Paris: The Novel (119 page)

For another decade, France had drifted. With a weak franc—good for the British and American visitors, but bringing inflation to the French themselves—the weak liberal governments of the Third Republic had tottered on, still opposed by the old guard of monarchists, conservative Catholics and military men. When America’s Great Depression hit Europe, French jobs were lost and wages fell.

Jacques Le Sourd had known how to use the time, however. Endless quiet campaigning with the Socialist Party, writing and distributing pamphlets, talking with union men, visiting small works and large factories: this had been his life.

“When the new revolution comes,” he would tell his son, “Paris will be the key. Not only because it’s the political and spiritual center of France, but because of the industrial workers here. When I was a young man,” he’d explain, “most manufacturing around the city was done in workshops and small plants. But now we have huge factories, producing things
like cars, that didn’t even exist before.” More than once he had taken Max down to the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, which lay in a great loop of the river south of the Bois de Boulogne, and taken him through the gates into the Renault works. “The men here,” he told him, “will one day have the destiny of France in their hands.”

Though Jacques always reminded his son that he was just one of many good socialists giving the lead, it pleased young Max to see how, in the huge car works and in smaller plants all over the city, his father was respected.

And two years ago, the work of Jacques Le Sourd and his friends had been rewarded.

At the start of 1934, the old guard had occupied the parliament and tried to stage a coup. Within days, the socialists and the communists of France cooperated in a general strike. Millions put down their tools. In Paris, the workers filled the streets. The country came to a standstill. The old guard were kicked out.

“Now’s the time to play politics,” Jacques had urged. “All our efforts will be for nothing unless we can win political power.”

A grand coalition had been formed. First the two great trade unions—the moderate CGT and the communist-led CGTU—had come together. Cleverer still, the political parties had come to a subtle agreement. His own Socialist Party and the French Communist Party had arranged that the communists would give silent support to the socialists, but take no part in any government, so as not to frighten off the bourgeoisie. With this reassurance, and a promise to respect private property and not to nationalize the banks, the left had been able to form a coalition with the bourgeois radical and liberal parties of the center.

“Call it the Popular Front,” Jacques said, “and we could win an election.”

He’d been right. By the start of 1936, the Popular Front was ready to fight an election. A month ago, at the start of May, the Popular Front had won, and Léon Blum, the Jewish leader of the Socialist Party, was prime minister of France.

When Le Sourd had been asked if he’d like any government job, Max had assumed he would accept. But his father had surprised him.

“There’s something more important for me to do,” he’d said. And despite his age, he’d thrown himself into another, feverish round of activity. Meetings with important union men, visits to factories: for three
weeks Max hardly saw him. But when he did, his father always said the same thing.

“Now is the moment, Max. Strike while the iron is hot. Everything is possible, if we act fast.”

His father was right. All over France, from plant to plant, strikes started breaking out as workers, bolstered by the thought of having a socialist government, began demanding all rights: a forty-hour week, paid holidays, wage increases. As Jacques had also predicted, the key was Paris, and by late May he could point out triumphantly: “Thirty-two thousand workers have occupied the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt. Every big engineering works around Paris is out on strike now. That’s another hundred thousand men. The workers of the Bloch aircraft factory out at Courbevoie are with us.”

A few days ago, there were two million Frenchmen out on twelve thousand separate strikes.

The part of the Champs-Élysées where they were standing lay less than halfway down from the Arc de Triomphe, just above the Art Nouveau glass houses of the Grand and Petit Palais. The triangle of streets that lay between this section and the River Seine was becoming known as the Golden Triangle, the Triangle d’Or, for as well as the American Cathedral church and the recently built Hotel George V, it was home to some of the richest people and most elegant enterprises in the city.

It wasn’t an area that Jacques Le Sourd would normally care to visit. But today he had come there, for the satisfaction of seeing it all shut down.

They crossed the Champs-Élysées. As they walked between the trees on the avenue’s northern side, Jacques glanced at his son with affection.

If he’d taken a long time to find a wife, his marriage was a happy one. He’d met Anne-Marie when he was forty and she was twenty-five, when she had come to work for the Socialist Party. He hadn’t thought of her as anything but a young colleague at first. But as he’d come to know her a little better, he’d been astonished by her direct and uncompromising mind. He’d never known any woman like her.

She was southern, with straight black hair and pale skin. Her father was a worker from Marseille, her mother a devout Catholic from the countryside of Provence, and she spoke with a Provençal accent. But everything else in her life she’d decided for herself. When he asked her if she was
religious, she replied simply: “No one has ever given me any useful proof that God exists, so obviously I can’t believe in Him.” The idea of faith without proof didn’t make any sense to her.

In the same way, socialism wasn’t a passion or a religion with her—as it was for so many in the movement. She’d just decided that capitalism was unjust, and socialism was more logical. After that, she couldn’t see the point of arguing about it.

He had been fascinated by this strange girl from Provence. He found himself spending more and more time in her company. After a year had passed, they had become inseparable. “We may as well live together,” she’d remarked one day, “since we’re never apart.” When she became pregnant with Max, they’d married.

Max looked very like his father, but he was not quite so tall, and his face was finer, more Mediterranean. And though he had his mother’s talent for logic, his reactions to life were those of his father. They shared jokes, and even when they argued, they would often finish the other one’s sentences. Jacques was never more comfortable than when he was in his son’s company.

For some years now, Max had written for the communist paper
L’Humanité
, which was read across the nation. And he’d joined the Communist Party.

They reached the Place de la Concorde and stared across at the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre.

“The site of the guillotine,” Jacques remarked wryly to Max. “In the first revolution, we took away the nobles’ lives. The second revolution is kinder. We take away the capitalists’ money.” He shrugged. “It’s more practical.”

They walked past the Hôtel de Crillon, a short way along the rue de Rivoli and up into the Place Vendôme, where Napoléon’s great column graced the center.

“In the Commune,” Jacques reminded his son, “we knocked that column over.”

“Why?”

“I forget.” He smiled. “Do you see what I see?”

On their left, the Ritz Hotel had a shuttered look, like someone pretending to be asleep. Around the rest of the square, small groups of men were standing, some with placards, in front of the closed doors of the shops.

“Mon Dieu,”
said Max, “even the jewelry store workers are on strike.”

In high good humor the two Le Sourds continued up through the rue de la Paix, across Saint-Honoré with its chic boutiques, through the heartland of fashion, finding everything on strike. Once or twice Max glanced at his father, wondering if he might not be getting tired, but the tall seventy-year-old was striding like a young man.

They left the world of fashion, passed through the Ninth Arrondissement, then up past the back of the Gare du Nord, and into a little poor district known as the Goutte d’Or, where, finding a small bar run by an Algerian, they finally sat down.

“A good journey,” his father remarked. “From the Triangle d’Or to the Goutte d’Or.” He ordered cognacs and coffee to celebrate what they had seen. “Today, the world changes,” he announced.

“It’s certain that Blum’s government are going to offer a huge package of reforms,” Max agreed. “It will transform the life of every worker in France.”

“Of course,” said his father, “but that’s not what I mean. It will go much further than that. All we have to do now is keep the strike going, and power will pass into the hands of the workers. It has nowhere else to go.”

“But we already have an elected socialist government,” Max pointed out.

“Exactly. And as Marxists, they will see the inevitability of the situation as it unfolds. The Popular Front has served its purpose. Now as the workers take power, everything else will crumble away. Give the strike a month and I tell you, a new state will be born.”

And it was now that Max looked at his father and wondered whether it was time to break the news to him. He didn’t want to do it, but he felt that he must.

It was only when they had finished their drinks, however, and Max had insisted on buying a second round that he plucked up the courage.

“You know, Father,” he said quietly, “in another couple of days, the strike is going to end. It’s already been decided.”

“By whom?”

“By us, Father. By the communists.” He paused while his father stared at him in stupefaction. “We don’t want to upset the capitalists. We need them.” He smiled sadly. “Those are the orders.”

“Orders? From whom?”

“From Russia.”

Max had been a boy when fascism began, in Italy, where the former socialist Mussolini decided that authoritarian nationalism worked better. If Il Duce was supposed to be like some ancient Roman Caesar, it was harder to know what to make of the next Fascist Party when it had suddenly sprung up in Britain a few years ago, and he’d read the accounts with fascination.

A genuine English aristocrat, of ancient lineage, was leading huge rallies of men in black shirts against his own British establishment.

It seemed to Max, however, that Sir Oswald Mosley was far closer to the military men of the French right who were fearful of the communists and socialists, and disgusted with the liberal weakness of their governments. “If the left wants revolution and will use force to get it, then the only defense is to beat them at their own game.” Mosley doubtless considered that he was fulfilling the role he was born to, as a forceful leader of national regeneration.

When there were scenes of violence at a big rally at Olympia, however, the placid British public turned against him and the movement fell apart.

But Germany was another matter.

Max found it easy to understand why the German fascists had arisen so rapidly. During the twenties, with the miseries that followed the war compounded by the crippling demands of reparations from the Allies, and a runaway inflation that wiped out everyone’s savings, the Weimar Republic had been brought to ruin and despair. It did not surprise him that people were looking for a strong leader who could hold out the promise of hope and regeneration.

“Unfortunately,” his father had remarked, “Adolf Hitler is a messianic speaker, but he’s also a lunatic. There’s an imperfect French translation of his book
Mein Kampf
and I’ve actually read it. The most turgid stuff. But it sets out his whole plan. He seems to believe Germany’s problems are caused by the Jews, and he plans to conquer France and eastern Europe. The whole thing is evil, but it’s also insane.”

“Yet people don’t treat him as a lunatic.”

“No. And I think I know why. He’s anti-Semitic. So are most of the ruling class in the Western world, and most Catholics, too. Think of our own Dreyfus affair. Or the recent Stavisky scandal. A French Ukrainian
financier defrauds a huge number of people and everyone says it’s because he’s Jewish. It’s absurd, yet everyone does it.”