Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  Simone de Beauvoir had hopped on her bicycle and rode toward the place de la Concorde. In the crowd, she lost sight of Olga and Wanda, who managed to get to the top of the Champs-Élysées while she stayed at the bottom. Sartre had chosen to watch the events from a balcony of the Hôtel du Louvre giving onto the rue de Rivoli, right opposite Jacques Jaujard’s office.

  Jacques Jaujard had invited his lover Jeanne Boitel but also many friends from the Comité National des Écrivains to watch history pass his windows. Among Jaujard’s guests was a twenty-four-year-old curly-haired redhead named Anne-Marie Cazalis. She was the youngest member of the Comité National des Écrivains44 and had won the Paul Valéry award for her poetry a year earlier. Braving her vertigo, Anne-Marie chose to sit on the giant ledge below Jaujard’s office windows. A hundred yards west, Ernest Hemingway was walking toward the rue de Rivoli from the Ritz while Henri Cartier-Bresson was loading yet another Agfa roll into his Leica at the corner of the rue de Castiglione. A. J. Liebling was not going to miss the event for anything but was still debating where best to position himself. How he wished he could follow the action from a restaurant terrace serving champagne; he was exhausted and emotionally drained. Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, holding hands and kissing, would follow the flow wherever it went. Camus had just written the next day’s editorial: “Four years of a monstrous history are ending, and with it an unspeakable struggle during which France was fighting both her shame and her rage.”45

  The American magazine Life put it this way: “Paris is like a magic sword in a fairy tale—a shining power in those hands to which it rightly belongs, in other hands tinsel and lead. Whenever the City of Light changes hands, Western Civilization shifts its political balance. So it has been for seven centuries; so it was in 1940; so it was this week.”46

  After inspecting Leclerc’s troops, de Gaulle started walking down the Champs-Élysées with Parodi on his left. Around him were Free French soldiers, résistants of all political inclinations including the Communist FFI, their guns on their hips, gendarmes in their uniforms, even a bailiff with his golden chain around his neck, a symbol of the republican ritual. There was madness all around. Indescribable chaos and confusion. De Gaulle recalled this moment in his memoirs: “Ah, this is the sea! An immense crowd, perhaps two million souls … At this instant in time, something is happening, one of those miracles of the national conscience, one of those gestures which, sometimes, through the centuries, come and illuminate France’s history.”47

  Having reached the bottom of the Champs-Élysées, at the place de la Concorde, de Gaulle climbed into an open car and headed toward Notre Dame through the rue de Rivoli, the crowds parting in front of him as the Red Sea did for Moses. De Gaulle had just passed below Jacques Jaujard’s windows, and the Hôtel du Louvre’s balcony where Sartre was standing, when gunshots went off. Many in the crowd threw themselves flat on the pavement; others, confused and less accustomed to fighting, ran in all directions, easy prey for diehard collaborators and German snipers firing from the roofs. With lightning speed, the young Anne-Marie Cazalis climbed up from the ledge into Jacques Jaujard’s office and threw herself under a table. A young man collapsed at her feet, shot in the chest, dead.

  In front of the Hôtel de Ville, American and British war reporters and photographers were waiting for de Gaulle, ready to report back to Washington and London. De Gaulle inspected troops again in front of the cameras, ignoring the Communist FFI, then walked to Notre Dame for a short mass. Along the way there were more gunshots, more snipers; people ran for cover while de Gaulle walked tall across the Seine on the Pont d’Arcole. The bullets whizzed around him as he marched on. Inside the cathedral he lowered his voice and exchanged a few words with Leclerc: “Let’s keep the mass short and get rid of those snipers.” After an extremely fast service of fifteen minutes, interrupted by the sound of machine guns fired in retaliation by Leclerc’s men, positioned in the cathedral’s galleries, de Gaulle left Notre Dame and went straight to talk with Eisenhower over the phone: “I need your help to clean Paris of its few remaining enemies. Two American divisions should do.” That day there were three hundred civilian casualties, and the two collaborators who had attempted to kill de Gaulle in front of Notre Dame were found and executed.

  In a week, 700 résistants and 2,800 civilians had lost their lives; 3,200 German soldiers had been killed and 12,800 taken prisoner. That night Édith Thomas wrote in her diary: “It is finished, it is beginning. In the eternal sway of history. The moment we have so much desired has finally come, but what will it be?”48

  Amid this “orgy of fraternity,” as Simone de Beauvoir called it, this debauchery of joy, there were ugly scenes in the streets of Paris. In the rue de Seine, the street where she lived, Simone came across the revolting spectacle of a naked woman humiliated by an uproarious mob. The woman was accused of having slept with the enemy. Many other women were shaved in public and sometimes beaten up for the same alleged crime. Beauvoir, whom Albert Camus had just hired to write about those historic days for Combat, wrote of the “medieval sadism” of such rituals. She was relieved each time she saw the FFI protecting those women from the lynching crowds. Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson refused to take pictures of the shamed women. They loved the people, but not when they became a mob.49

  Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government ordered the disbanding of the command structure of the Communist Forces Françaises Intérieures, in effect ordering résistants to disarm or to enroll in the Free French army for the duration of the war. Jean Cocteau’s dashing partner Jean Marais enrolled immediately. It was never too late to be a patriot, and many Frenchmen who had lived through the four years of the Occupation with the shame of the armistice but had not had the courage to join the Resistance or go to London seized the opportunity to clear their conscience.

  Those days were heavily charged with tension, danger, and emotion and suffused with carnal desire and eroticism. When the Germans had taken Paris on June 14, 1940, they compared the city to a woman who had turned to stone. When the Free French and the Allies liberated her four years later, they brought her back to life. That week Picasso, ensconced right in the heart of the battlefield, did not choose to paint another Guernica. He had been studying Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan, of which he drew an ink sketch and then painted a gouache, a watercolor, and an oil. Always his own man and never a slave to events, Picasso was in fact in tune with history. That week he left behind the mournful natures mortes and skulls he had painted for four years. The sixty-three-year-old was in love again, with the twenty-four-year-old Françoise Gilot; Paris was being liberated, he was bursting with life and joie de vivre and was going to let the world know. With his Bacchanales, inspired by Poussin, Picasso was at once modern and archaic. While the tanks were shaking the buildings all around him and gunshots were going off continuously on the boulevard Henri IV at the tip of the Île Saint-Louis where he painted, Picasso was unleashing his erotic euphoria.

  Now that Paris was safe and rid of its snipers, he could leave Marie-Thérèse and Maya, knowing they would be safe. A crowd was waiting for him at his studio. Picasso had, despite himself, become the standard-bearer of liberated Paris and the symbol of fortitude during the Occupation. He received everyone, from simple GIs to heads of international museums, from known and unknown fellow artists to students curious to meet him in the flesh. He basked in universal glory, answering reporters’ questions and genially posing for pictures. “For weeks, Picasso’s doors were wide open. His studio became a fairground and a brothel. Mixing in this heady fraternity, were international reporters, photographers, superb North American girls from the U.S. and Canadian armies, GIs with their little French girls on their arms, very thin young women wearing the scars of years of privation, students in white socks and black turtlenecks, old beauties from the Moulin Rouge wearing feather boas at eleven in the morning, and some ‘aristocrack’ as Picasso called them.”50

  Fraternity was everywhere. In the streets, in b
ars, Gaullists, Communists, Catholics, and Marxists sang together—they had fought together and swore that nothing could separate them. In the streets, children were chanting a new song: “We will not see them again, it’s over, they’re finished.”51 But what about those French citizens who had connived with the Nazi occupants and were still there?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE DESIRE

  FIRST, THE PURGE

  Paris’s hundred shades of soot and grime suited its spirit and matched its troubled spirit. Unlike London or New York, Paris had faltered, it had sinned. In 1944 the monuments and buildings of Paris may have been riddled with bullet holes, but its physical scars were insignificant in comparison with London’s open wounds, where whole neighborhoods had been wiped from the map during the Blitz. Paris had been spared because France had capitulated, yet the pain ran deeper for the cowards than for the brave. Paris owed its untouched beauty to mental defeat; in 1944 Paris was in ruins, in many more ways than one. And so was everyone who had run away or stayed without fighting. Not to mention those who had collaborated with the enemy.

  In early August 1944, a thousand collaborators had fled France, including the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline1 and the editor Jean Luchaire, Simone Signoret’s former boss, and they were now all living in Sigmaringen Castle, standing by the Danube river 150 miles west of Munich, waiting for the apocalypse. Others naively thought that they could just hide and bide their time until the people’s wrath had abated. On September 14, the anti-Semitic writer Robert Brasillach was finally found hidden in his mother’s attic and arrested for “conspiring with the enemy.” The Communists wanted his head and he knew it. The Communists were the most ardent advocates for revenge, a sentiment they instilled into their readers, day after day, with inflammatory editorials. Of the thirteen newspapers now authorized to be printed, they represented almost half of the national press with, among others, L’Humanité, Libération, Ce Soir, and Le Front National. In this way they managed to work the people up to an incandescent rage. The actress Arletty was kept under house arrest following her love affair with a “Fritz” and was allowed out just to reshoot a few scenes of Les enfants du paradis. Her neighbor at the Ritz, Coco Chanel, now sixty and in a relationship with Hans Günther von Dincklage, was also arrested but was released a few hours later. Churchill was a friend from the time when Coco had been the Duke of Westminster’s mistress, and there was speculation that he had intervened. As soon as she was released, Coco and her German beau packed and left for Switzerland. They would not set foot in France for the next eight years.

  There were dilemmas. What to do with the grande dame of literature, Colette? At seventy-one, she was among the many tricky cases the French conscience would have to deal with. Colette had been writing for collaborationist publications such as La Gerbe and Le Petit Parisien while hiding her young Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket, in her flat. She probably wrote for collaborationist newspapers in order to have friends in the right places should she need their help to free friends in danger. Luckily for Jean Cocteau, the Communists considered him a member of a persecuted minority because he was a homosexual. His mingling with Nazi officers at high-society events was forgotten.

  The purge (or épuration, as it was known in France) became a murky affair, and the discrepancy in punishments opened up a national debate on the nature of revenge and justice. Never more public than among writers and journalists, the debate tore friends apart. On September 9, 1944, the first issue of the Communist-leaning Les Lettres françaises printed on its front page a manifesto signed by more than fifty French writers, among them Paul Valéry, François Mauriac, Paul Éluard, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, André Malraux, Jean Paulhan, and Raymond Queneau. “Let us remain united in victory and freedom as we were in sorrow and oppression. Let us remain united for the resurrection of France and the fair punishment of the imposters and traitors…”—except nobody agreed on what represented fair punishment. Camus, at first, sided with the Communists, demanding a ruthless purge, while others such as Mauriac and Paulhan asked their colleagues to “forgive and forget.”

  Apart from those few who had joined the Resistance early and actually risked their lives—those noblest were the most forgiving—the majority of French intellectuals and the population at large were of two minds about collaborators. The more passive they had been during the Occupation, the more revengeful they proved toward alleged collabos. The personal shame they felt at their inaction made them all the more aggressive. The Occupation had been a laboratory of moral ambiguity as in no other period in France’s contemporary history. The coexistence, for four long years, of heroism, passivity, cowardice, and duplicity is, three-quarters of a century later, something France is still trying to come to terms with.

  Sartre tried to explain the phenomenon to his British friends in a short essay written in the autumn of 1944.

  Somebody who was asked what he had done during the Terror in 1793 replied: “I lived…” It is an answer we could all give today. The same daily and ordinary necessities made us all share the same space. We bumped into the German occupants everywhere, on the streets, and in the métro where we literally rubbed shoulders. Of course, we kept our resentment and our hatred for them intact but those feelings had become somehow abstract. With time, an indescribable and shameful solidarity had emerged between Parisians and those foreign troops. A solidarity that wasn’t in any way sympathy, but rather a biological habituation.2

  In other words, the enemy had become too familiar to really become an object of hate. Besides, by sustaining even the minimum economic activity in the country, everyone was contributing to serve the enemy. A subtle venom poisoned every enterprise. Every choice was bad and yet one had to make decisions. Downing tools and ceasing all activity was not an option, or the whole country would have perished. “The enemy were like leeches, sucking our blood; we lived in symbiosis.”3

  And what to say of those who had left France in 1940? Had it been nobler to leave or to stay? To leave at once and join de Gaulle in London was one thing, as Sartre’s schoolmate the philosopher Raymond Aron did; but to flee to New York like André Breton and many other non-Jewish Surrealists? Those who stayed never quite forgave those who left, though the reunion between old friends was very moving at first.

  Raymond Aron came back from London and fell into Simone de Beauvoir’s arms at the Café de Flore. He had joined de Gaulle in London from the very beginning in 1940. In the evening, at the terrace of the Rhumerie, boulevard Saint-Germain, Aron would tell Beauvoir and Sartre about their life under the Blitz. Beauvoir discovered “historical events that were ours but that we hadn’t really known about. Our joie de vivre was tempered by the shame of having survived.”4

  “A country that fails its purge is about to fail its renovation,” warned Albert Camus in an editorial. On learning that the thirty-five-year-old anti-Semitic writer Robert Brasillach had been sentenced to death, Camus felt deeply disturbed. Although leading figures of the daily press and radio had been executed, no other creative writer had been sentenced to death. Camus signed a letter along with Paul Valéry, Jean Paulhan, Cocteau, Vlaminck, and Colette in which they asked de Gaulle to pardon the writer. However, even de Gaulle had to yield to the Communists’ demands occasionally. They had asked for five thousand collaborators’ heads, as a fair retribution for their sacrifice, and they would get Brasillach’s. For many people in France the Communists had the moral high ground, as they had paid with their blood in greater quantity than the Catholics, the Socialists, and the Gaullists—or so went the legend they had successfully built. They had branded themselves “the Party of the 75,000 Shot,”5 a gross exaggeration6 but one that would not be challenged by historians until decades later. On February 6, 1945, Robert Brasillach faced a firing squad of twelve men without flinching, a red scarf around his neck and a picture of his mother in his inside pocket. To the young soldiers who were about to shoot him he said “Courage!” and then, as the first bullet hit him in the chest, he
managed to shout “Vive la France!”

  Simone de Beauvoir had attended Brasillach’s trial and, unlike her friend Camus, had not signed the petition asking for his pardon. She had too many friends who had been denounced by collaborators like Brasillach and who had not yet returned from Germany. She did not possess the force or the heart to forgive. In his writing, throughout the war, Brasillach had called for people to be shot and killed. Did not he deserve the punishment he not only wished on others but also efficiently encouraged?7 For Simone, Brasillach was the hangman, not the victim. Sentencing him to death was not inhuman, but just. Reflecting on this particular case in his memoirs, de Gaulle considered that Brasillach’s talent had been an aggravating factor. Talent enhances one’s responsibility.

  PHILOSOPHER REPORTERS

  Encouraged by Sartre, Beauvoir decided to quit teaching once and for all. At the age of thirty-six, she was embarking on a full-time writing career, a longtime dream. Beauvoir felt a little lonely, though. Camus had sent her “petit Bost” to cover the war on the eastern front for Combat. He had, in fact, poached almost all of Beauvoir and Sartre’s former students to write for Combat. “In the morning, when I opened the newspaper, it felt like reading my own private correspondence.”8

  Albert Camus aimed even higher when he thought of asking Sartre himself to go on a five-month American tour for Combat. The U.S. State Department had invited a dozen French writers and reporters on an official visit to the United States, as a way of “getting to know each other,” a way of making new friends. Camus called Sartre at the Café de Flore one morning: “Would you like to go on behalf of Combat?” Sartre almost jumped for joy. “I never saw him so happy,”9 wrote Simone de Beauvoir later; “American literature, jazz, and films had nurtured our youth.” Later, Camus also offered Beauvoir the chance to report from a two-month trip to Portugal and Spain.