Writers who were the victims of such abuse found it easier to choose their camp. Mauriac wrote of his own case:
The glorious name of Marshal Pétain resonated for me as for all the French … But at the same time I reacted instinctively, without calculating, in the direction of the Resistance—or rather I found myself on that side without even having to choose it: my enemies, much more numerous and virulent than I had imagined, designated my true place for me by their calumnies, from the first day.15
Gide was also saved from compromising himself by the attacks to which he was subjected. In Gide’s case it had been a close thing, and for a long time he had to struggle against what he called his ‘demon of curiosity’. When Gallimard laid siege to him, trying to persuade him to contribute to Drieu’s NRF, Gide’s attitude changed almost daily. Although he contributed to the first and third issues, in April 1940 he attacked Chardonne’s notorious article ‘Été à Maurie’, and announced that he would cease writing for the NRF.16
Culture under Vichy
The dilemmas facing intellectuals were different in each zone. In February 1941, a group of Communist intellectuals in Paris started a clandestine journal entitled La Pensée libre. Its first issue declared: ‘Today in France legal literature means: literature of treason.’ If this was appropriate for Paris, did it also apply to the South? Not in the opinion of another Communist, Louis Aragon, living near Carcassonne. In September 1940, Aragon published a poem, ‘Les Lilas et les roses’, in Le Figaro. It was reprinted in the collection Le Crève-Cœur, published by Gallimard in April 1941. These associations might seem suspect, but Aragon conceived his poem, and others which followed, as a coded form of resistance. He developed the notion of ‘contraband’ literature which he had formulated during the Phoney War in response to anti-Communist repression. In his poem ‘Art poétique’, published in August 1942, the lines
Pour nos amis morts en mai
Et pour eux seulement désormais
Que mes rimes aient le charme
Qu’ont les larmes sur les armes
passed the censor because the ‘amis morts en mai’ (‘the friends who died in May’) could be taken to refer to those who had died in the battle of France. But it was the execution of a group of Communist intellectuals in May 1942 which had inspired Aragon’s poem. In the essay ‘La Leçon de Riberac’ (June 1941) Aragon, discussing his experiments with the styles of medieval poetry, invoked the clus trouver (the closed art), of the Troubadours which allowed them ‘to sing to their ladies in the presence of their Lords’. He argued that contemporary poetry could exploit similar stratagems. Aragon’s poems had a great impact, and Le CrèveCœur was reprinted in London in 1942.17
Aragon was not the only poet to exploit the possibilities of sending coded messages through legal publication. Openings were available in several avant-garde literary reviews published in the South. Among these were the Marseilles-based periodical Les Cahiers du Sud; Max-Pol Fouchet’s review Fontaine, founded in Algiers in 1939; René Tavernier’s Confluences, published in Lyons from July 1941; Albert Béguin’s Les Cahiers du Rhône, published at Neuchâtel in Switzerland but read in France; Pierre Seghers’s Poésie, started in 1939 under the name Poètes casquées 39 (Poets under Arms 1939) to publish poets mobilized into the army (the first issue was dedicated to Péguy), and then continued as Poésie 40, Poésie 41, and so on. Poetry became important in literary resistance because it lent itself to ambiguity. Perhaps also, once open publication became too risky, the move underground was easier for poets accustomed to small readerships of initiates than for novelists accustomed to large audiences and public acclaim.18
These avant-garde reviews were not all unambiguously opposed to Vichy. Each had its own individual voice. The July 1940 issue of Fontaine declared defiantly ‘We are not defeated’, while Confluences was initially pro-Vichy. In December 1941, its editor, Tavernier, enthusiastically reviewed an edition of Pétain’s speeches. But whatever their stance towards Vichy, these publications all provided a tolerant forum for both established and new poets—Aragon published in Les Cahiers du Rhône, Confluences, Poésie, Fontaine—and increasingly they sailed close to the wind of Vichy disapproval. Confluences was banned for two months in August 1941 after publishing a poem by Aragon whose message was too transparent.19 The last poem Aragon published under his own name was ‘La Rose et le Réséda’ in March 1943. His subsequent writing appeared in clandestine publications.
For two years, however, the free Zone did offer some freedom of manoeuvre. Despite the cultural somnolence of the town of Vichy itself, a surprisingly rich cultural life existed in many cities of the South. The Occupation witnessed an unprecedented cultural decentralization because many Parisian intellectuals who had joined the Exodus decided to stay in the South after the Armistice. One intellectual magnet was Lyons, where many Parisian newspapers—Le Temps, Le Figaro, Action française—were now published. Lyons also had a reputation as a centre of Catholic thought, and for that reason several Catholic intellectuals (Mounier, Gabriel Marcel) took refuge there. Marseilles was also culturally vibrant thanks to the presence of so many French and European intellectuals, waiting to escape. Cultural life in Clermont-Ferrand was stimulated by the University of Strasbourg which had moved there after the Armistice. Nice benefited from thes proximity of Gide, Malraux, and sometimes Aragon.20
Although some degree of cultural diversity was possible in the shadow of Vichy, the official tone of the regime was moralizing, bien-pensant, and culturally stifling. Unlike Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, however, Vichy did not have a prescriptive cultural agenda. There was a project to create an Order of Artists, bestowing professional status and regulating artistic standards. Louis Hautcœur, Secretary General of the Fine Arts Ministry, believed that the decadence of Western art derived from the collapse of the studio system in which artists had been trained up as apprentices. The Order of Artists, by developing a corporatist structure for artists, was conceived as a step towards restoring such a system. But it never advanced beyond the planning stage.21
Vichy ultimately lacked the means, the coherence, or the time to develop an artistic policy. Some collaborationists in Paris called for ‘art in the service of the National Revolution’,22 and Rebatet denounced the decadence and Jewishness of modern French art (he liked Corot, Renoir, Degas, Rousseau, Utrillo), but the nearest Vichy got to a ‘cultural project’ was the promotion of folklore.23 Pétain’s only interest in art was to ensure that portraits sufficiently emphasized the blue of his eyes; Laval’s only interest was to use works of art coveted by the Germans as possible bargaining counters in collaboration.
There was no ‘Vichy art’ except in the sheer proliferation of representations of Pétain. There was a department (Imagerie du Maréchal) to orchestrate images of the Marshal; and another one, the Service artistique du Maréchal, to create an ‘art Maréchal’. The Service artistique was run by the ceramicist Robert Lallemant whose own work was influenced by cubism. He recruited his artists eclectically, and his own contributions—a plastic paperweight and a Sèvres vase—were of modernist inspiration. If there was a Vichy style, it was embodied in Gérard Ambroselli’s album on the life of Pétain, produced for the Imagerie du Maréchal. Using the folkloric style of the Image d’Épinal woodcuts, Ambroselli transformed Pétain’s life into the simplicity of a fairy story: content and style fused perfectly.24
German Ambiguities
What was life like for intellectuals in the Occupied Zone? In two respects, the Germans’ attitude to French cultural production was uncompromisingly repressive: they banned any manifestation of anti-German sentiment and eliminated any Jewish presence. Plays written or even translated by Jews were banned from the stage. From September 1940, publishers had to respect the so-called Otto List containing 1,060 works by Jewish and allegedly anti-German authors including Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Julien Benda, Claudel, de Gaulle, and Malraux. All books on this list had to be destroyed. More extensive lists followed in March 1942 and May 1
943. In return for complying with these lists (which only applied in the Occupied Zone), publishers were theoretically free to publish what new works they pleased providing these were not injurious to the Germans. Doubtful cases had to be referred to the German censors. In effect therefore the Germans put the responsibility of censorship upon the French themselves although the freedom of publishers was further constrained from the start of 1942 when the Germans started to use the distribution of paper, which was tightly rationed, as a form of control.
French publishers accepted this dispensation without protest. In most cases they did so without enthusiasm, apart from a few who rallied entirely to the New Order like Robert Denoël who published Céline and a collection of Hitler’s speeches. Another enthusiast was Bernard Grasset who returned promptly to Paris after the Exodus. He started a collection called In Search of France in which he published such collaborationist luminaries as Abel Bonnard, Chardonne, Drieu, and Déat. In November 1940 Grasset declared publicly that the Occupation would be ‘an opportunity to rediscover the real Frenchness of our being’.25
In the visual arts, the Germans banned Jews from exhibiting; Jewish galleries were ‘Aryanized’ and Jewish collections seized. Many of these works were stored at the Jeu de Paume Museum. Large quantities of booty were taken to Germany, but the effectiveness of the pillage was hampered by rivalries between different German departments. No one was more avaricious than Goering, who pillaged on a Napoleonic scale. In the course of his twenty visits to the Jeu de Paume, he seized ten Renoirs, ten Monets, and even works by artists who breached Nazi canons of correctness, such as the Jewish Pisarro. Those works left over once the Nazi barons had had their pick of the best flooded on to the Parisian art market which was more active during the Occupation than it had been for many years. Some works, however, were considered beyond the pale, and on 27 May 1943 the Germans organized a secret auto-da-fé at the Jeu de Paume, burning paintings by Picasso, Miró, and Ernst.26
In other respects, however, German cultural policy in occupied Paris was comparatively relaxed. The Germans pursued the bread and circuses principle that cultural distractions would keep the population happy.27 Behind this pragmatism, their real attitude to French culture was a schizophrenic mixture of jealousy and contempt: jealousy of France’s cultural predominance; contempt at French artistic decadence. Hitler who visited Paris only once, on 23 June 1940, was so in awe of the city, especially the Opéra, that he sometimes mused about razing it to the ground. In the end, he decided that the new Berlin would dwarf Paris in magnificence: Paris could be spared because Germany would do better. The Propaganda-Abteilung’s long-term objective was to break French cultural hegemony, but this did not mean imposing Nazi cultural norms in France or revealing to France ‘the secrets of Germany’s cultural renaissance’: Nazi values were not for export.28 In Nazi eyes, there was no contradiction between permitting France some cultural freedom and wanting to destroy French cultural hegemony. ‘What does the spiritual health of the French people matter to us?’, Hitler told Speer; ‘Let them degenerate!’
Allowing the French to choke on their culture suited those Germans in Paris who admired French culture and were keen for the opportunity to choke on it themselves. These cultural Francophiles were mostly employed at the Embassy, but there were also some, like Heller, working for the Propaganda-Abteilung. In 1981 Heller published a memoir describing his wartime experiences in Paris: his disillusionment with Nazism, his assistance to French writers in trouble with the authorities, his visits to Picasso’s studio. Presenting his book on French television, Heller seduced the public as effectively as he did French writers during the war, but his artfully selective account must be taken with a pinch of salt. Most Germans who displayed a marked affinity for the French were usually noticed and suffered for it by being sent to the eastern front (as happened to Bremer in 1942), or at least recalled to Berlin (as happened to Epting from June 1942 to January 1943). Heller’s feat of lasting the entire war in Paris suggests he had not taken that many risks. Certainly he was zealous in applying the anti-Semitic instructions to literature.29
Germans like Heller or the writer Ernst Jünger did certainly see themselves as Francophile, but as we have already observed in the cases of Abetz and Siegburg, German ‘Francophilia’ was often double-edged. It could coexist with an attitude of superiority bordering on contempt: precisely those aspects of France which made her so attractive—her refinement and douceur de vie—also condemned her to the second rank.30 But many French intellectuals were so relieved by the urbanity and admiration displayed by their conquerors (or some of them) that they failed to detect what lay beneath it. German Francophilia salved uneasy French consciences and lulled the unwary. Joliot felt reassured by the presence of his colleague Gentner. Jean Cocteau had a clearer conscience for being able to write in his diary that the Germans he met were people with a ‘profound French culture.’31 Even Claude Mauriac, who felt only antipathy to the Germans and avoided their company, was witness on one occasion to the spell cast by Heller. In February 1943 he found himself unexpectedly at a social gathering where the other guests included two Germans: Heller and a German playright. Although ‘stupefied to be shaking hands with one of those officers whose contact I find so repugnant on the metro’, he could not deny the ‘irresistible charm’ of Heller, ‘laughing and smiling, witty and friendly’. Heller told him such encounters showed that this ‘horrible war hasn’t stifled every trace of civilization and humanism’. On the next morning Mauriac noted his sense of shame: ‘The champagne and the atmosphere of sympathy and youth made everything too easy. I should not have been there.’ He reassured himself with the thought that since the Germans were obviously going to lose the war, his presence could not be interpreted as toadying to them whereas a year earlier he would have left such a gathering as soon as he had seen who was present. Nonetheless, despite his guilt, Mauriac still felt that those present had represented a ‘small island of honest men’.32
Glittering Paris: Temptations and Sophistries
For such reasons, the Occupation was a glittering period of Parisian cultural life. The collaborationists compared the cultural openness of Paris favourably with the puritan stuffiness of Vichy. The Vichy authorities believed that German tolerance of pornography in the Occupied Zone jeopardized the task of remoralizing France.33 So tolerant could the Germans be, that in April 1941 the Propaganda-Abteilung intervened, in the name of ‘artistic freedom’, to allow the performance in Paris of Cocteau’s play Machine à écrire which the Vichy government had wanted to ban given the dubious morality of its author.34 One or two adventurous Paris galleries even showed works by Kandinsky, Léger, Ernst, Klee, Miró, none of whom could be exhibited in Germany.35
Over four hundred plays were performed in Paris during the Occupation. Among them were the first plays of Sartre, Camus, and Montherlant, and the first performances of plays by Anouilh, Cocteau, Guitry, Claudel, and Giraudoux. No less striking was the increasing number of theatregoers: rarely had theatre been more brilliant or more popular. The same was true of other arts as well. The number of visitors to galleries was greater than at any time since 1937; 1942 saw the opening of the Museum of Modern Art at the Palais de Tokyo. Culture perhaps offered a refuge from the difficulties of daily life; cinemas and theatres were also a way of keeping warm when fuel was scarce. After the introduction of STO, however, they could be dangerous once the police started carrying out raids to track down réfractaires.
If the atmosphere of occupied Paris was surprisingly liberal, this also made it dangerous for the unwary. In this period, enemies could be more useful than friends, as Mauriac and Gide discovered. For those who were not the target of collaborationist attacks, the temptations were legion. First, there was the social temptation: the receptions at the German Institute, the Gallery openings at which one mingled with the Germans, the first nights at the Opéra. The Parisian salons of Florence Gould (where Claude Mauriac had met Heller) and Marie-Louise Bousquet continued through th
e war, as they did after it: Bousquet’s salon was attended by Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford in 1946, as it had been by Ernst Jünger in 1943.36 The butler at the residence of Baron Robert de Rothschild, now occupied by the German General Hanesse, told Cocteau: ‘I am not unhappy working for the Baron, I mean the General, since he receives the same people as the Baron used to.’37 The 1942–4 social diary of the German chargé de presse Schwendemann contained sixty-four French names, ten of them with particles.38
Jünger’s Parisian journal offers a catalogue of the cultural tout Paris during the war. We find him meeting the decorator Christian Bérard and the actress Arletty, as well as Gaston Gallimard, Cocteau, Giraudoux, Morand, Jean Marais, Mme Boudot-Lamotte, Florence Gould, the Marquise de Polignac, and, of course, Drieu la Rochelle, Jouhandeau, Fabre-Luce, and Bonnard. He drinks the best Burgundies and champagnes at Pruniers, the Tour d’Argent, Maxims, La Pérouse, and the Ritz. He visits the studios of Picasso and Braque. A fairly typical occasion would be 8 October 1941 when he was invited to lunch by de Brinon. His host, whose wife was Jewish, made remarks about ‘Yids’ (youpins); the playwright and actor Sacha Guitry made a bad joke about collaboration; Arletty laughed uproariously throughout.39
Sacha Guitry, a sort of French (heterosexual) Noel Coward, was a frequent star of such occasions. He made no political statements during the Occupation, and afterwards felt aggrieved to find himself pilloried for doing what he had always done: seeking to be the centre of attention in all circumstances. The same was true of Jean Cocteau. His wartime diary displays staggering political naivety allied to an irresistible compulsion to dazzle, regardless of the context. The naivety was particularly evident in his remarks about Hitler. In July 1942 he wrote that the chance offered by Montoire had been missed because Pétain lacked a sense of imagination worthy of Hitler: ‘One does not respond to grand theatre with the reactions of an usherette.’ Hearing that after Munich Hitler had proposed that French and German soldiers throw their arms into the Rhine to repudiate war, he regretted that this poetic gesture had been spurned by narrow-minded politicians like Daladier. Cocteau was much taken by the remark made to him by the German sculptor Arno Breker about Hitler’s deep artistic sensitivity. Idealizing the artist as a free spirit, Cocteau was conveniently able to pass off his accommodation to circumstances as a grand assertion of artistic integrity: ‘one must not let oneself be distracted at any price from serious matters by the dramatic frivolity of the war’.40 Hearing himself denounced as a collaborator on the BBC, Cocteau was aggrieved at the injustice of the world.
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