Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (57 page)

France had been able to breathe a sigh of relief in 1949 with the Communist threat at home greatly diminished and the end of the Berlin blockade, but a new phase of the Cold War opened in 1950. Mao Tse-tung, the victor of the Chinese civil war, signed a Sino-Soviet pact in Moscow, and six months later the Korean War began. The fear of atomic war and Soviet tanks on the Place de la Concorde resurged dramatically.

The French Communist Party vigorously continued its peace propaganda and Picasso’s dove became the most over-used image of the age. Yet even at this crucial moment, personal rivalries cloaked in ideological nuance seethed in its upper ranks. Doctrinal purity in art soon provided a
casus belli
for the hardliners.

Picasso’s decision in 1944 to join a party which still officially condemned non-representational art as decadent had complicated matters for the Communists. At first, the purists of socialist realism had restricted their criticism to coded attacks. But the change in the party line dictated by Moscow in 1947 affected almost everything. ‘The fresh air of Soviet art,’ declared
Pravda
that summer, ‘is polluted by the stale stench of capitalism’s artistic bankruptcy.’ Picasso and Matisse were held responsible. The main thrust, however, was aimed at the influence of the United States. Abstract art was said to be tainted with American culture. It was ‘American imperialism’ which controlled ‘abstract art like all the rottenness in the world’. This gave Louis Aragon, Picasso’s great supporter, the opportunity to deflect the attacks. With a chauvinist twist, he described American modern art as ‘the production line imitation of an avant-garde which was born in Paris’. *

French Communism, following the Congress of Intellectuals at Wrocław in 1948, returned towards a stronger support for socialist realism. Certain distinctions were made clear: Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger were not Communist painters, but painters who were Communists. At the Salon d’Automne of 1949, the socialist-realist painters were all grouped together in the first room; André Fougeron was hailed by Communist critics as the Jacques Louis David of the modern proletariat. For Stalin’s seventieth birthday that December, the party chose as their main gift Fougeron’s
Hommage à André Houllier,
a portrait of the Houllier family grieving at the spot where their son had been shot by a policeman as he pasted up a Communist poster. Picasso, on the other hand, offered as his present a rapid sketch of a face-like hand holding up a glass with the legend ‘
Staline à ta santé
’. The compromise solution between the two camps was to declare Fougeron to be the official painter of the party and Picasso the official painter of the peace movement.

The following year, Auguste Lecoeur, whose power base lay in the coalfields of the north, commissioned a series of paintings by Fougeron on miners’ lives, known as ‘
Au Pays des mines
’. In January 1951, without checking dates with anybody else, he announced in
L’Humanité
the opening date of this exhibition. It clashed with the new Picasso exhibition. This was probably a genuine mistake, but, intended or not, it brought the battle between the socialist-realist school and the supporters of Picasso out into the open. The vastly greater success of the Picasso exhibition constituted a humiliation for Lecoeur. He had to wait just over two years for his revenge.

When Stalin’s death was announced on Friday, 7 March 1953, Aragon called in Pierre Daix and rattled off a shopping list of features to honour Stalin in a special issue of
Les Lettres françaises
– ‘an article by Joliot, one by me, an article by Courtade, another by Sadoul, one by you. We must have something by Picasso.’

Since Picasso had always refused to do a portrait of Stalin from a photograph, Daix sent a telegram to himat Vallauris saying, ‘Do whatever you want’, and signed it ‘Aragon’. Picasso’s drawing of Stalin, which depicted him as a curiously open-eyed young man, arrived at the very moment
Les Lettres françaises
went to press. Daix took the picture in to Aragon. He admired it and said that the party would appreciate the gesture. While it was being set into the front page, office boys and typists crowded round the picture. Everyone thought it ‘worthy of Stalin’. Daix was overjoyed to be the one who had commissioned Picasso’s first portrait of the Soviet leader and rushed it down to the printers. But a few hours later, when the edition had been run off, the mood in the building had completely changed to one of fear. Journalists from
L’Humanité,
passing by, spotted the drawing and cried out that it was unthinkable that any Communist publication should consider printing such a representation of ‘
le Grand Staline
’.

Pierre Daix promptly rang Aragon at his apartment; Elsa Triolet answered. She told him angrily that he was mad to have even thought of asking Picasso for such a drawing.

‘But really, Elsa,’ Daix broke in, ‘Stalin isn’t God the Father!’

‘Yes, he is, Pierre. Nobody’s going to reflect much about what this drawing of Picasso signifies. He hasn’t even deformed Stalin’s face. He’s even respected it. But he has dared to touch it. He has actually dared, Pierre, do you understand?’

Aragon rose to the occasion and took full responsibility upon himself. It was almost as if somebody had to face a court martial for treason. But for the staff of
Les Lettres françaises,
the worst was still to come. Daix found secretaries in tears from the insults screamed down the telephone at them by loyal Communists protesting at the sacrilege. Some even said that it portrayed Stalin as cruel and Asiatic, which was what his enemies wanted.

Those who wished to revenge themselves on Aragon did not waste time. Chief among them was Auguste Lecoeur. He wanted
Les Lettres françaises
publicly condemned. Aragon prepared a suitably grovelling apology.

Communists who found themselves excluded from the party during the frenzy over the Titoist heresy were like lost souls. They had automatically been deprived of the vast majority of their friends, not having made or kept many outside the party. And they had lost all sense of purpose in their lives, along with the sense of comradeship which an embattled community provided. A true Communist used to say that he intended to die with his party membership card in his pocket – ‘
mourir la carte dans la poche
’.

The wrench was almost as hard for those who took the decision to leave because they could no longer swallow the lies and ‘
serrer les dents
’. For some this came with the show trials in Eastern Europe, for many more it came in 1956. Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes on 26 February at the Twentieth Congress, yet the French Communist Party, still irredeemably Stalinist, tried to pretend that nothing had happened. The news was entirely suppressed in
L’Humanité,
while every other newspaper was full of the story.

Jacqueline Ventadour-Hélion, who had read Khrushchev’s speech in
Le Monde,
raised the issue at the next party meeting she attended. There was an embarrassed silence, then the subject was rapidly changed. Afterwards, a cadre told her firmly that ‘not all truths should be spoken aloud’. This, for her, was the time to leave. She was already under suspicion for having visited friends in the United States. Communists were not allowed visas – she had in fact obtained one through a friend in the American Embassy who took a more relaxed view of the regulation – so in the party’s logic she was therefore a supporter of John Foster Dulles. Unlike those who hated the idea of losing their party card, she felt an immense sense of liberation when it was torn up.

That autumn, during the Suez crisis, Soviet tanks crushed the rising in Hungary. Furious demonstrators attacked the Soviet Embassy. In the crowd, General de Bénouville encountered Colonel Marcel Degliame, the Communist who had come to him on that night in 1948 to warn him to be prepared against an attack.

Crowds also surrounded Communist Party headquarters, where the security guards were ready. A more serious attack was mounted against the offices of
L’Humanité
. Groups climbed over the roofs and threw Molotov cocktails. Inside, staff and other Communist volunteers, who had come in to help defend the place, put out fires and ejected any attackers who managed to break in. They hurled what missiles came to hand: bottles from the canteen, chairs, even a bust of Karl Marx, which was said to have flattened one assailant. The most effective were hunks of metal newspaper type. Three Communists were killed in the disorders and the days of the Resistance were recalled once again.
L’Humanité
claimed afterwards, in an effort to dignify the events, that workers loyal to the party had rushed into Paris from the ‘
ceinture rouge
’ to defend ‘their party, their newspaper… just as one throws oneself into a fire to save one’s wife and children’.

The events of 1956 led to a dramatic decline in the Communist Party’s influence on intellectual life in Paris. This did not mean that the left-wing intelligentsia’s fascination with revolutionary violence slackened. Over the next decade, new idols and theorists – including Mao, Marcuse and Che Guevara – were raised up to take the place of Stalin.

Paris continued to be a cultural and literary Mecca for the rest of the world. The
patronnes
of cheap hotels in the
Quartier Latin
still grumbled and failed to prosper. Gabriel García Márquez, who had arranged for his employer, the Colombian newspaper
El Espectador,
to send him to Paris, moved into a maid’s attic room on the top floor of the Hotel de Flandre in the rue Cujas. There he lived off cold spaghetti, smoked three packets of Gauloises during the course of a working night, and squeezed sideways against the radiator as he tried to summon up the tropical heat of Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The result was
La Mala Hora,
hammered out on an old typewriter. A photograph of his fiancée, Mercédes, back in Barranquilla pinned to the wall was the only decoration.

He had no radio, or the money to buy newspapers, and his source of information on Castro’s revolt against Batista was the poet Nicolas Guillen, who used to yell the latest news from his window. The only luxury was a drink behind the steamed-up windows of La Chope Parisienne amid silent chess players. On Christmas Night 1957, he saw snow for the first time in his life. He ran out and danced wildly among the large soft flakes.

Madame Lacroix, the
patronne
of the Flandre, was indeed tolerant. Not only did she allow García Mÿrquez credit for a whole year, she permitted the then unknown Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa to stay for two years without paying. At one point García Märquez was reduced to begging in the streets when
El Espectador
went bankrupt. But one day he was encouraged by a curious incident. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel he spotted Hemingway, still his literary idol, across the street. Without thinking, he called out his name: ‘
Emming-way!
’ Ernest Hemingway did not look round, he just raised his hand. Yet the optimistic young South American sensed this gesture as a benediction.

Coincidentally, a new wave of writers from the United States had reached the Latin Quarter at the same time. Several members of the Beat generation, including William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, established themselves in what became known as the Beat Hotel at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur. Their ambition was to meet Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose novel
Voyage au bout de la nuit
had excited and influenced them. Ginsberg and Burroughs, having arranged an introduction through his editor, went to pay a call on him in the run-down suburb of Meudon. It was to be a visit of homage rather than a literary discussion.

Since his return from Denmark, Céline had not had many visitors, except Arletty, who had corresponded with him during his exile and had remained a faithful friend. She understood his
cafards
; besides, the two had more in common than their origins in Courbevoie. Arletty made a recording of his
Death on the Instalment Plan
and he wrote a scenario for her called
Arletty, jeune fille dauphinoise,
a sort of picaresque adventure in the eighteenth-century manner, rather reminiscent of
Candide
. But Céline did not have long to live: he died on 1 July 1961, the same day as Hemingway.

France’s tortuous relationship with the United States was not improved in 1954, when the unwinnable war in Indo-China ended in ignominious defeat at Dien Bien Phu. French dominion over North Africa was also doomed. A fatal combination of bigotry, weakness, wilful shortsightedness, political inconsistency and bad faith was leading to a series of humiliations which together were tantamount to the defeat of 1940. Once again, de Gaulle appeared as the only candidate able to rescue France from the consequences of national pride and then proceed to rebuild it.

The bitter turmoil in Algiers allowed him to return to power in the virtually unopposed
coup d’état
of May 1958. Colonel Passy immediately flew to his old wartime haunt of London as the General’s envoy to the intelligence community. Passy arranged a discreet lunch with the former SIS chief of station in Paris, who was now in charge of the European department. He chose the Savoy, where, to remind himself of the gastronomic curiosities of London, he ordered kippers and a bottle of Bass beer. The purpose of his visit, however, was to ask his old colleagues to spread the message that de Gaulle had come to power only to solve the Algerian crisis. He had absolutely no intention of staying on.

The General, however, had every intention of staying on. His return allowed him to end the Fourth Republic, which he had despised from its conception. This time he was able to insist on the Constitution he wanted, with almost all the power concentrated in the hands of the President. The Fifth Republic, with politicians reduced to rude mechanicals, was patently his creation.

His distrust of the British and the Americans had continued to burn strongly over the years. In 1961, President Kennedy sent a highly secret message for de Gaulle’s eyes only to Paris by special courier. The missive informed the French President that the CIA had just started to debrief a Russian defector, and he had produced the names of Soviet moles high in the French administration. If President de Gaulle would like to select a senior English-speaking officer with intelligence experience, his nominee could come to the United States and sit in on the relevant debriefing sessions. De Gaulle promptly summoned General Jean-Louis de Rougemont, who was then head of the army’s intelligence staff, to the Élysée Palace. He emphasized to Rougement the great secrecy of the whole affair and explained in detail what he should do. ‘In any case,’ said de Gaulle, ‘you must see whether this isn’t a trap.’