Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (113 page)

SEVENTEEN
The European Lazarus

If post-war history took the new nations of Africa and Asia down a series of blind alleys, often terminating in horror and savagery, Europe’s experience offered more comfort. This was unexpected. The prevailing mood in 1945 was despair and impotence. The European era in history was over. In a sense Hitler had been the last truly European leader, able to initiate world events from a Eurocentric vision. He lost that power at the end of 1941. The vacuum opened by his colossal fall could not be filled by European rivals. At the end of the war, the two non-European superpowers stood, as it were, on the rim of a spent volcano, peering contemptuously into its still smouldering depths, uninvolved in its collapse but glad it no longer had the daemonic energy to terrify humanity.

On 26 October 1945, at the opening of the new ballet at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the drop-curtain by Picasso was hissed by the packed high-society audience.
¹
That was the old Paris. Three days later, at the Club Maintenant, Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a lecture, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’. Here was the new Paris. This occasion, too, was packed. Men and women fainted, fought for chairs, smashing thirty of them, shouted and barracked. It coincided with the launching of Sartre’s new review,
Les Temps modernes
, in which he argued that literary culture, plus the
haute couture
of the fashion shops, were the only things France now had left – a symbol of Europe, really – and he produced Existentialism to give people a bit of dignity and to preserve their individuality in the midst of degradation and absurdity. The response was overwhelming. As his consort, Simone de Beauvoir, put it, ‘We were astounded by the furore we caused.’
²
Existentialism was remarkably un-Gallic; hence, perhaps, its attractiveness. Sartre was half-Alsacian (Albert Schweitzer was his cousin) and he was brought up in the house of his grandfather, Karl Schweitzer. His culture was as much German as French. He was essentially a product of the Berlin philosophy school
and especially of Heidegger, from whom most of his ideas derived. Sartre had had a good war. Despite the surface enmities, there was a certain coming together of the French and German spirit. Paris was not an uncongenial place for an intellectual to be, provided he could ignore such unpleasantnesses as the round-up of Jews, as most contrived to do without difficulty.
³
As the Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy was later to point out, radical, proto-fascist forms of racialism were rarely repugnant to the French, not least to French intellectuals: he even called it ‘the French ideology’.
⁴

The Paris theatre flourished under the Nazis. André Malraux later snarled: ‘I was facing the Gestapo while Sartre, in Paris, let his plays be produced with the authorization of the German censors.’
⁵
Albert Büssche, theatre critic of the Nazi forces’ newspaper,
Pariser Zeitung
, called Sartre’s play
Huis Clos
‘a theatrical event of the first order’. He was not the only beneficiary of German approval. When a new play by the
pied-noir
writer Albert Camus,
Le Malentendu
, was presented at the Théâtre des Mathurins on 24 June 1944, it was hooted by the French intellectual élite (then largely fascist) because Camus was known to be in the Resistance. Büssche found it ‘filled with profound thoughts … a pioneering work’.
⁶
Camus did not share Sartre’s aloofness to the war; he was in fact one of only 4,345 Frenchmen and women who received the special Rosette of the Resistance medal. But his thinking reflected the growing contiguity of French and German philosophy which the Occupation promoted and which was an important strand in the post-war pattern. The most important influence in his life was Nietzsche, whom in effect, through his novels
L’Étranger
and
La Peste
, he gallicized for an entire generation of French youth.

Sartre and Camus came together in 1943–4, protagonists – and eventually antagonists – in a cult centred on St Germain-des-Prés which sought to relate philosophy and literature to public action. Their caravanserai was the Café Flore, itself a symbol of the ambiguities of French intellectual life. St Germain had been a haunt of Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau, who had congregated in the old Café Procope. The Flore dated from the Second Empire, when it had been patronized by Gautier, Musset, Sand, Balzac, Zola and Huysmans; later by Apollinaire and later still by the circle of
Action Française
, led by Maurras himself: Sartre occupied his still-warm seat.
⁷
Existentialism in its post-war presentation was derived from Kant’s ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law’. Our positive acts, Sartre taught, created ‘not only the man that we would like to be ourselves’ but also ‘an image of man such as we think he ought to be’. Man could shape his own essence by positive political acts. He thus offered a rationalized
human gesture of defiance to despair – what Karl Popper called ‘a new theology without God’. It contained an element of German pessimism, characteristic of both Heidegger and Nietzsche, in that it placed exaggerated emphasis upon the fundamental loneliness of man in a godless world, and upon the resulting tension between the self and the world.
⁸
But for young people it was magic. It was a form of Utopian romanticism with much the same attractions as the Romantic movement 150 years before. Indeed it was more attractive because it offered political activism too. As Popper complained, it was a respectable form of fascism which, needless to add, could easily be allied to forms of Marxism. Camus insisted he was never an Existentialist, and in 1951 he and Sartre quarrelled mortally over the latter’s defence of various forms of totalitarian violence. But it was Camus’s re-creation, in modern terms, of the solitary Byronic hero, who resists fate and an alien world by defiant acts, which brought the cult so vividly to life and gave it actual meaning to youth on both sides of the Rhine.

Thus Existentialism was a French cultural import, which Paris then re-exported to Germany, its country of origin, in a sophisticated and vastly more attractive guise. The point is worth stressing, for it was the first time since the age of Goethe, Byron and De Stael that young people in France and Germany felt a spontaneous cultural affinity, a shared
Weltanschauung.
It served, then, as a preparation for a more solid economic and political harmonization, for which circumstances were also propitious. Yet this might not have come about but for two further circumstances. The first was the final (and possibly terminal) maturing of Christian activism in politics, which for a vital generation became the dominant mode in Europe. The second was the emergence of a group of European titans – not Byronic, not young, not romantic, not indeed heroic in any obvious still less Existentialist sense – who were to revivify the corpse of a Europe which had slain itself. Both the agency, Christianity, and the agents, Adenauer, de Gasperi, de Gaulle, were by nature abhorrent to the founders of Existentialist activism. But then history habitually proceeds by such ironies.

Adenauer, de Gasperi, de Gaulle were great survivors; men whose turn failed to come, might never have come, then did come by gift of catastrophe and in rich plenitude. At the end of the war in 1945, Alcide de Gasperi was sixty-five, Adenauer sixty-nine. Both were men from the borders, devout Catholics, anti-nationalists, men who revered the family as the social unit, hated the state (except as a minimal, regrettable necessity), and believed the most important characteristic of organized society to be the rule of law, which must reflect Natural Law, that is the ascendancy of absolute values. In
short they set their faces against many of the salient features of the twentieth century. And theirs were obstinate faces; strange faces. A terrible accident in 1917 had given Adenauer’s the mahogany impassiveness of a cigar-store Indian.
⁹
De Gasperi, like Adenauer, tall and excessively thin in youth, faced life with the scowl of a guard-dog. Both were confederalists. Adenauer represented the poly-centrist Germany of the Holy Roman Empire, de Gasperi the northern Italy of the Habsburgs.

De Gasperi, indeed, was born under Austrian rule. As his father commanded the local gendarmes, he felt a secular loyalty to a royal house rather than to a nation state. But his primary allegiance was spiritual. Throughout his life he went to Mass every day if possible. In the remarkable letter proposing marriage to his future wife, Francesca Romani, in 1921, he wrote: ‘The personality of the living Christ pulls me, enslaves me and comforts me as though I were a child. Come, I want you with me, to be drawn to that same attraction, as though to an abyss of light.’
¹⁰
He went to Vienna University and admired the city’s famous mayor, Karl Lueger, though for quite different reasons to Hitler. He believed Lueger had indicated ways in which the ‘social encyclicals’ of the more progressive popes could be realized. His formation was thus German Catholic populism and his earliest writing was in the Austrian Catholic paper, the
Reichspost.
De Gasperi, indeed, was almost immune to the two great diseases of modern times: ethnic nationalism and the belief that states based upon it can be transformed into Utopias. In his first speech, made in Trento in 1902, he urged his listeners: ‘Be Catholic first, then Italian!’ He said he ‘deplored’ the ‘idolization’ of the nation and the
religione delia patria.
His motto was ‘Catholic, Italian, then democratic!’ – in that order.
¹¹

Hence de Gasperi was the natural antipode to Mussolini. The two men debated ‘Socialism in History’ in a Merano beer-hall in 1909, Mussolini urging the need for violence, de Gasperi the necessity for basing political action on absolute principle. He had to leave early to catch a train, followed to the door by Mussolini’s fluent jeers. ‘He called de Gasperi: ‘A man of slovenly, ungrammatical prose, a superficial man who invokes an Austrian timetable to avoid an embarrassing debate.’
¹²
De Gasperi, for his part, never recognized in Mussolini anything except a destructive radical: ‘Bolshevism in black’, as he put it. His own
Partito Popolare Trentino
was welcomed by Don Luigi Sturzo into the Catholic Popular Party, which might have ruled inter-war Italy but for Mussolini’s
putsch.
De Gasperi disliked Italian parliamentary politics (’an equestrian circus’), with their theatricals and oratorial tricks, which he always spurned. But he hated the big totalitarian state still more. As he said
at the last
Partito Popolare
National Congress, 28 June 1925: ‘The theoretical and practical principles of fascism are the antithesis of the Christian concept of the State, which lays down that the natural rights of personality, family and society exist before the State.’ Fascism was just ‘the old Police State reappearing in disguise, holding over Christian institutions the sword of Damocles’. Hauled before a fascist tribunal in November 1926, he insisted: it is the very concept of the fascist state I cannot accept. For there are natural rights which the state cannot trample upon.’
¹³
De Gasperi was lucky. Mussolini threw him into the Regina Coeli prison in 1927. He might not have survived the regime any more than Gramsci. But the signature of the Lateran Treaty in 1929 enabled Pius xi to get de Gasperi out of custody and into the Vatican library, where he was sheltered for the next fourteen years.

Hence when fascism collapsed, de Gasperi was the only unsullied major figure to offer the Italian people an alternative to it which was not another form of statism. He formed the first post-war coalition government in December 1945, and in the elections to the Constituent Assembly took his new Christian Democratic Party to the front with 35.2 per cent (against 20.7 for the Socialists and 18.9 for the Communists). His real breakthrough came in January 1947, when the Social Democrats, under Giuseppe Saragat, split from the Marxist socialists under Pietro Nenni. This enabled de Gasperi to form a homogeneous Christian Democratic government, which won the first, crucial elections under the new constitution, in April 1948, with 48.5 per cent of the votes and an absolute majority of the seats (304 out of 574). This was one of the most important of the post-war European elections, for it set a pattern of relative stability in Italy for a generation. During the ‘de Gasperi era’, 1945–53, Italy achieved political respectability as a centrist member of European society, accepted the Marshall Plan, entered
NATO
, joined the Council of Europe and the European Coal and Steel Community and launched its own economic
miracolo
, symbolized by the Vespa, Emilio Pucci colours, Pininfarina car-bodies, Necchi sewing-machines and Olivetti typewriters, and by the morning greeting in the power-house of industrial recovery, Milan –
‘Buon’ lavoro!’