And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (63 page)

The reality is that cultural resistance had a limited reach, if for no other reason than that its numbers were small: albeit including some of France’s most respected writers, membership of the writers’ CNE, in both Paris and the south, never exceeded forty; the other cultural resistance groups were even smaller. And they all struggled to find the resources—and the printers—needed to put out their clandestine sheets. In its best moments in the weeks before the liberation,
Les Lettres Françaises
was printing twelve thousand copies per month (less than one-tenth of the print run of, say,
Combat)
. And with the exception of
Le Silence de la mer
, which was reprinted in London and delivered back to France by the RAF, Éditions de Minuit could usually put out only between five hundred and two thousand copies of each of its books.

After the liberation, Galtier-Boissière was dismissive of this literary resistance. “Poets who wrote a quatrain about Hitler for a confidential sheet—called clandestine—under a pseudonym believe
sincerely that they have saved France,” he wrote in his journal.
²
In fact, often the public understood that an artist or writer was in the opposition only when he was insulted by the collaborationist press. After the liberation, Mauriac recalled that it was thanks to the “calumnies” of his enemies that he was quickly designated an opponent of the regime. And it was attacks on Aragon by his erstwhile friend Drieu La Rochelle that publicly identified the poet as a resister. But the collaborationist press also fired indiscriminately, frequently targeting Cocteau for his homosexuality and—erroneously—accusing Guitry, Trenet and Lifar of being Jewish. In the end, the French were very aware of the armed resistance but knew little of the artistic and intellectual underground.

What, then, did cultural resistance achieve? Its real importance was not its public impact. Although it was given a structure by the Communist Party, it was born principally as a reaction—ideological, patriotic or moral—by a number of individuals who refused to accept the occupation and felt the need to do something. They then joined like-minded colleagues and found a way of expressing their views in print. Yet even if they aspired to reach a larger audience, their main feat was to preserve a core of decency among practitioners of the arts. Put differently, by following their consciences, they remained true to what they believed were the responsibilities of artists and writers. “The resistance of intellectuals was first of all useful to them, which after all is worth something,” Mauriac said after the war.
³
Taking place largely inside the world of artists and writers, this resistance also served to warn collaborationists that they would pay a price for embracing the German occupier. This much, at least, some in France could deduce from fiery clandestine poetry and the stirring “Chant des partisans.”

Even then, however, most collaborationists paid little heed to their critics. They were too fully enjoying being in the spotlight, ready to exchange their prestige for whatever benefits were available. And in contrast to the improvised struggle of the resistance press, they were well paid for their articles, and their pronouncements were widely publicized. Still more damaging was the example they set by socializing with the Germans and accepting invitations to Berlin. But, as always, not everything was as it seemed: Parisians would have been surprised to learn that some prominent writers, musicians and movie directors who worked with German approval were also in the resistance.
Instead, many French were left with the impression that cultural collaboration had become acceptable.

When the liberation came, then, cultural
résistants
hurried to make it known that, from 1940, there were artists and writers who rejected collaboration and actively opposed the enemy. In doing so, they wanted to rescue both their individual reputations and the prestige of performers and creators as a social class. And now the columns of the city’s new or reopened newspapers were open to them. Galtier-Boissière was amused by how quickly they responded. In his journal entry for August 28, he wrote, “First newspaper: a ‘message’ from Mauriac; second newspaper: a ‘message’ from Duhamel; third newspaper: a ‘message’ from Mauriac on the right and a ‘message’ from Duhamel on the left; fourth newspaper: a ‘message’ from Duhamel on the right and a ‘message’ from Mauriac on the left.… When you’ve had to hold back for four years!”
⁴
Soon Mauriac had a regular column in
Le Figaro
, while other former
résistants
had their own newspapers: Camus as editor in chief of
Combat
, Aragon as editor of
Ce Soir
and Morgan still running
Les Lettres Françaises
.

Sartre, who had begun glorifying the resistance—and, implicitly, himself—in
Les Lettres Françaises
, never altered his simplistic, and duly romanticized, claim that the only options were to collaborate or to resist. Many years later, he told an interviewer: “So every French person had the free choice to be part of the resistance, in their heads anyway, even if they actually did nothing, or to be an enemy.”
⁵
He even suggested that intellectual resisters were more important than saboteurs. “Our job was to tell all the French, we will not be ruled by Germans. That was the job of the resistance, not just a few more trains or bridges blown up here and there.”
⁶

The cultural resistance was no less intent on exposing collaborationists as deviants from the ethical standards claimed by the creative and performing arts. The greater the scorn that was poured on collaborationists, the greater the credit due to
résistants
. For this, the press was again crucial, giving full coverage to the chain of celebrity artists and writers who were arrested by the FFI and thrown together for a few weeks in Drancy and Fresnes. Meetings of the various cultural
comités d’épuration
were also reported, as were bans on the professional activity of collaborationists. It seemed reasonable to believe that only through this public cleansing ritual could the cultural community recover its standing in society. But even among
those claiming the moral high ground, there were soon deep disagreements. Specifically, hard-liners, mostly Communists, wanted strong punishment, while moderates—and, in practice, much of the public—were more forgiving. The gap between these two groups, illustrated by the justice-versus-charity debate between Camus and Mauriac soon after the liberation, continued to widen.

Paulhan, who had misgivings about the
épuration
as early as fall 1944, resigned in 1947 from the very CNE that he had cofounded. In 1952, he went further, publishing a critique of the
épuration
in a small booklet called
Lettre aux directeurs de la résistance
. Eight years after the liberation, he was still trying to rescue the resistance from political extremism. “I am a
résistant,”
he began. “I became one from the month of June 40 and I still am, or at least I think I am. And yet this no longer gives me pride. Rather, it fills me with shame.”
⁷
He accused the
résistants
of abusing their power: “Let me tell them that they have fallen into a trap: no less cowardly or treacherous, no less unjust than those among them who, on the torture table, informed on their colleagues.”
⁸
And he concluded, “I am neither politician nor judge. I am also not a priest. All I see—and this I see clearly—is that horror and disgust will awaken us tomorrow if we close our eyes today. We are owed arrears of justice and law. Let us have them! Then—and this should be possible—let us be kept informed.”
⁹

Whether or not Paulhan believed that the sins of cultural collaboration should be forgiven, by the early 1950s they had been largely forgotten. In 1951, Éditions Gallimard published Rebatet’s
Les Deux étandards
(The Two Battle Flags). The following year, it published Céline’s
Féerie pour une autre fois
(Fable for Another Time). And in 1953, Gallimard won permission to reopen the
Nouvelle Revue Française
—it was called the “new”
NRF
until 1959 to distinguish it from Drieu La Rochelle’s version—and Paulhan returned as its editor, opening its pages to all political currents, as he had done before the war. In his letter to the “leaders of the resistance,” however, Paulhan appeared to be addressing less the past excesses of the
épuration
than the current excesses of a Communist Party that remained as Stalinist and doctrinaire as it had been in the 1930s. The party had, of course, changed in one important way: it had emerged enormously strengthened from the occupation, winning 27 percent of seats in a new Constitutional National Assembly in October 1945 and participating in coalition governments until 1947. Even after it left the government, its control of the labor movement enabled it to organize
general strikes and other actions to destabilize the newly installed Fourth Republic.

In the world of culture, as power shifted sharply to the left, the Communist Party worked hard to impose its thinking on a new postwar generation of artists and creators. Even Éluard, whose wartime poem “Liberté” had inspired resistance, became a servant of the Soviet propaganda machine, penning an “Ode to Stalin” in 1950. Aragon, who remained the party’s intellectual commissar, edited its afternoon paper,
Ce Soir
, until it closed in 1953. He then took over
Les Lettres Françaises
as a weekly supplement of the party daily,
L’Humanité
. Still more influential was Sartre, who never actually joined the Communist Party but shared many of its positions. As the pipe-smoking guru of existentialism, he presided over the Left Bank intelligentsia from the benches of the Café de Flore. Those on the left who challenged this conformism could expect no mercy, as Camus was to discover. Briefly a Communist in his twenties in Algeria, he remained firmly on the left, but in 1952 his strong anti-Stalinism brought a rift with Sartre, whom he considered overtolerant of totalitarianism. As a result, he was increasingly ostracized by the left.

For sheer celebrity value, of course, Picasso was the Communist Party’s bright new star. In a 1944 interview with the American magazine
New Masses
that also ran in
L’Humanité
, he explained his decision to join the party: “Yes, I am conscious of always having fought as a true revolutionary through my painting, but I have now understood that this is not enough.”
¹⁰
In a separate interview with
Les Lettres Françaises
, he defended political art, saying, “No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war, for attack and defense against the enemy.”
¹¹
In early 1945, for the first time since
Guernica
, he painted a political work,
The Charnel House
, his response to the genocide of the Nazi death camps. In 1950, he traveled to Moscow to accept the International Stalin Peace Prize. And the following year, he painted another protest,
Massacre in Korea
, depicting American soldiers shooting Korean civilians. But Picasso was hardly a born apparatchik, and his next venture into political art would prove to be his last. When Stalin died, on March 5, 1953, Aragon begged him for a drawing of the dictator. Picasso, who was in the south of France, could only find a photograph of Stalin as a young man and, with that as a model, his sketch of a Georgian peasant appeared on the front page of
Les Lettres Françaises
. Such was the scandal provoked in Communist ranks by this “disrespectful” image
that Aragon was forced into a public mea culpa for the affront. Picasso was unrepentant.

Still, for all this political agitation, the cultural life of Paris slowly resumed. But clearly, much had changed. The liberation was followed by a harsh winter, aggravating fuel and food shortages, while the economy as a whole would begin to recover only when the effects of the Marshall Plan were felt, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. More significant, culturally the city was no longer a magnet for artists and writers from around the world. American writers were the exception: Richard Wright, Chester Himes, James Jones, James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and William Styron were among the dozens to experience the Left Bank expat life in the late 1940s and 1950s. But if these Americans found respite from racism and McCarthyism in Paris, they remained Americans in Paris and contributed little to the city’s literary scene. In contrast, European artists and writers who had been so integrated into Paris culture during the interwar years no longer needed a refuge from Fascism (and it would be some years before the city began taking in eastern European writers fleeing Communism). Many of them had also been scattered in the diaspora of the war. And even if some, like Chagall, did return, Paris was no longer at the center of their lives. Soon a question was being posed: Had the city lost its place at the creative heart of modern Western culture?

The clearest sign that cultural power was shifting away from Paris came in the visual arts, with Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism placing New York at the vanguard of contemporary art. In Paris, too, a new generation of painters emerged, including Jean Bazaine, Jean Fautrier and Nicholas de Staël, who were first noticed during the occupation and who created their own abstract movement, known as Lyrical Abstraction. Others went their own way, like Pierre Soulages, who became known as the “painter of black,” and Jean Dubuffet, who developed the neoprimitive style known as
art brut
. But they could no longer count on the influential art dealers who had done so much since the late nineteenth century to make Paris the world’s art capital. Now the market, the money and the energy were to be found in New York. Instead, Paris became an exporter of modern masters like Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Léger, who represented an earlier era. Even Surrealism’s leading artists, Dalí and Miró, had returned home to Spain.