And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (2 page)

Nowhere was French cultural leadership greater than in the visual arts. Between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I alone, art movements born in France—Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Les Nabis, Fauvism and Cubism—succeeded one another in what came to resemble a permanent revolution. The 1914–18 conflict did little to disrupt this. While German artists like Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann addressed the nightmare of trench warfare, artists in France paid little heed to a war being fought barely a hundred miles north of Paris. When it was over, those nineteenth-century giants Renoir, Monet and Rodin were still alive, while the influence of Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse continued to grow. Many artists with prewar reputations, men like Georges Braque, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, Pierre Bonnard and Aristide Maillol, also remained faithful to their prewar styles. Fernand Léger was a rare exception. After he spent two years on the front, his art was transformed, with his sketches of artillery and planes anticipating his tubular “mechanical” paintings of the 1920s. Bonnard avoided the trenches, serving briefly as a war artist and painting just one scene of desolation,
Un Village en ruines près du Ham
. But he quickly returned to his cherished themes of nudes and interior scenes.

For European artists, Paris was the place to meet great artists and to aspire to become great oneself. And it helped that the city was an important art market. From the late 1890s, the legendary dealer Ambroise Vollard carried the names of Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh abroad and, in 1901, he gave Picasso his first exhibition in Paris. In the interwar years, it was the turn of other dealers, notably Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and the Rosenberg brothers, Léonce and Paul, to keep European and American collectors supplied with the new art from Paris. For foreign artists, the city’s energy, bubbling away in the studios and cafés of the Left Bank, was as appealing as
any specific art movement. True, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Joan Miró embraced Surrealism, but other foreigners went their own ways, among them Constantin Brancusi, Chaïm Soutine, Piet Mondrian, Amedeo Modigliani and Alberto Giacometti. The list of prominent French artists in Paris at that time was even longer. And to these could be added the architects and designers who created Art Deco as a style that would define the 1930s. Probably at no time since the Italian Renaissance had one city boasted such a remarkable concentration of artistic brilliance.

In the performing arts, change came from abroad, with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes leading a revolution in dance that would influence ballet for much of the twentieth century. In 1912, the troupe’s star dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, shocked Paris with his erotic interpretation of Claude Debussy’s
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
. The following year, the dancer was at the center of a riot in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées during the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
, when some spectators mutinied against Nijinsky’s unorthodox choreography and the music’s disturbingly primitive rhythm.

Diaghilev’s role as a promoter and organizer of talent was still more important. Among choreographers, he recruited Michel Fokine, already a major figure in Russian dance, and he made the names of Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska (the dancer’s sister) and George Balanchine. Among dancers, along with the inimitable Nijinsky, he turned the English-born Alicia Markova and the Russians Tamara Karsavina and Serge Lifar into international stars (Lifar later also ran the Paris Opera Ballet). A strong believer in the “total art” that Wagner had called
Gesamtkunstwerk
, Diaghilev also pulled different art forms together as never before. He invited Derain, Rouault and Picasso, as well as the Russian artists Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois, to design his stage sets. And while his favorite composer was Stravinsky, who also wrote
The Firebird, Petrouchka, Les Noces
and
Apollo
for the company, Diaghilev commissioned ballets from Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Strauss. One memorable example of “total art” was
Parade
, a ballet that was conceived by the artist-poet Jean Cocteau and combined music by Erik Satie, choreography by Massine, scenario by Cocteau himself, set, curtain and costumes by Picasso and program notes by Guillaume Apollinaire. First performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on May 18, 1917, it, too, caused a scandal.

Diaghilev never returned to Russia. By the time of his death, in 1929, other Russian artists and writers—among them the painters Marc Chagall and Natalia Goncharova—had fled the Bolshevik Revolution for the safety of Paris. After Hitler took power in 1933, it was the turn of more artists and intellectuals, many of them Jews, to seek refuge in France; these included the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky and the composer Arnold Schönberg, as well as the writers Joseph Roth, Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin.

Other foreigners found a different kind of liberty in Paris. When the novelist Edith Wharton settled in France shortly before World War I, the experimental writer Gertrude Stein was already receiving the likes of Picasso and Matisse in her Left Bank apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, where she lived with her lesbian partner, Alice B. Toklas. In the 1920s and 1930s, Stein became a kind of eccentric matron to the “lost generation” of American writers, notably Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Henry Miller moved in a different—and more impecunious—circle, but he, too, enjoyed a freedom that, he later noted, “I never knew in America.”
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Little wonder, since three of his 1930s novels,
Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring
and
Tropic of Capricorn
, were banned in the United States as obscene. One gathering point for both American and French writers was Shakespeare & Company, the Left Bank bookstore that Sylvia Beach had opened at 12 rue de l’Odéon, across the street from La Maison des Amis des Livres, run by her friend and lover, Adrienne Monnier. Beach also came to the rescue of James Joyce, who had moved to Paris in 1920; with American and British publishers shying away from Joyce, fearing charges of obscenity, she dared to publish his monumental
Ulysses
in 1922. In the late 1930s, Samuel Beckett followed Joyce to Paris, equally determined to escape the suffocating strictures of deeply Catholic Ireland. Their relationship became strained only when Joyce’s troubled daughter, Lucia, fell for Beckett—and Beckett did not reciprocate.

Josephine Baker, the black American dancer and singer, was another who flourished in the artistic melting pot of interwar Paris. Happy to escape racial discrimination in the United States, she arrived in Paris in 1925 to perform
La Revue nègre
at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with a black American dance troupe; almost immediately, she was hired away by Les Folies Bergère. There, she became a star, winning over Parisians with her erotic and funny cabaret shows, which included her love song to Paris, “J’ai deux amours,
mon pays et Paris,” and her trademark “Danse sauvage” performed bare breasted and wearing just a skirt of artificial bananas. Soon she was also exploiting her exotic image in French movies like
Zou-Zou
and
Princesse Tam Tam
, where she played a Tunisian shepherdess-turned-Parisian princess in true Pygmalion style. In 1934, she even sang the title role in Offenbach’s operetta
La Créole
. It helped that, at a time when the French were becoming increasingly xenophobic, black American culture was all the rage in Paris. Above all, jazz and swing brought by black Americans was enthusiastically adopted by French musicians, none more brilliant than the Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and his Hot Club de France. La Baker, as she was known, was not the only cabaret diva. Music halls and cabarets were by far the most popular entertainment in Paris and, by the time Édith Piaf joined Josephine on the scene in 1935, Léo Marjane and particularly Mistinguett—La Miss—had long been queens of the night. Press speculation that La Miss and La Baker were feuding only helped to pull in the crowds. Male crooners like Maurice Chevalier and Tino Rossi and bandleaders like Ray Ventura were no less admired.

The French movie industry, in contrast, was in crisis. Although the new talkies were popular in the 1930s, the French industry felt threatened; it had placed a quota on Hollywood movies in 1928, and some in the business resented the growing power of Jewish producers, who had immigrated to Paris from central Europe. Struggling to raise money in France, many French directors and producers sought German backing, first with Tobis, a production company that set up a studio in Paris in 1930, then with Universum Film AG, or UFA, a Nazi-controlled production company in Berlin. As a result, not only were dozens of French films made in Berlin, with the same story then reshot with German actors, but UFA, Tobis and other German companies also began distributing films in France. Such was German involvement that the French secret service warned that the Nazis were using cinema as a weapon against France. But the abundant talent of French cinema, both behind and before the camera, was also envied by Germany. From the mid-1930s, when a gritty genre known as
réalisme poétique
made its mark, two directors stood out: Jean Renoir for
La Grande illusion, La Bête humaine
and
La Règle du jeu;
and Marcel Carné for
Le Quai des brumes, Hôtel du Nord
and
Le Jour se lève
. France could also boast star power. To character actors like
Fernandel, Michel Simon and Pierre Fresnay and the rugged leading man Jean Gabin, it added the trump cards of glamorous actresses like Arletty, Edwige Feuillère, Viviane Romance and Danielle Darrieux.

In theater, Paris had writers for all tastes. France’s national theater, the Comédie Française, offered a steady fare of classics by Corneille, Racine, Molière and Shakespeare, but it also presented the work of living authors. The most popular playwrights, though, were Sacha Guitry, Marcel Pagnol and Henri Bernstein, who were writing sentimental tragedies, comedies of manners and tales of provincial life for the
théâtre de boulevard
. Among weightier dramatists, Jean Giraudoux stood out. A World War I veteran, former diplomat and novelist, he was forty-six when his first play,
Siegfried
, was staged, in 1928. Others followed, but his most apposite commentary on the times came in 1935 with
La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu
(The Trojan War Will Not Happen), a witty play that slyly suggested that France, like Troy, was blind to what lay ahead. The veteran playwright Paul Claudel clearly did not see Giraudoux’s irony because he termed “this apology of cowardice and peace at any price repugnant.”
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No one, though, provoked more scandal than the multitalented Cocteau, whose 1938 play
Les Parents terribles
(The Awful Parents) was closed down after a week of protests. Examining these plays with a sharp eye for both writing and staging was Colette, doubling up as prolific novelist and drama critic for
Le Journal
.

Two veteran directors were particularly influential in shaping modern French theater. André Antoine challenged convention in 1887 when he created the Théâtre Libre—“free” in the sense that it was unconstrained by traditional rules. Using a permanent ensemble of actors, he presented both banned and foreign plays. And as a stage director, he emphasized realism and naturalism, rejecting the stylized acting of the Comédie Française. In 1916, Antoine gave up directing for theater and film criticism, but he remained an influential voice until his death in 1943. To this day, the Théâtre Libre stands as a reference point in French drama; the Théâtre Antoine, on the boulevard de Strasbourg in Paris, carries his name. His successor was Jacques Copeau. While Antoine began his career as an actor, Copeau’s initial approach was more theoretical, reacting against the commercialism of the
théâtre de boulevard
and stressing the supremacy of the text. From 1913 through the interwar years, he implemented his ideas as a director and teacher, forming a generation of actor-directors, notably
Louis Jouvet and Charles Dullin, who would dominate postwar theater in Paris. At the time Paris fell, Copeau himself was running the Comédie Française.

The world of letters was also bubbling, cheerfully keeping alive the tradition that writers hold forth on politics, too. The Académie Française, for all its self-importance, was the least interesting forum. It offered prestige to its forty
immortels
but, since its new members were often elected more for their political clout than their literary talent, it remained a very conservative body. Far more dynamic was the
Nouvelle Revue Française
. Founded in 1909, the monthly featured both new and established writers and set the agenda of intellectual debate. Acting as a kind of referee was André Gide, a playwright, novelist, essayist and diarist who was unchallenged as the dominant French intellectual—despite the storm that erupted when he proclaimed his homosexuality in print in
Corydon
in 1924. The poet Paul Valéry and the Roman Catholic writer François Mauriac were also treated with reverence, while novelists with a large following included Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Paul Morand, André Maurois and Colette, whose indiscreet memoir of her first tumultuous marriage,
Mes apprentissages
, sold particularly well in 1936.

Among younger authors, André Malraux won the Goncourt Prize for
La Condition humaine
(published in English as
Man’s Fate)
in 1933 and Roger Vercel for
Capitaine Conan
(Captain Conan) in 1934. Jean-Paul Sartre’s first attempt at fiction, his existentialist novel
La Nausée
(Nausea), appeared in 1938 and was followed in 1939 by
Le Mur
(The Wall), a collection of five stories and a novella. It was also a time when books by leading French authors sold well across Europe. And this brought international recognition: Nobel Prizes in literature were awarded to the political man of letters Anatole France in 1921, the philosopher Henri Bergson in 1927 and the novelist Roger Martin du Gard in 1937.