Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (37 page)

Pavement in front of café. Respectable bourgeois men and women reading newspapers, stirring cups of coffee.

There’s the Café de Flore…

A teenage girl and boy walk past: she wears a sweater, Capri pants, sandals laced above the ankle, pony-tail; he has an open-neck shirt, beard, cigarette dangling from his mouth. The camera lets them pass, then swivels quickly to follow them. Lingering shot of girl in centre of screen. She tears the wrapper from a chocolate ice cream and drops it on the pavement.

Did I say nothing had changed?…The Café de Flore is now a temple–a temple whose high priests are called Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Café table with empty coffee cup and overflowing ashtray, and two books
: Le Deuxième Sexe
and
Les Mains sales.

And the name of this cult? EXISTENTIALISM!

Frantic trumpet and cymbal.

Bookshop: young people picking through books; handwritten posters–‘Are you for or against?’, etc.

The Club Saint-Germain, underground dance-floor. Men in sunglasses, women in split skirts. Fast jazz music.

Close up: crude painting on wall based on le Douanier Rousseau’s
The Muse Inspiring the Poet
: Sartre in dinner jacket with pipe in mouth, next to a long-haired figure resembling Juliette Gréco.

Some say that this misty philosophy, which no one understands, not even its exponents, is essentially Germanic; others that Sartre and his acolytes are the Trojan Horse of ‘the American way of life’. And who could deny it?

More scenes of dancing.

Jazz…the jitterbug…American cigarettes…

Relaxed, laughing faces, chewing gum.

Those GIs feel quite at home at the Club Saint-Germain!

Close up: young man wearing flat cap, sunglasses, toothy smile.

‘
Homo existentialis
’ wears sunglasses and lives underground. His bookstores, bars and, yes, his ‘discothèque’, are all several metres below sea-level–probably because of his morbid fascination with the Atom bomb. And, of course, he–and she–wears black…Black (
slight cough
) is his favourite colour…

Black American enjoying the music and the dancing.

Cut to: Sartre walking along a pavement talking to an earnest admirer.

Who is that man who looks like a gargoyle come to life, or a grocer going back to his shop?…You don’t know? Why, that’s the man who started it all!–Jean-Paul Sartre. He’s the one those long-haired adolescents call ‘master’. The author of…‘Being and Nothingness’, ‘Nausea’, ‘Dirty Hands’–well, you get the picture…

News footage of Sartre talking to Simone de Beauvoir at a literary party.

Ask any of the young women who’ve been invited up to the master’s room…I’m told on reliable authority that there’s a distinct smell of Camembert chez Jean-Paul Sartre…

13. The floods of 1910 and the Nord-Sud Métro before its inauguration. Maurice Branger (1910).

14. Le Corbusier, ‘Plan Voisin’ (1925). ‘How can we deal with the problem of Paris? The ‘great East–West throughway of Paris offers the City Council the chance to launch a gigantic financial enterprise.’ The two tiny blobs in the central square are the Porte Saint-Denis and the Porte Saint-Martin.

15. Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler and Arno Breker being filmed on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, 23 June 1940. By Heinrich Hoffmann.

16. ‘
Playground. Children only. No Jews
.’ November 1942.

17. Statues used as p metal during Occupation. he foreground: he Marquis Condorcet, acques Perrin. he statue was er recast and stored to the uai de Conti. Pierre Jahan, 1941.