And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (62 page)

Among the mainly Communist members of the Front National du Théâtre, there was nonetheless a strong desire to sanction those who had appeared to be too close to the Vichy regime. René Rocher, who had been named director of the Théâtre de l’Odéon by Vichy, was jailed for five months but was then acquitted. The Comédie Française’s own purge committee dismissed a number of actors who had freelanced by reciting poetry or famous soliloquies at Nazisponsored events. Conversely, the Jewish actress Béatrice Bretty, whose husband, Georges Mandel, had been murdered by the
milice
in 1944, was welcomed back to the theater. Among playwrights, the only appealing target was Montherlant, not for his historical drama
La Reine morte
but for
Le Solstice de juin
. But even his one-year prohibition from publishing was retroactive.

A more interesting debate revolved around whether plays approved by the Nazis contained hidden resistance messages. For some in the Front National du Théâtre, Anouilh was suspect, not only because he was a Laubreaux favorite but also because he was a relative newcomer to theater and did not belong to Left Bank literary circles.
He defended himself, arguing that
Antigone
forcefully articulated his belief in individual freedom. But while he was never sanctioned, the unproved charges thrown at him, all too often by the Communist Party’s daily,
L’Humanité
, raised doubts about his position.

Sartre, on the other hand, was better placed to insist that
Les Mouches
and
Huis clos
were both resistance plays. Although his involvement in the intellectual resistance had been minimal, after the liberation he had suddenly appeared as the chronicler of France’s calvary. While many other artists and writers were consumed by the
épuration
, he stood back and reinvented the occupation as a kind of tragic historical novel. “Never have we been freer than under the German occupation,” he wrote in
Les Lettres Françaises
on September 9, 1944. “We had lost all our rights, starting with that of speaking; we were insulted daily and had to remain silent; we were deported en masse, as workers, as Jews, as political prisoners; everywhere—on walls, in newspapers, on screens—we were confronted by this vile image that our oppressors wanted to give us of ourselves: because of all that, we were free.” In this drama, the resistance was the unfailing hero. And since Sartre’s “we” embraced both the French and the resistance, it was easy to suppose that he, too, had faced the risk of “imprisonment, deportation and death”—notwithstanding the fact that he, for one, had not “lost all [his] rights” to publish books and present plays. When the article was reprinted as “The Republic of Silence” in the
Atlantic Monthly
in December 1944, the magazine introduced its author as “one of the leaders of the CNE” who “had devoted himself to underground activities with sublime courage,” and it ranked him among literary combatants alongside Aragon, Éluard and Paulhan. The construction of Sartre’s American image was well under way.

Meanwhile, the artists and writers who had chosen exile began returning to France, the theater director Louis Jouvet in 1945, André Breton in May 1946, others much later. The postwar cultural life of Paris did not wait for them. The Paris Opera reopened on October 23, 1944, with an existing production of Gounod’s
Roméo et Juliette;
Picasso was the star of the 1944 Salon d’Automne,
^*
his first exhibition in France since early 1940; Josephine Baker returned to
the stage as a resistance heroine; the
théâtre de boulevard
came back to life;
Les Enfants du paradis
finally had its premiere in March 1945; and new newspapers and journals appeared, including
Le Monde
and Sartre’s
Les Temps Modernes
. Among some artists and writers who had belonged to the resistance, above all those close to Aragon, now nicknamed the
Le grand inquisiteur
, the urge to settle old scores faded slowly. But once the worst traitors and criminals of the war years had faced justice (or had gone into hiding abroad), most French people seemed happy to embrace the myth of the resistance, to bury the memory of their own ambivalances and to forget the occupation. Artists and writers were among the beneficiaries. Few were those who, within a few years, were not again performing or painting or publishing.

*
Estimates of the number of children born of French mothers and German fathers—the so-called
enfants de Boche
—during or immediately after the occupation range between 100,000 and 200,000. Some Frenchmen working under the STO program also fathered children with German women.

*
Decaux went on to have a successful career as a writer and was elected to the Académie Française in 1979.

*
On September 5, 1940, Gide wrote, “To come to terms with one’s enemy of yesterday is not cowardice; it is wisdom and acceptance of the inevitable.” He added, “What is the use of bruising oneself against the bars of one’s cage? In order to suffer less from the narrowness of the jail, there is nothing like remaining squarely in the middle.”

*
In another apparent contradiction, Béraud’s editor at
Gringoire
, Horace de Carbuccia, was never brought to trial.

*
In 1950, Bernstein publicly forgave Cocéa and dropped a lawsuit against the actress Michèle Alfa, who, with her Wehrmacht boyfriend, had occupied his apartment from 1940.

*
Galtier-Boissière was unpersuaded by Picasso’s new ideological commitment. In
Mon journal depuis la libération
, he wrote, “The truth known to all artists is that Picasso was in terror of losing his immense fortune. By joining the Communist Party, he obtained an insurance and some are even mentioning the exact size of the premium” (p. 31).

*
Picasso, who had always stayed away from the traditionally conservative Salon d’Automne, was shocked when his seventy-four paintings and five sculptures provoked angry protests from visitors disturbed by their radicalism.

_·
CHAPTER 17
_·
Surviving at a Price

WHAT, THEN
, was the cultural legacy of the occupation? Were the “dark years” in fact a golden age for culture, as some remembered them, or were they a time of creative silence and pain? Certainly, despite the taxing circumstances, France’s performers and creators kept remarkably busy, offering the public a rich fare of art and entertainment that it could enjoy and understand. In just four years, they also produced some works of lasting quality: several movies, notably
Les Enfants du paradis;
a handful of plays, including
Huis clos;
a few compositions, among them Messiaen’s
Quatuor pour la fin du temps;
some hidden paintings and sculptures; and one great work of fiction, Camus’s
L’Étranger
. In part, this reflected advantages France enjoyed over other occupied countries, such as a degree of self-government and a residue of German respect for French culture. In Paris, both occupier and occupied wanted an active cultural life—the Germans to distract the locals and themselves, the French to demonstrate that their culture was still alive.

Yet these were hardly normal times. Numerous leading artists left
the country, others were forced into hiding, a few chose to remain silent. And those still working in Paris could draw little inspiration from the daily sight of Nazi troops. Not only did fear, censorship and propaganda dampen the creative spirit, but Germany was also ready to smother any new French claim to cultural leadership of Europe. Above all, there was no room for the intense intellectual and artistic debates that had enlivened Paris during the interwar years. Creative artists need the oxygen of freedom to take flight. During the occupation, they had sufficient air to survive, but not to lift off. In that sense, then, the Germans could claim success.

The occupiers did less well, however, with their broader plan to tame French culture and bring German arts to France. While the occupation isolated French artists and writers from the rest of the world, the Germans still liked to parade them through Berlin and other cities as guests of the Reich. They banned and then persecuted Jewish artists, performers and producers, but this left more room for new French talent. They extended their prohibition of “degenerate” art, music and jazz to France, yet modern art was still created, contemporary music was composed and jazz was widely performed. The shortage of textiles, leather and fur hurt the fashion industry, but designers, seamstresses and women at home improvised with flair; understandably, German officers were beguiled by the style and beauty of
les parisiennes
.

Of course, the German embassy and institute had no difficulty in gathering celebrities for diplomatic dinners and receptions. And these guests invariably included Fascist writers and newspaper editors who supported Hitler’s new German Europe. But many others attended simply to be in the limelight, to enjoy good wine and food and to ensure that no obstacles stood in the way of their careers. And as opportunists they were not reliable apostles of German culture. In fact, even French Fascists who were happy to endorse National Socialism did little to promote German arts beyond applauding Breker’s Orangerie show in 1942. This job was left to the German Institute, which invited some historians and philosophers to give lectures and exchange ideas with their French colleagues. But German movies, plays and books reached few French people. Only in music were the French enthusiastic about German culture—as they had been before 1940 and would again be after the war.

The cultural resistance used every opportunity to work openly as the best way of reaching a broad public. And while artists could
hardly be expected to organize an uprising, they could at least assure their audiences that they were not alone in resenting the occupation. A few
chansonniers
with a gift for the double entendre could usually count on chuckles of recognition from streetwise Parisians. Plays by Anouilh and Sartre, while approved by German censors, addressed the question of personal freedom and could be read as allegories. In movies, there was the final scene of
Les Visiteurs du soir
, with a stone statue’s beating heart suggesting that France still lived. Some poetry with coded resistance messages was also published openly with the approval of the Propaganda Staffel in Paris and of Vichy in the south. Somewhat accidentally, this included the most influential poem of the occupation, Éluard’s “Liberté.”

Poetry denouncing the occupation and extolling the resistance, on the other hand, could only circulate secretly. Its function was different. Direct, emotional, patriotic, often violent, it was not written for posterity: it was closer to agitprop than art. After the war, the Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, who was in exile in Mexico, compared the lyricism of this militant poetry with “pharmaceutical advertising” in
Le Déshonneur des poètes;
the title was chosen as a riposte to
L’Honneur des poètes
, the poetry collection published by Éditions de Minuit in 1943. From the comfort of New York, André Breton also sniped at Aragon and Éluard for sacrificing their art to politics. Yet in occupied France, political poetry was the path that beckoned.

In fiction, two works stood out for their artistic quality. Vercors’s
Le Silence de la mer
, published clandestinely by Éditions de Minuit in 1942, portrayed the pain of defeat in a refined literary form. And Irène Némirovsky’s
Suite française
—written in 1941 and 1942 and published only in 2004—was a still finer example of fiction in time of war. Significantly, though, no hidden literary chef d’oeuvre appeared immediately after the liberation.

Did this form of cultural resistance worry the Germans? Early in the occupation, alert to any signs of plotting, they moved quickly to dismantle the Musée de l’Homme network in 1941 and to execute the cofounders of
La Pensée Libre
in 1942, even though these
résistants
were doing little more than publishing anti-German propaganda. As the occupation advanced, however, persecution of artists and writers became more haphazard. Several foreign artists, including Otto Freundlich, were arrested and sent to death camps, but as Jews, not resisters. Similarly, Tristan Bernard and Max Jacob were arrested as Jews: Bernard was soon freed, but Jacob died at Drancy. Two Jewish
intellectuals, Benjamin Crémieux and Marc Bloch, also died at the hands of the Germans, but both were engaged in the armed resistance. Among those active in Paris, Robert Desnos was one of the few to be arrested and deported (he died of typhus at the Terezin camp in Czechoslovakia), but, again, he had belonged to the Agir resistance group.

From mid-1942, no one involved in the writers’ Comité National des Écrivains or in the smaller cinema, art, music or theater resistance groups was detained. One likely explanation is that, while bent on combating armed resistance, the Germans gave little importance to these groups. They were aware of
Les Lettres Françaises
and they had good reason to believe that Paulhan, Mauriac, Aragon and Éluard were involved. In his memoir, Heller said he worried constantly about Paulhan’s safety: “Several times at night, I walked up and down the rue des Arènes”—where Paulhan lived—“as a kind of watchman, ready to warn him in case the German or French police arrived.”
¹
Indeed, in mid-1944, a tip from Heller gave Paulhan time to go into hiding. At the same time, while these literary
résistants
had ample cause to be fearful, they took few precautions; if the Gestapo had chosen to follow them, it could have rounded up a good part of the writers’ resistance group in Édith Thomas’s 5th arrondissement apartment. But the Germans presumably calculated that ignoring intellectual celebrities would cause them less trouble than arresting them.