And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (12 page)

Other publishers also recognized the risk of being excluded. From his hideaway in the south of France, Gaston Gallimard feared that his publishing house’s liberal record could make it a Nazi target. And, with the Germans already intervening in publishing, Gallimard’s own authors encouraged him to return to Paris. As early as August, the occupation forces had issued the so-called Bernhard List of 143 books to be withdrawn from circulation; these included Jewish authors and anti-Nazi books. In September, when a further one thousand or so books were banned under the new “Otto List,” the French publishers’ association, the Syndicat des Éditeurs, offered to cooperate under the guise of keeping French culture alive. In an agreement signed with the Propaganda Staffel, the publishers pledged not to publish any book banned in France or Germany and to assume responsibility for any new books they would put out. The Syndicat noted, “Affected are books which, through their lying and tendentious spirit, have systematically poisoned French public opinion; particularly targeted are publications by political refugees and Jewish writers who, betraying the hospitality that France has offered them, have unscrupulously promoted a war which they hoped would benefit their egotistical aims.”
¹³
For their part, the Nazis were happy: without self-censorship, they would have needed a small army of French-speaking experts to review thousands of manuscripts.

Gallimard made his own Faustian bargain with the German
embassy. Abetz is said to have remarked that France’s three powers were banking, the Communist Party and the
Nouvelle Revue Française
. And he soon fixed his eyes on the prestigious literary and political journal, which had been founded by Gide, Copeau, the writer Jean Schlumberger and Gallimard himself in 1909. Since 1925, the
NRF
, as it was widely known, had been edited by Jean Paulhan, a position that automatically made him one of the most powerful figures in the Paris intelligentsia. In its traditional form, with its pages open to a broad range of political opinions, it was not acceptable to Abetz. But the German envoy was willing to allow it to resume publication if—and only if—it was edited by his friend Drieu La Rochelle. Without much hesitation, Gallimard agreed. With the journal’s first postoccupation edition circulating in December 1940, Éditions Gallimard was not only back in business, but had also gained some freedom to publish books by authors not known for their Nazi sympathies.

Thirty years later, Sartre would say, “During the occupation, we had two choices: collaborate or resist.”
¹⁴
In truth, the options—and dilemmas—facing individual artists were far more varied, as Sartre himself demonstrated. A few Jews, like the the playwright Bernstein, the novelist Maurois and the composer Milhaud, wasted no time in leaving France for the United States. In contrast, the writer Paul Morand and the historian Paul Hazard, who had just been elected to the Académie Française, chose to return to occupied France from abroad. Some viewed the defeat as resolving the problems of the 1930s rather than creating new ones. Paul Claudel, a diplomat, playwright and conservative, happily said good-bye to the Third Republic, which, he maintained, had devoured the country like a rampant cancer. In his diary entry for July 20, 1940, he lamented France’s loss of independence but listed developments he considered positive. “Freedom after 60 years under the yoke of the radical and anti-Catholic party (teachers, lawyers, Jews, Freemasons). The new government calls on God and returns the Grande Chartreuse
^*
to the monks. Hope to be released from universal suffrage and parliamentary rule as well as from the evil and idiotic domination by teachers who since the last war have covered themselves with shame. Restoration of authority.”
¹⁵
In December 1940, he even penned an ode to
Pétain with these instructive lines: “France, listen to this old man who cares for you / And talks to you like a father.” Claudel, though, would be among many French citizens who changed their views. The young poet Claude Roy made a bigger leap, switching from L’Action Française to the Communist Party.

Writers who were in the unoccupied zone had the option of remaining there. As a high-profile Communist, Aragon wisely stayed in the south, although he later led intellectual resistance across the region. Similarly, Malraux, renowned as an anti-Fascist, did not leave the Côte d’Azur until he joined the armed resistance in early 1944. On the other hand, right-wingers like Drieu La Rochelle, who had also fled the fighting, were not unhappy with the outcome; some offered their services in Vichy, while the majority returned to Paris. Many moderates also made their way back to the capital, among them Mauriac, who initially believed—“despite everything,” as he put it to the essayist Jean Guéhenno—that the French had no choice but to support Pétain. Although he would later join the resistance, in June 1941 he made the mistake of asking Epting to approve publication of his novel
La Pharisienne
and then petitioning Heller for extra paper for a second printing. In a dedicated copy of the book sent to Heller, Mauriac wrote, “To Lieut Heller, who took interest in the fate of
La Pharisienne
, with gratitude.”
¹⁶
On the other hand, Cocteau, that artistic polymath and social butterfly, refused to stop being Cocteau. In August 1943, he noted in his journal, “At no price should one let oneself be distracted from serious matters by the dramatic frivolity of war.”
¹⁷
He had unwaveringly followed this principle over the previous three years.

For almost everyone else, it was a period of great uncertainty. Saint-Exupéry, for instance, visited Pétain before deciding to leave France and, even in the United States, he had ambivalent feelings toward de Gaulle. Others felt a need to analyze the reasons for France’s defeat, as the playwright Henry de Montherlant did in
Le Solstice de juin
from the safety of a café in Marseille. And at this stage, the commonplace, even among moderates, was that France’s prewar decadence—decadence now becoming the scapegoat for all of the country’s troubles—had invited defeat. The right, of course, had a more detailed list of culprits.

Gide, who stayed in the unoccupied zone until leaving for Tunisia in 1942, also tried to make sense of political events, although he did so in the privacy of his journal. And, somewhat typically, this quintessential
man of letters wavered. He applauded Pétain’s first speech and disapproved of another, one week later. He was impressed by the German victory, noting, “We have been prettily maneuvered, without even being aware of it, by Hitler, the sole master of the circus ring, whose sly and hidden smartness surpasses that of the great captains.”
¹⁸
Almost echoing Pétain, he also saw France inviting its own defeat: “All my love for France could not keep me from being aware of our country’s state of decay. To my constant awareness of that decay is merely added a great melancholy. It was obvious that that was leading us to the abyss.”
¹⁹
At one moment, he regretted that he was far from the fray. “The ‘intellectual’ who aims first and foremost to take shelter loses a rare opportunity to learn something,” he noted.
²⁰
But he also had no yearning to be in Paris.

A few months later, he was still confused, writing, “My torment is even deeper: it comes likewise from the fact that I cannot decide with assurance that right is on this side and wrong on the other.”
²¹
He added: “Oh, I should like to be left alone, to be forgotten! Free to think in my own way without its costing anyone anything and to express without constraint or fear of censure the oscillation of my thought.”
²²
On May 21, 1941, Gide was reminded that the French right included him among France’s problems. The newly formed Légion Française des Combattants, or French Legion of Veterans, forced cancellation of a lecture on the poetry of Henri Michaux that Gide was scheduled to give in Nice. “I like being a ‘victim’ of the Legion,” he later wrote. “I do not like the fact that it should be for so small a reason.”
²³
Yet, more than one year after the fall of France, Gide remained anguished: “Proud of being French.… Alas, for months, for years now, France has hardly given us any reason to be proud.”
²⁴

Gide can perhaps be forgiven for offering pieces for the first and third issues of Drieu La Rochelle’s
Nouvelle Revue Française
, since he subsequently recognized his error and broke his ties with the journal in an article in
Le Figaro
. But, in reality, with only a few exceptions, French writers seemed all too eager to continue publishing, even if that meant bowing to censorship.

One who refused to do so was Guéhenno. True, he did not need to publish to stay alive, since he had a job as a teacher in a Paris lycée. But, from the very beginning of the occupation, in contrast to the hesitations of, say, Gide and Mauriac about Pétain, Guéhenno never wavered. His
Journal des années noires
opens with his reaction to
Pétain’s June 17 speech proposing an armistice. “There we are, it’s over,” he wrote in disgust, adding: “I will never believe that men are made for war. But I also know that they are not made for slavery.”
²⁵
Two days later, he heard de Gaulle’s speech from London. “What joy in this ignoble disaster finally to hear a voice with some pride,” he noted.
²⁶
He returned to Paris from Clermont-Ferrand in early September and resumed teaching, but his gloom deepened. After the Statute on Jews was decreed, he wrote, “I am filled with shame.”
²⁷

Guéhenno was far from cheered when the
Nouvelle Revue Française
announced Gide, Giono and Jouhandeau for its first issue and Valéry and Montherlant for its second. On November 30, 1940, he wrote, “The species of the man of letters is not one of the greatest of human species. Incapable of surviving for long in hiding, he would sell his soul to see his name in print. He can stand it no longer. He quarrels only about his importance, the size of the print in which his name appears, its ranking in the table of contents. It goes without saying that he is full of good reasons. ‘French literature must continue.’ He believes that he is French literature and thought and that they will die without him.”
²⁸
A few months later, Guéhenno even took a swipe at Gide: “A perhaps admirable desire to enrich himself, to improve himself, always leads him. But I cannot identify myself with this irresponsible life, one lacking all commitment. Everything for him is literature, an occasion for pleasure.”
²⁹

One notably droll observer of the intellectual and political scene was Jean Galtier-Boissière, a journalist who founded the satirical weekly
Le Crapouillot
in 1915 while he was fighting in the trenches. In 1940, he refused to reopen the newspaper and tried to survive as a bookseller. Throughout the war, he kept a journal, later published as
Mon journal pendant l’occupation
, comprising a vivid mixture of anecdotes, encounters, rumors, jokes and throwaway lines. For instance, of General Weygand, the humbled French army commander, he quipped,
“Veni, Vidi, Vichy.”
Then there was the chance meeting of a German and a Frenchman. The German: “You look very cheerful for being conquered.” The Frenchman: “You look very sad for being the conqueror.”

Since Galtier-Boissière knew many writers and artists, both collaborationists and
résistants
, his insights into that world are particularly telling. And, by his own account, he always spoke his mind, including his early conclusion that Germany would lose the war. Four months into the occupation, one guest at a dinner party in his
apartment on the place de la Sorbonne was Drieu La Rochelle, who was full of praise for Ambassador Abetz. “Drieu is certain of the rapid German victory,” Galtier-Boissière observed. “I tell him I expect a long war and an English victory. He shrugs his shoulders with a superior smile and treats me like a fool. ‘My dear Drieu, I’ll bet that you will be shot.’ ‘And you?’ he asks. ‘Me too! But in my case … by mistake.’ ”
³⁰
Jokes at the expense of the Germans became his form of entertainment. “Hitler telephones Mussolini: ‘Are you in Athens?’ ‘Sorry, I can’t hear you well.’ ‘I asked if your troops have reached Athens?’ ‘I hear you very badly, my dear Adolphe, you must be calling from far away … perhaps London?’ ”
³¹

Most writers, then, went ahead and published books and plays, while some moderates and a few who were later identified with the resistance wrote for daily and weekly newspapers and journals, both in Paris and in the unoccupied zone. Yet even if they wrote articles about culture in, say,
La Gerbe
, they risked having their names appear alongside anti-Semitic diatribes.
Comoedia
, another literary-political weekly, was perhaps the only place in the occupied zone where noncollaborationist writers could appear unscathed, although there were more outlets in the unoccupied zone, including several literary journals and, notably, the literary supplement of
Le Figaro
, which had moved to Lyon.

For the most part, though, the Paris press served as mouthpieces for the Germans in exchange for subsidies from the German embassy. Some dailies had huge circulations:
Le Matin
, which reappeared on June 17, was soon selling over half a million copies daily;
Le Petit Parisien
close to 700,000; and
Paris-Soir
almost one million. The Nazis were also intent on obtaining or influencing ownership of the printed media, with the German embassy and the Propaganda Abteilung competing for control. Eugène Gerber, the editor of
Paris-Soir
, was backed by the Propaganda Abteilung in expanding his empire to include several popular women’s weeklies, including
Pour Elle
and
Notre Coeur
. Jean Luchaire, Abetz’s friend from the 1930s, brought out a new daily,
Les Nouveaux Temps
, and later headed the Association de la Presse Parisienne. Abetz also supported the German businessman Gerhard Hibbelen, who took over the Jewish-owned Société Parisienne d’Édition and built up a press group that included fifty newspapers around France.