The Pursuit of Laughter (47 page)

Who had collaborated with the enemy? There were plenty of obvious targets, but they shaded down from people who had denounced their compatriots to the Germans, to petrol-pump men who had not refused enemy custom, or
artistes
who had sung in
nightclubs
patronized by German soldiers. It was a prime time for settling private feuds in an atmosphere of terror and hatred. People went to bed at night far from sure they would not be dragged out at dawn and thrown into a filthy, overcrowded prison. It was easy to get away with murder if the motive was patriotism, and sometimes it seemed as if only the few who had been in London with General de Gaulle were quite safe, leaving fifty million or so at risk. Every Frenchman alive at that time has his Liberation story, if he can be induced to tell it.

On a bigger stage, there was the developing American-Russian quarrel. What was to
be done with Germany, defeated and in ruins? De Gaulle hated the Americans even more than he did the English, lumping them together as Anglo-Saxons, which, considering the ethnic composition of the US, seems bizarre. Americans had been rude to him during the war and he was in vengeful mood. But they were so powerful that his visit to Moscow hardly caused a stir. He hated every aspect of American civilization, but he was also deeply anti-Communist. What he craved was a great and powerful France; what he found was a bankrupt, half-starved country overrun by Anglo-Saxon armies on their way to crush Germany. Americans were bombing towns and villages in Normandy to smithereens.

A few years later when I came to live in France, I asked friends how they fared during the occupation and its aftermath. One told me he had been sent a miniature coffin by the Free French, but nothing untoward happened. His mother dispatched a hamper of food from the country every week for four years. He went to the Gare d'Austerlitz and
trundled
it home. I asked whether, when shortages became acute, the hamper was ever stolen on the railway? Never, he said. Of course he could have lived where the goods came from, but Frenchmen would rather be hungry in Paris than bored elsewhere.

Another friend, a member of the Académie Française, told me that even now, in the Nineties, the ‘Immortals' are split down the middle, twenty a side. There is something
reassuring
about such a balance. However much they loathe each other's opinions they
manage
to pretend to be making a dictionary which will purge the language of Anglo-Saxon words.

The English love travel and hate foreigners. Do they dislike each other as much as the French do? We have never had occasion to discover the answer to that question.

When a Great Nation Turns against Itself: Paris after the Liberation
Beevor, A. and Cooper, A.
Literary Review
(1994)

If my sister Nancy thought Paris an earthly paradise, it must be remembered that ten of the years she lived there were the 50s, an extraordinary decade the like of which we have never seen since. From the war years and Occupation, Paris splendidly recovered;
disliking
austerity and shabbiness it quickly resumed its addiction to fashion, luxury and
delicious
food, helped by a flourishing black market.

In London the slogan was ‘Fair Shares', which is nothing but a cruel illusion when poverty and riches live side by side. London seemed almost to revel in ‘shortages', even paper was rationed (there were murmurs that it was all being hoarded to accommodate the many volumes of Churchill's war memoirs) and Lord Berners was heard to complain that at the very entrance to a bookshop one was greeted by the cry: No Tolstoy! No Dostoyevsky!

Paris rejected austerity. Far from rationing clothes, for example, dressmakers, led by Christian Dior, changed the fashion overnight, and decreed that each garment should
consume
many metres of silk, wool or cotton, thus giving a boost to the producers of these materials, as well as enchanting their clients, who had got so tired of their old clothes, and of clattering about in shoes with wooden soles.

Marshall Aid seems to have been well spent on modernising public transport and
putting
an efficient welfare system in place. But the most exciting aspect of the 50s was that the arts flourished as never before. Picasso produced surprises as he did throughout the war, but now painters flocked to Paris. The theatre led the genial atmosphere of renewal which prevailed. There was an explosion of talent, led by Louis Jouvet, Montherlant's thrilling play
Le Cardinal de L'Espagne
was in the repertory of the Comédie Française and his
Port Royal
at the Odeon, a play which gave the illusion that the audience was actually witnessing the drama of Jansenism, the nuns victims of the pitiless autocracy of Louis XIV. Sartre wrote his powerful
Diable et le Bon Dieu
, Julien Green a twentieth-century homosexual drama,
Sud
, in the romantic setting of the Deep South. Cocteau's star actor was Jean Marais, Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault had their own troupe, and there were great beauties, Edwige Feuillère and Danielle Darrieux, as well as the
irrepressible
Arletty and the child-like quality of Zizi Jeanmaire. This constellation of talent performed on both stage and screen, in films like
Les Enfants du Paradis
.

At the same time there were constant balls and parties given in sumptuous houses
decorated
by Georges Geoffroy. Much, though not all, of the money spent on these
extravagances
came from South and North America. Daisy Fellowes, Mona Bismarck,
Marie-Laure
de Noailles, Etienne de Beaumont, Patino, Beistegui were generous hosts.

Novels and journals were written by Paul Morand, Montherlant, Sartre, Mauriac, an
endless
array of talent. Towards the end of this unusual decade, it was realised it was too good to last. As so often in human affairs, politics and war replaced gaiety and happiness. The
terrible
war in Algeria affected every French family. No more balls were given, a sombre cloud descended. General de Gaulle came back from his twelve years at Colombey. He ‘settled' Algeria, but it never knew peace.

Paris became hard working and serious, the Paris we know now. It is as beautiful as ever, but its elegant inhabitants wear blue jeans and fashionable black rags and tatters. The dressmakers floated away, leaving only their names behind. Could that decade of half a century ago ever again materialise? The décor is still in place.

Unpublished (2003)

Paris is a haven for intellectuals in a way that London has never been. To make a
comparison
,
you would have to imagine not only Parliament, the British Museum and the palace of the head of state, but also Oxford, Cambridge, and the major public schools, all
gathered
in London. Of course there are clever boys in the French provinces, but they make a bee-line for Paris as soon as they possibly can.

Not many English writers live in London. They prefer the country, and go to London to see their publishers or agents, more than to see each other. The physical proximity of French writers and academics generates an abnormal amount of envy, hatred and malice, fuelled by the literary prizes which ensure the sale of novels which might otherwise
languish
. Television also plays a part in sales promotion, and Bernard-Henri Lévy is a
popular
performer, interviewing writers and intellectuals dressed in black and white to match his black hair and white face.

He starts his adventure on the freedom road with a backward glance at the Dreyfus case, but it would be difficult for anyone not familiar with the Affaire to make out what happened. In his version, Conservatives, the Army and the Catholics sent an unfortunate and totally innocent man to prison on Devil's Island. They undoubtedly did, but except for the few who were guilty of this injustice most people imagined Dreyfus had sold
military
secrets to Germany, a crime which appalled the patriotic French, terrified as they were of another war. By the time, owing to the efforts of Dreyfus's brother and his
powerful
allies Clemenceau and Zola, his innocence was as good as proved and the real
culprit
, Esterhazy, unmasked, France was in such a fever of fear and hatred between those who supported Dreyfus and those who condemned his supposed guilt that it was like a civil war. There was a famous caricature at the time of a dining room filled with a party of men in white ties and ladies in long gowns and jewels, all gesticulating, chairs broken, china and glass smashed. The caption was: ‘They had spoken of Dreyfus.'

Proust's description of the Prince de Guermantes, who had gradually become
convinced
that a terrible crime had been committed by the Army, backed up by the Church, and who seeks out his old friend Swann, a Dreyfusard from the beginning, to tell him of his change of mind, is one of the most moving scenes in his novel. Needless to say, Proust does not let the Guermantes off the hook. The Duchess makes her bad-taste joke when people say how unattractive Dreyfus is: ‘They'll have to change victims.' Words that echo through the Faubourg St Germain, finding itself on the wrong side in the bitter dispute. Since most of M. Lévy's ‘causes' are to do with nationalism, still so powerful after the demise of ideologies, he is right to start with the most famous of them all. He is more indulgent to nationalists of other climes.

After the first war the surrealists were paramount among Paris intellectuals; some were communists and others were not. The Communist Party was never happy with its
intellectual
adherents, they were too unreliable. They went to Russia to see the workers' paradise and admire the revolution, and often saw too much and came back disillusioned and wrote, like Gide in
Retour de l'URSS
, books denouncing the regime.

After the second war there was another civil war between resisters and collaborators,
still raging quietly when France embarked upon its colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria. Inevitably they failed, and the generations of intellectuals described by Lévy played a part in trying to assure some sort of ‘Freedom' for the wretched people caught up in these
interminable
struggles.

After 1989 and the collapse of communism old values such as the Rights of Man asserted themselves once more, and the intellectuals, disillusioned by the failure of the
students
' revolt in 1968 to effect radical change, seem to have settled down to arguing on
television
and writing.

Naturally the old bitter divisions of the last war remain. Lévy's hero is Malraux, his
villains
Drieu la Rochelle and Céline. Yet when the dust has finally settled, what remains is the writing. Sartre's and Montherlant's plays, Céline's
Voyage au bout de la Nuit
, Aragon's
Semaine-Sainte
, along with the Journals of Gide, Mauriac and Julien Green will be read when their politics have faded.

Lévy's book, well translated, may prove rather puzzling to English readers. They will be like the people in the rue du Quatre Septembre who, when asked what event had given the street its name, hadn't the slightest idea. The word Billancourt means nothing to most of the English, and the footnote is not much help. The ‘sixth February' is apt to pass them by. But they will enjoy some of the interviews, even if they seem rather anti-French, and perhaps congratulate themselves that our native writers are mostly fuddy duddy liberals, and not quite so furiously ‘engaged.'

Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century
, Lévy, B.-H., trans. Ceasey, R.
Evening Standard
(1995)