeria and Morocco and the Germans and Italians took over Tunisia, Gide was given a real taste of enemy occupation. Finally, in May 1943, the Allies freed Tunisia and he, too, was free to move to Algeria, where he sponsored a new literary review,
L’Arche
. He dined there on June 26 with General de Gaulle. “I shall not find it hard to hang my hopes on him,” he noted that same evening.
⁶

Gide’s close friend Roger Martin du Gard, the Nobel literature laureate in 1937, opted for still greater silence. In 1940, having finally published the epilogue of his best-known work, the eight-volume family epic
Les Thibault
, he moved first to Nice, then to Cap d’Antibes. There, he devoted himself to a new novel,
Le Lieutenant-colonel de Maumort
, but he published nothing until after the liberation. For his part, Mauriac, who stopped writing for any German-approved publisher after 1941, was by 1942 engaged in the intellectual resistance.

André Malraux also chose to withdraw from public life. After his prewar campaigns against Fascism and his support for the Republicans in the Spanish civil war, he had come to personify the
intellectuel engagé
. But in 1941 and 1942, he turned down several invitations to join the resistance, arguing that only the Allied armies could free France. Instead, he spent much of the war in a quiet corner of the Côte d’Azur, publishing one book,
La Lutte avec l’ange
,
^*
in Switzerland and following his half brother Roland into the armed resistance only in early 1944. Working with British agents in the Dordogne, Malraux assumed the name of “Colonel Berger” and made several secret visits to Paris. On July 22, while driving with a British officer, Major George Hiller, Malraux was arrested and jailed in Toulouse, but he was freed by resistance fighters one month later, just as the Germans were withdrawing from the city. After the liberation of Paris, he compensated for his late arrival in the resistance by joining the French army.

A handful of writers were nonetheless ready to act, helping British soldiers to flee France and collecting intelligence to be sent to London.
As a professional group, though, they were in need of leadership. Two men emerged to provide it: Paulhan, the literary critic who as the longtime prewar editor of the
NRF
knew most French writers, and Aragon, the Communist poet who broadened the movement by reaching outside Communist ranks. Other figures emerged, some as activists, others as symbols, but these two men played pivotal roles, recruiting new members, serving as points of communication and remaining coolheaded in difficult moments.

Their lives could hardly have been more different. Aragon, who at first struggled to reconnect with his Communist colleagues in the occupied zone, stayed in Nice until the Germans took over the south; he then hid for a year in Lyon and, again forced to flee, he and his Russian-born Jewish wife, Elsa Triolet, spent the final months of the occupation under the assumed names of Élisabeth and Louis-Lucien Andrieux in Saint-Donat-sur-l’Herbasse, fifty miles south of Lyon. Throughout, he wrote prolifically and, from mid-1941, remained in constant touch with fellow resisters in both Paris and southern France. Paulhan, in contrast, lived a double existence. An elegant intellectual in his mid-fifties, he was jailed in May 1941 after the Gestapo discovered his involvement in the Musée de l’Homme network, but he was freed thanks to Drieu La Rochelle and promptly resumed his resistance activities. At the same time, he maintained an aura of respectability: he lived with his wife on the rue des Arènes in the 5th arrondissement, he went to work daily at Gallimard and he was a regular at Florence Gould’s Thursday lunches. “I admire Jean Paulhan’s gift to lighten life all around him,” Guéhenno, who knew of his resistance work, wrote in his journal. “What a delightful companion and how he would have helped me to live in this prison.”
⁷
Even Gerhard Heller, who befriended many French writers, described Paulhan as “my master” in his memoir.

But if Paulhan and Aragon became the pillars of the intellectual resistance, the idea of organizing writers came even earlier from Jacques Decour, a Paris lycée teacher who, with George Politzer and Jacques Solomon, founded
L’Université Libre
and
La Pensée Libre
, both sponsored by the Communist Party. These newspapers were aimed specifically at academic and intellectual elites. In February 1941, with its ninety-six pages giving it the appearance of a traditional literary journal,
La Pensée Libre
called on them “to revive the authentic traditions of our national culture in order to lead, along with writers, thinkers, scholars and artists of all occupied countries,
the great battle of enlightenment against obscurantism, which is the intellectual climate of the New Europe.” To carry this flag, the Communist Party then formed the Front National des Écrivains, or National Writers’ Front. But despite its grand name, it had almost no members, with several non-Communist writers refusing to write—even anonymously—for
La Pensée Libre
. Conversely, the Communist Party was not happy with Aragon’s decision to publish poetry under his own name, in the belief that he should channel his energy into subversive work. Nonetheless, Aragon’s first important initiative after the Soviet Union entered the war was to convince Decour to reach outside Communist ranks. And, with this in mind, during a secret trip to Paris in late June 1941, he put Decour in touch with Paulhan.

This bore fruit a few months later when Decour, Paulhan, Mauriac and several others cofounded the Comité National des Écrivains, or CNE, to represent all anti-Fascist writers. While Aragon agreed to set up a southern branch in the unoccupied zone, in Paris Decour took responsibility for publishing a new writers’ newspaper,
Les Lettres Françaises
, and began writing the first issue single-handedly. But on February 19, 1942, after the second—and last—issue of
La Pensée Libre
was printed, Decour was arrested by French police and was handed over to the Germans. He was shot on May 30, one week after Solomon and Politzer. The Communist Party passed the job of putting out
Les Lettres Françaises
to a man known as Claude Morgan, the pseudonym used by the son of Georges Lecomte, a member of the Académie Française. As Lecomte, he worked at the Louvre looking after provincial museums. As Morgan, he had to start from scratch, since Decour’s sister had destroyed all the texts Decour had prepared. Further, with no contact with Paulhan and the fledgling CNE, Morgan wrote the first six-page issue of
Les Lettres Françaises
entirely on his own. Printed on a mimeograph machine in September 1942, it opened with the manifesto of the Front National des Écrivains and included an homage to Morgan’s predecessor: “Adieu à Jacques Decour.”

Soon help came from Édith Thomas, an anti-Fascist writer who had just returned to Paris from the unoccupied zone. In the October 1942 issue of
Les Lettres Françaises
, also duplicated rustically on a mimeograph machine, Thomas wrote the main editorial, “Criez la Vérité” (Shout Out the Truth). In it, addressing the literary community, she described seeing a deportation train crowded with Jews,
including children:
^*
“The thin arms of children clung to the bars. A hand sticking out waved like a leaf in a storm. When the train slowed down, voices cried out, ‘Mummy.’ And nothing replied except the grinding of axles. You can then say that art has no country. You can then say that the artist should know how to isolate himself in his ivory tower, to do his job, nothing but his job. Our job? To be dignified, one must tell the truth. And the truth is total or it doesn’t exist.” Silence, she warned her fellow writers, meant complicity in the Nazi crimes.
⁸

As crucially, Thomas introduced Morgan to Paulhan and other CNE members, and the November issue carried a statement signed by the Comité National des Écrivains. By early 1943, Morgan was able to publish poems by Éluard and Aragon and articles by Paulhan, Sartre, Michel Leiris and Jacques Debû-Bridel, a conservative nationalist once close to L’Action Française. Finally, in October 1943, after printing nine issues on mimeograph machines, with the words “Founder: Jacques Decour, shot by the Germans” handwritten under
“Les Lettres Françaises,”
Morgan found a clandestine printer willing to take on the job. The next four issues were four pages each. In March 1944 the newspaper expanded to eight pages and incorporated
L’Écran Français, La Scène Française
and
Le Musicien d’Aujourd’hui
, representing the cinema, theater and music resistance groups. Some articles were even laid out by
résistants
working in the German-language
Pariser Zeitung
. Distribution of the monthly involved mailing copies in unmarked envelopes, placing other copies in apartment mailboxes, leaving some in cafés and circulating some among friends. The print run of four thousand in 1943 jumped to some twelve thousand in the months before the liberation.

Les Lettres Françaises
became the CNE’s principal raison d’être, but its members also met to exchange news and gossip, to debate their responses to new books, to plan denunciation of Fascist writers and to prepare for the end of the occupation. Morgan, Thomas, Aragon and Éluard were among its Communist members, but it also included moderates like Mauriac and Paulhan. Inevitably, a certain amateurism prevailed. Mauriac’s son Claude recalled a secret meeting at his parents’ house attended by Mauriac, Paulhan, Guéhenno and others. “With the air of inquisitors, they were drawing up—‘for victory day’—lists of those to be banned. Jean Paulhan said (with a certain
irony) that there was no need to change the law, since the existing crime of ‘flagrant treason’ would allow them to judge the accused quickly and without investigation.”
⁹

The committee—or at least a handful of its twenty-two members in Paris—would occasionally meet in Paulhan’s office at Gallimard, literally next door to that of Drieu La Rochelle. If just two or three writers needed to confer, La Closerie des Lilas, a restaurant on the corner of the boulevard du Montparnasse, was also a favorite. Then, from February 1943, the
comité
began meeting regularly in Thomas’s apartment at 15 rue Pierre-Nicole, near the Val-de-Grâce church, in the 5th arrondissement. The appeal of this address was that the building had no concierge, although the writers nonetheless took a risk by meeting in the same place every time. And they took other risks. When talking by telephone, they were meant to use codes, but Mauriac later admitted that he would forget the codes and wind up naming names. On one occasion, Thomas recalled, all twenty-two members in Paris came to her apartment, parking no fewer than fifteen bicycles below it. She begged her friends to be more cautious.

By 1943, many of the writers of the CNE were also participating in an extraordinary venture of clandestine book publishing. Its genesis was almost accidental. In late 1941, Jean Bruller, a journalist and satirical illustrator who chose to work as a carpenter during the occupation, read Ernst Jünger’s
Jardins et routes
(Gardens and Highways), his journal of the conquest of France. Impressed by Jünger’s sympathetic portrayal of France, Bruller wrote a novella, which he called
Le Silence de la mer
(The Silence of the Sea) and signed Vercors,
^*
taking the name from a mountainous region of southeastern France where he had once convalesced. His plan was to have it published by his friend Pierre Lescure, a secret British agent who was in contact with
La Pensée Libre
.

When the Germans confiscated the newspaper’s printing press (and arrested its editors), Lescure and Bruller instead formed their own underground publishing house, appropriately called Éditions de Minuit, or Midnight Publishing. They found a printer, Claude Oudeville, who was able to print Vercors’s novella, albeit only eight pages at a time, while Bruller turned to a childhood friend, Yvonne Paraf, to bind the books by hand. The first 350 copies of
Le Silence
de la mer
were ready in February 1942, but distribution was suspended when Lescure was forced into hiding. Finally, in September 1942, the first underground book of the occupation was released. Copies reached London, where Cyril Connolly translated the story into English; further copies were made and sent to France by RAF transport planes delivering weapons to the resistance.

Le Silence de la mer
was striking because its tone in no way resembled the anti-German and anti-Vichy drumbeating of
Les Lettres Françaises
. The story is told in the first person by a man who lives with his niece in an unidentified provincial town. Billeted in their house is Werner von Ebrennac, a well-educated German officer descended from French Huguenot exiles. Each evening he talks to them, but they remain silent. He says he has always admired France from afar, but on his deathbed his father had told him, “You must never go to France until you can enter with boots and helmet.”
¹⁰
He apologizes, insisting on his love for France. On subsequent visits, he reveals that he is a composer; he peruses the house library, admiring Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Molière, Voltaire; he recounts the tale of the Beauty and the Beast; he recites from
Macbeth;
he talks about Bach. Often he addresses the niece, to whom he seems attracted. And each visit ends with: “I wish you a good night.”
¹¹