And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (64 page)

Yet in that other high-profile visual art, fashion, Paris held its own
with panache. In March 1945, in a bid to reclaim their crown, leading fashion designers participated in a show called Théâtre de la Mode in an annex to the Louvre. Displayed on thirteen “stages” bathed in theatrical lighting were 228
petits mannequins
, or dolls, made of sculptured wire and angelic molded heads and standing just twenty-seven inches high. Each doll presented what Balenciaga, Lucien Lelong, Schiaparelli, Nina Ricci, Pierre Balmain and other designers had in mind for the spring–summer season of 1946. After V-E Day, two months later, the show carried the message “Paris is back” to London, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Vienna and, in May 1946, to New York. A generational change then brought radical renewal. With Coco Chanel living in Switzerland after her amorous adventures with a Nazi officer, in the late 1940s Christian Dior’s New Look revolutionized haute couture. Overnight the stark wartime look gave way to elegance and femininity.

In other art forms, the record of France’s postwar creativity was more nuanced. In theater, although Anouilh was the only new playwright of the war years whose work was widely performed abroad, Paris could soon claim Samuel Beckett as its own. Starting with
Waiting for Godot
in 1952, his stark existentialist plays, often written first in French, would revolutionize Western theater. Messiaen, the leading French composer of the postwar years, was another innovator, although from the 1950s it was Pierre Boulez who became the driving force of experimental electroacoustic music. Both theater and music also built on some of Vichy’s legacy. Jean Vilar, a theater director who worked with Jeune France, founded the Avignon Theater Festival in 1947. And as France’s culture minister between 1959 and 1969, André Malraux followed Jeune France’s example by opening cultural centers across France. The Jeunesses Musicales de France, created during the occupation, also survived: every year, it still presents some three hundred free concerts, attended by close to half a million children and teenagers.

In dance, though, while Diaghilev’s Russian dancers and choreographers had brought modernity to Paris early in the century, the initiative passed to New York. With Serge Lifar back at the Paris Opera in 1947 (he remained its ballet master until 1958), classical ballet continued to rule dance in France. And it, too, produced new names, notably Roland Petit as a choreographer and Jean Babilée as an acclaimed dancer. But New York breathed new life into modern dance, thanks to George Balanchine, who had worked there since
leaving Paris in the mid-1930s, as well as to Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins and a host of other American choreographers. Together, they created an entirely new vocabulary of contemporary dance that, two decades later, was enthusiastically adopted in France.

Where American influence was most immediately felt—and resented—was in cinema. Even before the war, the French movie industry was unhappy about Hollywood’s growing influence and, in the late 1940s, Hollywood was able to exploit the poverty and disarray of much of European cinema. But France was determined to rebuild its industry. And, in the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques,
^*
founded by Vichy in 1944, it had a film school capable of training a new generation of directors, with Alain Resnais among its earliest graduates. Some directors who made their name during the occupation, among them Robert Bresson and Henri-Georges Clouzot (despite the controversy over
Le Corbeau)
, also went on to make exceptional movies in the decade that followed. And the Cannes Film Festival, which had canceled its inaugural gathering in September 1939, finally opened in 1946 and quickly became the place where moviemakers most sought recognition.

Perhaps the crucial moment of postwar French cinema came with the founding of the
Cahiers du Cinéma
journal in 1951, because it spawned the New Wave of French movies of the late 1950s. The way was opened by landmark movies like François Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows
and Jean-Luc Godard’s
Breathless
. And along with such other directors as Resnais, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda, there came glamorous new stars like Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau. Almost overnight, it seemed, the Nouvelle Vague revived Paris’s reputation as a city of artistic innovation.

Literature had a more turbulent ride. In the late 1940s and 1950s, French fiction was still routinely translated into English and other languages. And as a measure of its continuing prestige, the Nobel Prize in literature went to Gide in 1947 and to Mauriac in 1952. But here, too, the war years brought new writers to the fore, none more prominently than Camus, who followed
L’Étranger
with
La Peste
in 1947, both quickly translated into English. In the 1950s, he also published
L’Homme révolté
(The Rebel), a historical analysis of the phenomenon of revolution in Europe, and
La Chute
(The Fall), his most existentialist novel. In 1957, it was his turn to win the Nobel Prize in literature. By then, a new literary movement had appeared in Paris. Known as the
nouveau roman
, or “new novel,” it was driven by a still younger group of writers who were more interested in experimenting with different styles than pursuing traditional narrative. Among these were Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon (who became a Nobel literature laureate in 1985), as well as the Argentine-born Paris resident Julio Cortázar. But their very obsession with style opened the doors to American, British and Latin American storytellers and, in many ways, French fiction never recovered from the
nouveau roman
.
^*

Rather, it was in the vaguely defined area of thought that France made its deepest mark in the postwar years. With his development of the existentialist ideas of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Sartre was for two decades Paris’s reigning philosopher. In 1964, he was awarded—and refused to accept—the Nobel Prize in literature, but the Nobel committee’s citation reflected his sway: “For his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.”

Sartre was not alone. Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 treatise,
The Second Sex
, became the cornerstone of modern feminism, while a disparate group of men played a central role in rethinking the ways history, literature and society can be analyzed. Variously introducing concepts like structuralism, deconstruction and poststructuralism into the modern language were the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the sociologist and Nietzschean philosopher Michel Foucault, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the semiotician Roland Barthes and the philosopher Jacques Derrida. They were not glamorous in the manner of painters and actors, for the most part they were not even household names in France, but their intellectual and academic influence was immense, not least in American universities.

Several of these men were, at one time or another, members of the Communist Party, yet they were not heirs to the
intellectuels engagés
of the interwar years or to the cultural
résistants
of the occupation.
Rather, it was again Sartre who, by defending such varied causes as Algeria’s independence, the 1968 Paris student revolt and the anti-Vietnam War movement, kept alive the idea of the public intellectual until his death in 1980. And even those who crossed swords with him, like Camus and Raymond Aron, were in a sense reacting to the radical positions he took. Did this mean that, despite the betrayal of trust by collaborationists, French society still looked to intellectuals and artists to serve as moral guides? Certainly there were fewer pretenders to this title than before the war, because many had failed the test during the occupation. Yet in a country where politicians are uniformly distrusted, the perception survived that those engaged in artistic and intellectual creation were more committed to a disinterested truth.

The real question, then, was not if but how these influential voices exercised their power. And here, once more, France offers an interesting lesson. Probably no other country better illustrates the perils assumed by a population that is educated to revere theories: it becomes fertile ground for extremism. Some see this as another legacy of the 1789 revolution, the inebriating notion that an idea translated into action can bring sudden, radical and idealized change. Certainly, during much of the twentieth century, many prominent French writers and intellectuals propagated doctrines—monarchism, Fascism, anti-Semitism, Communism, even Maoism—that offered explanations and solutions for everything. If French intellectuals no longer have the authority they once enjoyed, then, it is because these doctrines have failed and these mirages of Utopia have vanished. All for the better, no doubt: politically speaking, artists and writers may now be less prominent, but they are also less dangerous. They can still use their prestige and celebrity to ring alarm bells on national and global issues ignored by the political establishment. It is just that they no longer believe that ideas alone can resolve life’s problems.

*
In 1986, the school was renamed the École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l’Image et du Son and is now known as La Fémis, the acronym for the Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son.

*
In 2006, Irène Némirovsky’s
Suite française
was the first French novel to become a major American best seller since Françoise Sagan’s
Bonjour tristesse
(Hello, Sadness) and Simone de Beauvoir’s
Les Mandarins
more than fifty years earlier.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

EVERYONE
who has written a book about the occupation of France in recent decades owes a debt to Robert O. Paxton for his pioneering work on the subject. I owe a particular debt to Professor Paxton, who generously agreed to read my manuscript and, in doing so, corrected myriad errors and offered immensely useful ideas to improve the text. I was no less lucky that Robert Gottlieb, editor extraordinaire, was willing to read my manuscript at a stage where his erudite mind and sharp eyes could still shape the final result. My deepest thanks to these two Bobs.

I am also grateful to other experts and friends who read all or parts of this book and saved me from many pitfalls, among them Daphné Anglès, Lenny Borger, Myriam Chimènes, Hector Feliciano, Debra Isaac, Karine Le Bail, Gisèle Sapiro, Yannick Simone and C. K. Williams. As a journalist, I would have felt even more of an intruder in the world of historians had I not been able to interview many who had firsthand experience of the cultural life of Paris during the occupation. I am enormously appreciative of the time, memories and reflections of Claude Anglès, Jean Babilée, Héléna Bossi, Pierre Boulez, Leonora Carrington, Danielle Darrieux, Dominique Delouche, Michel Déon, Dominique Desanti, Michel Francini, Françoise Gilot, Stéphane Hessel, Elina Labourdette, Madeleine Malraux, Micheline Presle, Denise René, Jorge Semprun and Annie Ubersfeld, as well as those of the late Marcel Carné, Maurice Druon, Marguerite Duras and Willy Ronis.

I would also like to record my recognition of the academics and historians who, while too numerous to name outside my bibliography, have done much of the hard work that has made my overview possible. As well, the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent and the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine have supported research that has proved enormously useful to me. Without the work of these
scholars and institutions, I would not have known where to start. I was also lucky to count on Ginny Power for help in finding the photographs accompanying this book.

I owe special thanks to Ashbel Green at Knopf, who not only planted the seed of this book fifteen years ago but who over the past thirty years has proved both a loyal friend and an immensely patient editor. Susanna Lea, a dear friend long before she became my agent, has never ceased to nudge me and encourage me. My mother, Ina, in her one hundredth year while I was writing this book, was, as always, an inspiration. Finally, my wife, Marlise Simons, has once again allowed me to disrupt our lives by devoting long hours to a book. My fondest gratitude for her patience, endurance and support.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES

A number of books proved constantly useful to me during the preparation of this book. For general background, I counted on:
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944
by Robert O. Paxton;
France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944
by Julian Jackson; and
France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise
by Philippe Burrin. For a cultural overview, I was helped by
La Vie parisienne sous l’occupation
by Hervé Le Boterf and
La Vie culturelle sous l’occupation
by Stéphanie Corcy. Books covering more detailed aspects of culture during the occupation are listed below.

CHAPTER 1
Everyone on Stage

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beauvoir, Simone de.
La Force de l’âge. 1
960. Paris: Éditions Gallimard (Folio), 1986.

Bernier, Olivier.
Fireworks at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties
. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand.
Bagatelles pour un massacre
. Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1937.

Gide, André.
Back from the U.S.S.R
. Translated by Dorothy Bussy. London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1937.

Guéhenno, Jean.
Journal des années noires
. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1947.

Jackson, Julian.
France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.