WRITERS AND ARTISTS
The end of the war led in Paris to an immense hunger for ideas, restricted only by an initial shortage of paper. The new writing based itself in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and more specifically the bar of the Café Flore—which happened to be convenient to the residence of the great guru of Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and his consort, Simone de Beauvoir. Holding forth with a torrent of sophistry in the smoke-filled rooms of the Flore, he never wanted for a captive audience of students, many of them American. De Beauvoir, sometimes known as la grande sartreuse, like a prim governess with her hair austerely tied back, was ever the better writer, breaking new feminist ground with her Le Deuxième sexe and providing valuable material for contemporary historians with her various books of memoirs and her criticism of the Algerian War in La Force des choses (1963).
Among the new writers of the 1950s whose books about the past war deeply shocked Parisians was Jean Dutourd, first of all with his flaying attack on the nastiness of the petits collabos in Au bon beurre (1952) and—three years later—with his Les Taxis de la Marne, which exalted heroism at the same time as it excoriated the debility of the “men of ’40.” A few months after the publication of Au bon beurre Parisian theatregoers were agog with excitement at the first night of Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot—even if many understood its cheerless message even less well than the philosophy of Sartre. Highly contemporary, but much more entertaining, was Raymond Queneau’s irreverent bestseller of 1959, Zazie dans le Métro, featuring a horribly knowing child from the provinces, precociously aware of transvestism, lesbians, paedophilia and child prostitution, her one desire being to travel on the Métro—which is of course on strike.
In an intensely hot August of 1954 the revered Colette died and was given a public funeral in the Cour d’Honneur of the Palais Royal, paid for by the state—the highest posthumous honour attainable, and the first time it had ever been accorded to a woman. “Pagan, sensuous, Dionysiac,” declaimed the Minister of Education in his funeral address, and all Paris mourned. Surrounded by her cats, she had spent her last few years being carried from place to place in a sedan chair, sometimes sending down to the Grand Véfour for a lark pie. “What a beautiful life I’ve had,” she was recorded as remarking towards the end. “It’s a pity I didn’t notice it sooner.” As Colette left the scene, so almost simultaneously a new female writer, aged only eighteen, arose to fill the gap—and take Paris by storm: Françoise Sagan, who was both a product of and a reaction against the Existentialist wave. Writing of Bonjour tristesse, her first novel, Françoise Mauriac praised its literary merit but described its heroine as “a charming little monster.”
Of the outstanding journalists of the 1950s and 1960s, there was of course Camus, who founded Combat as a Resistance organ during the war, to continue long afterwards as a national paper—with his rallying cry that it was required of his generation to rise “up to the level of its despair.” There was also the vigorous young figure of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who launched L’Express. Known popularly as J-J S-S, Servan-Schreiber headed the attack on French policy in Algeria, exposing the worst excesses of torture, before going on to attack the foe of American universal power in Le Défi américain. Also deserving of mention was that remarkable phenomenon, the Paris correspondent of the London Evening Standard, Sam White. With his gravelly voice, Australian prize-fighter’s nose and generally dishevelled appearance, liberally covered with cigarette ash, Sam was central-casting for a tough foreign correspondent as played by Bogart.
In the world of painting, Picasso—forgiven his wartime career in Paris—went from strength to inventive strength (and from mistress to mistress), turning his hand to sculpture, fashioning marvellous bulls out of bits of old bicycles, broken urns and baskets. In 1949 he re-established both his pre-eminence and the claim of Paris once more to be the global art forum at an exhibition of sixty-four recent canvases. At the same time there was a retrospective of ninety works by Léger at the Modern Art Museum. As Picasso cornered the market, so other fabled contemporaries left it: in 1954 Derain died, knocked off his bicycle at the age of seventy-four; Matisse went next, in November, aged eighty-four, followed, in 1955, by Léger, his funeral held under the auspices of the Communist Party, of which he (like Picasso) was a member, and by Utrillo—tragically alcoholic since the age of ten, much overrated as an original artist, but his canvases of a grey Montmartre still commanding the highest prices.
DISTRACTIONS
There was one branch of the arts in which Paris had always led the world, and did so again just as soon as wartime restrictions lifted—haute couture. To reclaim its ascendancy, the industry put on a remarkable exhibition even before the fighting ended, in the Louvre’s Pavillon de Marsan at the end of March 1945, masterminded by Robert Ricci (son of Nina), Lucien Lelong, Christian Bérard, Dior, Patou, Carven and other great names. To beat shortages of materials the new designs that were going to sweep the post-war world were displayed on faceless, miniature dolls made of wire and looking like Surrealist sculptures. Some were even clad in silk underwear. In freezing attics, warming their hands over candles, an army of seamstresses and milliners had worked bravely and ceaselessly through the winter to produce the new clothes. To give it due importance the Garde Républicaine, en grande tenue, formed a guard of honour on the opening night. The exhibition was an immediate success: over 100,000 came to see it. Many could not possibly afford the dresses that would, eventually, be sold from the doll models, and had had nothing new to wear since 1939, but were drawn by this heroic statement that Paris’s pre-eminence in beauty and luxury was once more alive after the grim Occupation years.
February 1947 saw Christian Dior, a newcomer—described as suffering from “an almost desperate shyness augmented by a receding chin”—put on his first post-war show in the Avenue Montaigne. Such was the buzz about the show that some Parisians even tried to get in through the top of the house by ladder; it was that night that the New Look, with its tightened waists and ample skirts, was born, and Parisian haute couture was once more back on its rightful throne. Dior was followed by Givenchy, Balmain, Balenciaga, Courrèges, Saint-Laurent and others.
Not everyone instantly fell in behind these illustrious names, however. The fashionable Louise de Vilmorin, Duff Cooper’s mistress, was heard to declare in Saint-Germain that fashion was “a veneer foisted on naive women by despots. Give me sincere blue jeans!” Worse still, when Dior took his models to be photographed at the Rue Lepic market in a deprived area of Montmartre they were mobbed by angry stall-holders who tore their hair and tried to rip their expensive clothes off. Once more, it was a clear demonstration of the continued coexistence of two Parises—the rich and the poor. Following a fashion of a different kind, on the male side—as a kind of counterpart to London’s teddy-boys and a protest against contemporary values—were the zazous, children of the affluent bourgeois with their long greasy hair and equally exaggerated jackets with high collars—sometimes set upon and beaten up by Communist or fascist youths.
The world of the fashion model was not always that far removed from that of the oldest profession, once more back with a swing following the Liberation—with barely a pause for the cropped hair to regrow. By the early 1950s the Paris vice squad estimated the number of working prostitutes at around 17,000; they ranged from the blowzy workingman’s whores plying their trade for a few francs in the Place de la Bastille to stunning girls who worked the bars along the Champs-Elysées. More discreet, and more distinguished, were the various maisons de passe, or maisons de rendezvous, such as were so devastatingly portrayed in Buñuel’s 1966 film Belle de jour, and catering to every taste and perversion. There clients would be entertained by dazzling young models or jeunes filles biens in quest of a little extra pocket money and some fun.
THE SECOND COMING
Beset by the unwinnable Algerian War, by the merry-go-round of collapsing governments which seemed finally to have run out of talent and by perennial strikes, the Fou
rth Republic stumbled on to its extinction. Nineteen-fifty-six began with the unhappy omens of the Eiffel Tower catching fire and Mistinguett dying, followed by the longest stretch of cold weather (colder than Moscow’s) since 1940, which caused a quarter of Paris traffic lights to freeze up. Fisticuffs broke out in the Assembly, and the year ended with the humiliation of Suez—with France, in Parisian eyes, let down by both Britain and the United States, marking a caesura of distrust of her anglo-saxon allies never quite to be repaired.
Then, as a last indication of the decay of political institutions, there was the short-lived phenomenon of Pierre Poujade, a thirty-five-year-old shopkeeper from the Lot. A powerful rabble-rouser who appealed to his audience by performing a kind of striptease on the platform, hurling off his jacket, his pullover and finally his shirt as he warmed to his subject, Poujade created a grassroots political party out of the discontent of France’s small shopkeepers. Unambiguously called UDCA—Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans—it had the unpleasantly thuggish and anti-Semitic tendencies of the extreme right, but it was suddenly swept into the Assembly on a wave of petit-bourgeois discontent with taxation and government generally. In the elections of January 1956 UDCA amazed Paris and Poujade himself by attracting nearly two and a half million votes, to win 53 seats, with the Communists at the other extreme increasing their share from 95 to 150. It was the worst defeat for the conventional parties of the centre since the Republic first saw the light of day—and until the 2002 flowering of Jean-Marie Le Pen. But within the year the Poujadists in the Assembly, an undistinguished lot, began to disintegrate, and Poujade himself disappeared as swiftly as he had arrived; but Poujadism remained—in the English as well as the French vocabulary.
During the long years since his abrupt departure from politics in 1946, de Gaulle remained in the wilderness, fretting at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, more and more sickened by having to witness men of the circus of the Fourth Republic seemingly dedicated to reducing France to a third-rate power. Then, just as it had been war which had brought de Gaulle to the forefront in 1940 and again in 1944, so it was war—the disastrous Algerian War—that brought him back again in May 1958. His return was precipitated by a crisis in Algiers, after the Fourth Republic had proved its inability to end the fighting in Algeria. Tempers had been rising among the military in Algiers since the beginning of 1958, and the last straw had come with the execution in Tunisia of three captured French soldiers, on charges of torture, rape and murder. Exasperated, the army staged a coup in Algiers, beginning on 13 May with the seizure of the Gouvernement-Général building, where resided the organs of civil authority. The redoubtable General Massu formed a Committee of Public Safety—a sinister-sounding name to Parisians with a sense of history. A series of plots and counterplots, on Corsica and the mainland as well as in Algeria, thrust forward an apparently reluctant de Gaulle, aged sixty-seven. De Gaulle played hard to get, calculating sagely that to acquire a modicum of legitimacy he should step forward only when a clear majority of Frenchmen seemed to want him. Over several anxious days, Paris braced herself for a possible descent from the skies of the paras from Algeria, tough and hard-fighting men fed to the teeth with the tergiversations and pusillanimity of civilian politicians.
Finally, on 28 May, Premier Pflimlin resigned. De Gaulle, returning late to his hotel, told the concierge, “Albert, j’ai gagné!” The left reacted violently, with a giant demonstration of perhaps half a million winding its way from the Place de la Nation to the Place de la République—though not nearly as violently as some had feared. President Coty intervened. De Gaulle agreed to form a government. Later he was to recall how at home that night “above my house I watched the twilight descend on the last evening of a long solitude. What was this mysterious force that compelled me to tear myself away from it?”
On 1 June, for the first time since he had departed in January 1946, he presented himself to the Assembly, and was accepted. The Communist deputies thumped their desks and shouted, “Le fascisme ne passera pas!” But within a short while 30 per cent of Communist electors had deserted the Party. (Bizarrely, industrialists and big business also opposed de Gaulle initially—on the ground that he stood for change.) Otherwise an audible sigh of relief descended on Paris. In September de Gaulle held a referendum to put to the nation his new constitution, which conferred formidable powers on the President. Sartre voiced the left’s opposition to “King Charles XI,” declaring, “I do not believe in God, but if in this plebiscite I had the duty of choosing between Him and the present incumbent, I would vote for God; He is more modest.” Nevertheless, de Gaulle won by a sweeping majority. After all the confusion of the last days of the Fourth Republic, the new authority and indeed majesty ushered in by him had the most immediate and galvanizing effect upon France as a whole.
In January the following year, shortly after his sixty-eighth birthday, de Gaulle became president. His only words to his predecessor, “Au revoir, Mon-sieur Coty,” seemed like a calculated snub to the Fourth Republic. The Fifth Republic, and the new Gaullist era, had begun. France’s allies felt encouraged. In Paris, the Académie got on with life, vigorously debating the correct sex of the automobile.
ALGERIA MOVES TO PARIS
With de Gaulle, authority moved back from Algiers and her rebellious factions to Paris, which once more became the capital of France. But at the same time, and for the next four years, the war in Algeria moved to Paris. Promptly in June 1958, de Gaulle flew to Algeria, where he stunned the pieds noirs with his “Je vous ai compris” speech—though it soon became apparent that he had understood them not in quite the way they had hoped. Valuable time was wasted; the impetus lost. Soon disillusion was renewed on all sides as it became apparent that even Charles de Gaulle had no simple formula for ending the war. It was going to defeat him just as it had the men of the Fourth Republic. Meanwhile, as more and more conscripts returned to tell their families what was going on in Algeria, and reports of torture multiplied, so anti-war sentiment mounted in Paris—and with it the demonstrations. With uncharacteristic indecision de Gaulle let eighteen months run through his hands before coming out with any clear-cut new policy for Algeria, and his attempts to achieve a ceasefire with the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) were rejected with a crushing snub. Meanwhile the “ultras” or diehards among the pieds noirs of Algiers were becoming steadily more violent in their opposition to de Gaulle.
On 24 January 1960, there was a fresh eruption in Algiers which rocked Paris. Well-armed “ultras” started building barricades, in the best Communard tradition; gendarmes were brought in to clear them and firing broke out. The result was six dead and twenty-four wounded among the demonstrators, but no fewer than fourteen dead and 123 wounded among the unfortunate gendarmes caught in a deadly crossfire. For France it was the ugliest moment in the five-year-old war to date—Frenchmen were killing Frenchmen for the first time. The spectre of the 1940s, and, further back, of 1871, presented itself. Equally ominous was the spectacle of the elite paras manifestly siding with the demonstrators on the barricades. As Barricades Week dragged on, in Paris there was a grim sense that, once again, revolution was in the air.
Then, on the evening of the 29th, the weather took a friendly hand: in Algiers the skies opened on the over-heated citizenry. That same night de Gaulle appeared on television across France, dressed—with deliberate effect—in the uniform with its two stars familiar to so many in the army who could recall 1940 and the historic promenade through Paris in August 1944. It was as a soldier as well as head of state that he ordered the army in Algeria to obey him and not to side with the insurrection. He ended on an imploring note: “Finally, I speak to France. Well, my dear country, my old country, here we are together, once again, facing a harsh test.” Though saying nothing new, it was one of his finest speeches, a performance of tremendous power. De Gaulle won. Under an icy rain in Algiers the would-be insurgents broke up and went off home.
Yet 1960 was to offer increasingly little comfort to de Gau
lle, bringing less support and fresh enemies, as it brought the FLN new allies, both in the outside world and within France herself. In a remarkable summer entente, the Communist and non-Communist trades unions joined together to plead for successful peace negotiations, with threats of a general strike “as an answer to any insurrection or coup d’état.” Among Parisian youth the Algerian War was now dubbed “The Hundred Years War.” The discovery of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the impact of the nouvelle vague French cinema—especially of Roger Vadim’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, which seemed then as daring as it was embarrassing to the puritanical Gaullists— suggested which way domestic interests were turning. More and more articles were appearing in the press by young national servicemen returning from Algeria shocked by the “immoral acts” in which they had been forced to participate, or had seen or heard about. Out of all this inflammation of liberal sentiment there emerged in September in Paris a powerful “Manifesto of the 121,” which incited French conscripts to desert. The 121 signatories were all celebrities, including Sartre, de Beauvoir, Françoise Sagan and Simone Signoret. At the same time the “Jeanson Network” physically aided the underground activities of the FLN in France, running funds for it and helping FLN terrorists in hiding.
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