by Gay Talese
As an Italian citizen in Paris, where every day demonstrators in the streets protested the war and condemned Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini, Antonio felt uneasy about his future, but he managed to repress these fears until he saw them boldly presented by Picasso. Antonio felt again the sweat and terror of that day long before when he and thousands of others had fled Paris on the eve of the Great War, but that was in 1914, when he had been a young bachelor with few possessions and few cares beyond his own welfare. Now, he was a father of three children born in Paris, the youngest less than five months old; and if he were forced to go he would have to leave behind his spacious apartment, his business, and the many associates and friends he and Adelina had collected during a decade of married life in Paris.
Although a Francophile for more than twenty years, Antonio would not renounce his Italian citizenship, much as he might disagree with some of the contemporary policies of Fascist Italy. World opinion had begun to sour on Italy after Mussolini’s troops had invaded Ethiopia in 1935, but Mussolini’s joining Hitler in 1937 had further damaged Italy’s relationship with its World War I allies France, Britain, and the United States; and while these nations had remained officially neutral during the Spanish Civil War, there was antipathy among their citizens toward the Spanish, German, and Italian dictators. Nowhere was this more prevalent than in Paris, where left-wing factions had asserted themselves within the labor unions and the national bureaucracy, and on the boulevards and side streets of the city, waving red flags as they denounced the dictatorial triumvirate and fomented strikes protesting the French government’s resistance to joining the fight in Spain against the forces of Nazism and Fascism.
The French people’s hostility toward Mussolini at times grew into an anti-Italianism that touched Antonio and other Italian residents of the capital as it challenged their loyalties and dared them to choose between the two nations they loved. The French customers who now avoided Antonio’s shop, and the French veterans who had become uncharacteristically cool to their aging former Italian trenchmates who stood next to them at commemorative ceremonies honoring the battle victims of World War I, were in Antonio’s opinion hardly representative of the friendship that a majority of ordinary Frenchmen felt toward Italians. But he could not avoid the fact that the strong French–Italian bonds that had been forged on the frontlines were now in jeopardy of being buried with their wartime comrades unless the leaders in both nations quickly altered their policies and restored the harmony that had once existed between these two Catholic nations.
In the privacy of his fitting rooms, Antonio diplomatically urged both the French and the Italian statesmen who were part of his clientele to strengthen the weakening ties between the two countries; and in his role as president of the Italian Economic Federation of France and leader of the Paris-based Italian war veterans’ association, he reiterated this theme in the presence of other nations’ ambassadors and ministers with whom he came in contact as a frequent guest at official dinners and receptions. Antonio saw Mussolini as a man with more bark than bite, an egotist with a perhaps neurotic need to gain other people’s attention; yet he thought that the Duce could be reasoned with, must be reasoned with before he embraced Hitler as his single strongest ally. Mussolini was a dictator, but, Antonio believed, only a dictator could have restored order in Italy during the strike-ridden 1920s, perhaps saving the country from Communism; and to excoriate Mussolini for invading Ethiopia, as the French and British were doing, seemed somewhat hypocritical when one considered these two nations’ own history of colonial conquest. Worse, insofar as French–Italian relations were concerned, was France’s compounding its disapproval of Italian colonialism in 1936 by removing its ambassador in Rome, an individual who enjoyed Mussolini’s friendship and trust, Count Charles de Chambrun, and replacing him with Count René de Saint-Quentin, who on behalf of France refused Mussolini’s demand that he acknowledge Victor Emmanuel III as King of Italy and Emperor of Ethiopia. The Frenchman was unwilling to do so, for it would indicate official recognition of Italy’s recent African acquisition, and that prompted Mussolini to block Saint-Quentin’s transferral. Consequently, from October 1936 through October 1938, the years in which Mussolini and Hitler were engaged in foreign policy discussions affecting Europe and the Mediterranean, the French government was without the benefit of an ambassador in Rome. Not only Antonio but many Frenchmen saw this as a major diplomatic blunder—one made worse when Mussolini followed by pulling his ambassador out of Paris in 1937.
The French official most identified with the rift with Mussolini was a onetime customer of Antonio’s who, in early June 1936, had ascended to the premiership of France. He was Léon Blum. At sixty-four, Blum became the first Socialist and first Jewish premier in French history. Coming two months after Hitler’s militarization of the Rhineland—at a time when pacifism and the emancipation of the working classes seemed to represent a higher political calling in France than the clamorings by Colonel Charles de Gaulle for more tanks—the election of a nonmilitaristic, left-wing Jewish intellectual was infuriating to the French radical right; and even some Jewish leaders in France were discomforted by Blum’s success. They saw in his ascent a possible rise of French anti-Semitism to the level it had attained in the previous century during and after the Alfred Dreyfus trial, in which the Jewish French army officer had been unjustly accused of spying for Germany. An important rabbi in Paris urged Blum to resist the honor of leading the French government, and the rabbi’s concerns were perhaps realized when, on the very first day Blum was installed as premier, the right-wing deputy Xavier Vallat declared in the national assembly: “Your arrival in office, Monsieur le President du Conseil, is incontestably a historic date. For the first time this old Gallic-Roman country will be governed by a Jew.” Immediately called to order by the supervising official, Vallat would not be silenced. “I have a special duty here,” he insisted, “… of saying aloud what everyone is thinking to himself: that to govern this peasant nation of France it is better to have someone whose origins, no matter how modest, spring from our soil than to have a subtle Talmudist.” Again Vallat was admonished by the official and others in the chamber, none of whom was more enraged than Blum himself.
But Blum had experienced far worse in Paris earlier in the year. In mid-February, while riding with Socialist friends along the Boulevard Saint-Germain during a week when he and his party colleagues had held publicized pre-election meetings with their Communist associates, Blum was recognized by a group of right-wing ruffians who, after smashing the windows of the car, pulled him into the street and beat him so badly that he had to be taken to a hospital. Photographs of the battered Socialist leader that appeared in the press, and the public outcry against such violence, were generally believed to have influenced many voters to shift toward Blum’s Socialist–Communist coalition, the Popular Front; but the sympathy and concern for Blum’s well-being quickly subsided after he had moved into the premier’s office at the Matignon Palace.
Antonio Cristiani’s opinion of Blum had nothing to do with the latter’s religion (despite whatever failings might be attributed to the Italian people, their inherent individualism seemed to guarantee that anti-Semitism would not flourish in Italy); it had more to do with the fact that Blum had ceased being his customer. Exactly why he stopped ordering suits remained a mystery to Antonio, who recalled the many compliments Blum had paid him in past years, and Antonio could now only wonder, in the privacy of his diary, if Blum’s disenchantment with the expansionist colonial policy of Italy’s increasingly aggressive right-wing regime might have influenced his attitude toward his Italian tailor. Antonio continued to mail his brochures to the premier, but he received no more business from Blum.
In this Depression era, when many of the wealthier Frenchmen were taking their money out of the country—and when the franc, which had slipped from fifteen to twenty-one francs to the dollar, was expected to slip further, along with industrial production—Blum’s coalition of Socialists, Communi
sts, and bourgeois Radicals had demonstrated an unprecedented tolerance for strikes and work stoppages. It had committed itself to a workers’ wage increase averaging twelve percent, and the right of collective bargaining, and it would limit the work week to forty hours, with compensation for overtime. Workers were now entitled to a two-week annual vacation with pay, and Blum’s coalition would also allow the unionization of plants that employed more than ten workers.
Antonio employed nine men in his workroom, and should he hire two more his shop could fall under the control of a union, with his employees electing a shop steward who could challenge Antonio if he wished to dismiss or reprimand a tailor for inferior craftsmanship or an insubordinate attitude. Not only did Antonio worry that this might lessen his authority over his personnel, but he feared a decline in the standards of his craft. How could he insist that his men meet his highest standards with each stitch, and strive for perfection with each suit, if they knew that he lacked the power to punish them for deviations from his instructions? The shop steward, and not Antonio, would be setting standards. And what if the shop steward supported the men’s wish to work primarily on sewing machines, which involved less time and tedium than sewing every stitch by hand—what could Antonio do? If he said no, they could impose a work stoppage or a strike, and possibly put him out of business.
Strikes and work stoppages had proliferated throughout the nation; there had been revolts against management by French metalworkers, public utility workers, fuel oil deliverers, agricultural workers, bakers, and employees of hotels and department stores, restaurants and cafés. In excess of one million Frenchmen were on strike in early June 1936, and Léon Blum’s reaction was to sympathize with their demands, to condone their forceful takeover of factories as part of the class struggle, as a step toward an egalitarian society—giving the impression that he believed publicly, even if he did not privately, that equal rights and opportunities would produce equal results. If Léon Blum was so naive as to believe this, Antonio thought, the premier might have benefitted from knowing old Domenico Talese in Maida—who believed that some of God’s creatures were incorrigibly lazy, and that the proper way to wake them up in the morning was the method he used, slashing his whip against their bedroom walls. Antonio was not really sure that Léon Blum was privately any more democratic than Grandfather Domenico, as he noted in his diary:
Léon Blum is a wealthy descendant of a family of silk merchants. I knew him and his brothers from the time I began making their suits at Damien’s, and later at Larsen’s. Léon Blum became the family Socialist. He liked making speeches for workers’ rights and higher pay. But in his own household I know he was tough with his servants. He worked them hard and paid them little. I remember the messenger boy who used to deliver his suits saying that Léon Blum seemed to be changing his cooks, waiters, and other servants almost every week.
It was finally not Blum, but his Communist colleague Maurice Thorez, who managed to convince the French strikers to evacuate most of the factories they had seized during the spring and early summer of 1936, and to accept the gains the Popular Front had negotiated in return for the restoration of labor peace and the workers’ resuming their jobs. At the Bastille Day celebrations of 1936, in the second month of Blum’s premiership, Antonio watched Parisians crowd the streets singing the “Internationale” as often as the “Marseillaise,” and waving what seemed as many red flags as tricolors of the French Republic. Antonio stood among the spectators as Premier Blum acknowledged the marchers’ salutes and their signs reading “Vive Blum!” and “Vive le Front Populaire!” and for the first time he thought seriously of Communist influence in the city.
Antonio had continued to think of Paris in these terms throughout the period of the Spanish Civil War, which began four days after that Bastille Day celebration and lasted until Barcelona fell to Franco in January 1939; and while the war was conducted on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, hundreds of miles from Paris, its ramifications surrounded Antonio daily in the French capital. There were the red-bannered recruitment booths with posters urging men to enlist in the left-wing ranks of the Spanish Loyalists; the myriad events held to raise money and collect supplies for the Loyalists’ welfare; the rallies and revived strikes protesting the French government’s continuing failure to enter the war and assist their Popular Front confrères in Spain against the mutinous Spanish generals and their Fascist and Nazi friends in Italy and Germany. A work stoppage among Paris bus drivers and Métro workers in 1937, along with a strike at the Goodrich tire plant, were cited as the deeds of Paris-centered Communist union leaders who felt betrayed by the queasiness of Popular Front leaders in meeting the challenge of saving Spain from right-wing militants.
Antonio and other businessmen in Paris, few of whom believed that France had anything to gain by becoming entangled in the Spanish crisis, but who kept their thoughts to themselves (Paris abounded with spies, eavesdroppers, partisans unhesitant about smashing storefront windows), went about their duties and errands each day striving to conceal their inner feelings about the raucous speeches they heard all around them: from the left against the Fascists, from the right against the Communists, and sometimes the more squeamish voice of a centralist interrupting to ask (before being booed): Had France not shed enough blood in World War I? Should it not concentrate on defending its eastern borders, or building more tanks as de Gaulle had suggested? Loudly represented within the French right-wing rallies were middle-class Catholics who had loathed Blum from the start, and who saw the Popular Front leaders as the bastard offspring of Robespierre and those other godless revolutionaries who had tried to cut out the heart of the Church from the body of the nation; now in the 1930s these leaders had unleashed a workers’ reign of terror and an economic crisis, and had all but delivered the French nation into the arms of Soviet Russia. Given the choice of Spain’s being run by the Communists or the Fascists, the Catholics overwhelmingly favored the Fascists. Some Catholics would go even further than that, as was clear from the signs they brandished at right-wing rallies bearing the words: “Better Hitler than Blum!”
Antonio had no idea what Mussolini’s true relationship with Hitler was during 1937 and 1938, since he read conflicting opinions on the subject almost every week in the French and Italian press. But from his regular visits to the Italian embassy in Paris, together with frequent trips to Rome (where he continued to receive recognition and medals from the Italian government as an achieving emigrant), Antonio deduced that Mussolini was at most flirting with Hitler, although at times the Duce seemed to be emulating Hitler. Antonio was concerned in November 1938 when Mussolini broadcast a speech expressing the Fascists’ desire to expand the Italian empire at France’s expense into Tunisia, Corsica, and Nice. But at a reception at the Italian embassy in Paris, to mark the return of the Italian ambassador after a year’s absence, the latter privately reassured Antonio and other business leaders that Mussolini was not being serious, that he was just venting some of his frustrations toward the French Socialists and the Paris press for failing to give him sufficient credit for his peacekeeping role two months earlier at the Munich conference.
The Duce had been magnificent at Munich, the ambassador reminded his guests; Mussolini had convinced the Führer to settle for a small piece of mostly German-speaking Czechoslovakia in return for a vow of no further aggressions in Europe. The French representative to Munich in September, joining Hitler, Mussolini, and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, was Edouard Daladier, a Popular Front figure who had stepped in as premier after Blum’s second cabinet had fallen in April 1938. When Daladier returned from Munich he was greeted enthusiastically by most Frenchmen for his efforts in maintaining world peace. In his cheering section was Blum, who, ignoring Mussolini’s participation, commented: “There is not a woman and not a man to refuse Messrs. Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier their rightful tribute of gratitude. War is avoided.”
Antonio was unconvinced by Blum’s optimism, and was even less convince
d in the following months as Mussolini became palpably more belligerent, unnecessarily provoking anger in Paris with such observations as: “The French respect only those who have defeated them.” When Chamberlain visited Mussolini in January 1939, no doubt trying to convince the Duce that Italy could have friends other than the Germans (Hitler had visited Rome the previous spring), Antonio was in Rome with his wife, en route back to Paris after spending the Christmas holidays with Adelina’s family in Bovalino. They had decided to leave their three children under the care of Adelina’s family in southern Italy, for they were unsure that Paris would be safe for them much longer.
I must take every precaution, Antonio wrote in his diary on January 26, shortly after returning to Paris. I don’t feel right about what’s going on. I don’t trust any of these people in government. I wouldn’t trust Mussolini, Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier, Blum, or any others. I don’t trust the crowds around them. The crowds in the streets of Rome gave Chamberlain a tremendous reception. I’m told they also did that for Hitler. I remember hearing them cheer for President Poincaré as he waved from his carriage after returning from Russia in 1914. You should never trust people when they are enthusiastic.