The streets and cafés of Paris have long provided a stage for the theatre of everyday life, perhaps more than in any other city. Jean-Paul Sartre noted in the Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain how waiters played at the role of waiter, delivering an order with a nonchalant flourish. The phenomenon of the waiter as subconscious actor was brought into his major work, L’Être et le Néant, that largely unreadable bible of Existentialist philosophy.
During the German occupation, he and Simone de Beauvoir and other writers used to scribble away at rows of tables, making the place look like an examination room. This was also the café where the magnificently unattractive Sartre was besieged by young women. He profited from this fan club quite shamelessly, proving that ugliness is not a barrier to sexual success. According to Simone de Beauvoir, his partner in ideas but no longer in love, Sartre had a rather diabolical side when it came to impressionable and beautiful victims.
Saint-Germain, on the rive gauche of the Seine, was the most fashionable part of that intellectual quartier. It had long been a mecca for writers and painters, but its most brilliant heyday began in August 1944, when young parisiennes, many of them dressed in red, white and blue, clambered onto the Sherman tanks and half-tracks of their liberators to kiss their begrimed and dusty faces. Many spent the night with them, prompting the Catholic Church’s plaintive appeal: “Do not throw away your innocence in the joy of liberation.”
Around the quartier of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, novelists, philosophers and painters joined the delirious crowds, chanting and singing the Marseillaise. Saint-Germain entered an extraordinary period. It rapidly became the intellectual mecca of the world. Sartre and his circle had their own routines and meeting places, all within a short stroll of the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. There was, however, one place they avoided on principle, and that was Brasserie Lipp. This was because its spécialité d’Alsace, of sausage and sauerkraut, had attracted German officers in their swarms during the occupation.
The leading actors in this small world became characters in their own unscripted dramas. They formed coteries, seduced each other, quarrelled bitterly – over politics, not infidelity – and became the champions of French intellectual life. The cheap alcohol at their parties, known as “fiestas”, must have given them daily headaches. Simone de Beauvoir, although a robust drinker, often collapsed into tears after a few drinks. You needed youth and stamina to survive the all-night drinking sessions, the arguing over politics, philosophy and love. She was appalled to wake up one morning and find herself in bed with that relentless womaniser and anti-communist Arthur Koestler, not knowing how she had got there. These désordres amoureux usually started in the Café de Flore or the Deux Magots.
You needed youth and stamina to survive the all-night drinking sessions, the arguing over politics, philosophy and love
It was flattering for literary stars to be idolised by the young men and women who joined the circles of acolytes crammed around their tables, listening to every word, but soon this “idiotic fame” became a great inconvenience. Sartre found he could hardly walk the comparatively short distance from his apartment in rue Bonaparte to his publisher, Gallimard, without being stopped a dozen times in the street.
To avoid the crowd, the famille Sartre, which still included Albert Camus before their split, moved in the autumn of 1945 to the downstairs bar of the Hôtel Pont-Royal in rue Montalembert. It was only a few yards from Gallimard, who had offered them office space for their literary magazine, Les Temps Modernes, named after the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times. The idea had arisen before liberation during a dinner given by Simone de Beauvoir. She lived in a tiny “toothpaste pink” room in the Hôtel La Louisiane, where she served badly cooked beans and beef to her guests – most of whom were obliged to sit on the edge of the bed. Almost all their circle lived in cheap hotels. Sartre was one of the very few to inhabit an apartment, at 42 rue Bonaparte. He was just about the only one who could get away with such bourgeois permanence at this time of revolutionary ideals.
The first issue of Les Temps Modernes provoked a storm of interest. De Beauvoir found herself swamped with manuscripts by earnest young writers. All longed to be published in a magazine seen as the pantheon of modern thought, with the celebrity of great names rubbing off on them. What depressed her most was the lack of originality in the material she was given. It seemed as if half the young men on the Left Bank had been working on equally gloomy, pseudo-existentialist novels of the Resistance, because they thought that was what was expected of them – thus subconsciously imitating Sartre’s notion of the café waiter who plays the role of a café waiter.
The decidedly rundown Hôtel Pont-Royal was to be their undiscovered refuge for some time. American playwright Arthur Miller, who stayed at the Pont-Royal in the winter of 1947 and wanted to meet them, never knew they gathered in the subterranean bar. But he remembered the shabby hotel vividly. The concierge’s gaunt chin was covered in nicks as a result of shaving in cold water and he wore a tailcoat that was coming to pieces.
American writers were drawn to Paris in even greater numbers than in the heady days of Montparnasse in the 1920s, yet the immediate post-liberation period marked a new stage in the Franco-American love-hate relationship. The arrival of American troops in Normandy had aroused false hopes on both sides. Under the stifling Vichy regime, French teenagers had dreamed of the New World, with its cinema, music and literature. They adopted American-style plaid shirts, crew cuts and gym shoes, (second-hand clothes sent by Jews from the US for the dispossessed in Europe, but rapidly sold in street markets), yet they soon came to resent their saviours as a new occupying power. The complex relationship between the United States and France, which still exists today, harks back to the tension of the post-liberation period. They were like two resentful lovers, each angry that the other had not lived up to their fantasy, and the consequent disillusionment was bound to express itself in mutual recrimination and contempt.
Just round the corner from the Hôtel Pont Royal, in the rue Sebastien Bottin, stands the Gallimard building where Les Temps Modernes was based. The magazine remained there until 1949, when André Malraux forced Gaston Gallimard to evict its staff after they had ridiculed him in their pages. Gallimard had no choice since Malraux threatened to denounce his collaboration with the Germans during the Occupation. (His behaviour had not been contemptible. It had enabled him to continue sending money to writers in hiding). The garden behind the building was the scene of famous summer parties. At the gathering in June 1945, there was whisky, gin and champagne in apparently limitless quantities. Simone de Beauvoir sat on the grass with the writer Raymond Queneau, discussing the end of history. They arranged to meet next day to continue their discussion but had drunk so much that they both forgot the rendezvous.
Cheap restaurants also provided meeting places and postes restantes at a time when hardly anybody had a telephone that worked. One of their favourite restaurants was Le Petit Saint-Benoît at 4 rue Saint-Benoît, almost on the corner of rue Jacob. Founded in 1901, this establishment had become more like a club. The decoration is still wonderfully unmodernised, with old wooden café chairs, woodwork painted brown, and unframed oval mirrors. The tables are packed together under brass hat racks, and you sit wherever there is a space. At the far end of the room are still the pigeonholes where regular customers kept their napkins and left messages for one other.
The US and France… were like two resentful lovers, each angry that the other had not lived up to their fantasy
Across the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés from the Deux Magots stands Café Bonaparte, where Communist intellectuals, who at that time loathed Sartre and his circle, used to meet. In 1945, when the Red Army was seen by progressives as the saviour of the world from fascism, “the Party” enjoyed an extraordinary prestige. As well as the international power of the Soviet Union, the aggressive role of Communists in the French Resistance excited the admiration of intellectuals infatuated by ruthlessness and violence in the tradition of 1789. The barricades of 1944 against the Germans were also an act of homage to those of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Yet there was an uneasy division within Communist ranks, rather as there was between the Gaullists of London and the Resistance.
In 1939, during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, a deeply troubling time for many Communists, the Party’s leader Maurice Thorez fled to Moscow to escape serving in the French army. He spent the whole war there until Stalin and General de Gaulle privately agreed that he could go back without facing charges of desertion. After his return with his partner Jeannette Vermeersch, Charles Tillon, the leader of the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, made sarcastic remarks about those who invoked the Resistance having known nothing of it. But Thorez and Vermeersch, a proto-Mother Courage figure of impeccable proletarian origins, were worshipped by the left-wing, middle-class intellectuals of the Rive Gauche. Their respect for such figures was as great as that of nineteenth-century British merchants infatuated with the aristocracy.
The quartier was rich in contrasts. A few steps away from the communists’ Café Bonaparte, heiress Nathalie Barney, known as “the empress of lesbians”, held court in a little house behind 20 rue Jacob. It was described by Radcliffe Hall in her lyrically pessimistic novel, The Well of Loneliness, since regarded as a seminal work in American universities. Further on, at 60 rue de Seine, the Hôtel Louisiane remains, where Simone de Beauvoir lived in her room on the top floor.
The other famous inhabitant of this hotel was Juliette Gréco, the muse of Saint-Germain, for whom Sartre composed the songs that shot her to fame. A very short walk took her to rue Dauphine, where she helped make Saint-Germain famous in the short-lived decadence of Le Tabou nightclub. This cellar club opened in April 1947 but was forced to close a few months later because its wild success deprived the neighbourhood of sleep.
Further down was rue Christine, where Gertrude Stein lived with Alice B Toklas in their apartment hung with paintings by Gauguin, Matisse and Cézanne, as well as by their great friend Pablo Picasso. He lived and worked in the adjoining street, rue des Grands Augustins. Sartre and de Beauvoir would sometimes join Picasso and Dora Maar at his favourite restaurant, Le Catalan, just down the street. When Picasso, whose paintings had made him one of the richest men in Paris, announced he was joining the communist party, right-wingers laughed in derision. He was welcomed by the French Communist Party, although for them it was an exquisitely tricky moment. Picasso was a great hero, especially to their younger members, but his paintings had been condemned by Stalinist cultural supremos as decadent and totally contrary to the principles of socialist realism.
Politics, art and literature had become inseparable in the ferment of excitement and ideas. Anger against the Vichy regime encouraged the idea that liberation should be carried forward into revolution, yet intellectual honesty is always the first casualty of moral outrage. The Russian archives had just opened when I first tackled the Comintern and French Communist party files in Moscow. Stéphane Courtois, the editor of Le Livre noir du communisme, told me that he and his team of researchers had just discovered that the speeches made by Communist members in the Chambre des Deputés, and recorded in the Journal Officiel, had been written for them in Moscow. This had been at a time when the Party was vaunting its French patriotism. They had not dared alter a word from their set text.
In the early 1990s, Courtois described working in the Russian archives when they first opened as le vrai Wild West. It felt as if we were playing scissors, paper, stone with the authorities. Everything was done to block you by the old Communist Party loyalists working there. We were told we could obtain photocopies of files, but after handing in the file for copying, it would mysteriously vanish. When you asked what had happened to it, the reply came that it had been sent away for “reclassification”. In those early days, the authorities had little idea what was sensitive, and so as soon as a researcher found something interesting enough to warrant a photocopy, they withdrew it.
With a certain amount of subterfuge, I and my researcher managed to obtain one file which was closed because it gave the name of a Communist agent. This turned out to be the secretary of the foreign minister Georges Bidault. The most interesting part of this file was the fact that the French Communist Party was furious with the young woman because she had confessed her political allegiance to Bidault, thus rendering herself useless as a spy. But perhaps the most striking revelation in the Comintern files was Stalin’s disdain for France and lack of interest in the French Communist Party during the war and up until September 1947, when the Cold War started in earnest. The reason why there had not been a revolution following liberation was because Stalin had told Maurice Thorez not to cause trouble behind the Americans’ backs as their armies advanced on Germany. At that stage, the Soviet Union could not risk losing Lend-Lease supplies from the United States.
Simone de Beauvoir sat on the grass with Raymond Queneau, discussing the end of history
We continually needed to rely on interviews with participants and French historians to check out the reliability of items from the archives. On one occasion I mentioned to Henry Rousso, one of the great historians on Vichy, that as a young officer in Germany based next to Belsen concentration camp, I had been shocked to see a French government memorial to the French Jews who had died there. It stated: Aux juifs français qui sont morts pour la gloire et la patrie. The idea of anyone dying there for glory and patriotism seemed grotesque. “I entirely understand your reaction,” Rousso said, “but you are completely wrong. It was the French Jews themselves who insisted that their memorials should have exactly the same inscription as all the other war memorials.” This was because they would never forgive Vichy for having tried to take away their French nationality.
Perhaps the greatest lesson that a historian could learn emerged in the Archives Nationales. After a delay of nearly five months, my application to the Ministère de l’Intérieur to see the files of the security police was finally granted. In one tiny paragraph I found that a German farmer’s wife had been picked up by the police in Paris, having smuggled herself aboard a train repatriating French forced labourers from Germany in May 1945. It transpired that she was still infatuated after an illicit affair with the French prisoner of war who had worked on their farm while her husband had been conscripted for service on the eastern front. The report does not state whether he had given her his true name or address, still less whether he had been married himself and had returned home to find that his wife had had an affair with a German soldier in his absence. But there, in a four-line paragraph, was the outline for a whole novel by a writer such as Marguerite Duras. It was, above all, a salutary lesson that we should appreciate how the decisions of Hitler and Stalin affected the lives of everybody caught up in that vast conflict, with no control over their own fate.
History never repeats itself, but one often finds interesting echoes of the past. The post-liberation period saw France lurch from one financial crisis to another, yet the progressives intellectuals in Paris convinced themselves that the power of ideas alone could soar above the concerns of “dirty money”. Bizarrely, this is strikingly similar in psychological terms to the Grandmaison doctrine of the French Army in 1914, convincing itself that French élan and the bayonet could triumph over German heavy artillery.
The French Left has always dreamed of a world in which bond markets no longer exist to punish overspending. This proud defiance of cause and effect can never last very long, but France probably remains more vulnerable than most other European countries because of its tradition of protest. Whether it is farmers dumping cabbages in the Champs Elysées or the atavistic cry of Aux barricades!, the French remain viscerally opposed to any notion of the supremacy of market forces. Although no longer the capital of world culture, Paris is still the focus of political ferment.
Antony Beevor is, with Artemis Cooper, the author of “Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949” (Penguin Books)
