And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (4 page)

Some extreme rightist groups took the battle onto the streets of Paris. The Camelots du Roi, a thuggish group linked to L’Action Française, fought leftist students, attacked Jewish targets and in 1936 dragged Blum from his car and beat him severely. Jeunesses Patriotes, the Francistes and Solidarité Française were openly pro-Fascist, while the Croix-de-Feu, founded by World War I veterans and led by Lieutenant Colonel François de La Rocque, favored Mussolini’s Italy over Hitler’s Germany as a role model. In the mid-1930s, the Comité Secret d’Action Revolutionnaire, better known as La Cagoule, also opted for terrorist actions. One of the most striking features of the extreme right was how many of its key figures came from the Communist Party and still considered themselves socialists of sorts. Among these was Jacques Doriot; elected mayor of Saint-Denis on a Communist ticket in 1930, he was expelled from the party in 1934 and, two years later, founded the extreme rightist Parti Populaire Français, with financial support from Mussolini’s Fascist
regime. And even though Doriot himself was a former metalworker, he attracted many intellectuals to his new party, including the writers Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Ramon Fernandez, Alfred Fabre-Luce and Bertrand de Jouvenel, Colette’s former stepson and lover. Unknowingly contributing to this ideological confusion was still another intellectual, Charles Péguy, a poet and essayist who was killed on the Marne in 1914 at the age of forty-one. He variously promoted socialism, nationalism and Catholicism and, while as a Dreyfusard he was not anti-Semitic, his thoughts came to influence left, right and center. In 1927, the philosopher Julien Benda published
La Trahison des clercs
(The Betrayal of the Learned), admonishing intellectuals for bowing to inane nationalism, but the predictable response of the right was abuse, not least because Benda was Jewish.

By the mid-1930s, the extreme right was clearly on the rise. Several groups—they were known as
ligues
, or leagues—targeted university students, with student elections often turning the Latin Quarter in Paris into a battleground. At the Sorbonne, the lines were drawn, with pro-Fascists in a majority. Controlled by the hard right, students at the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine were openly anti-Semitic and were always ready to join anti-government demonstrations. The Faculty of Letters was still being fought over, while the Faculty of Sciences was run by various Communist front organizations, which came together as the Union Fédérale des Étudiants in 1939. Students attending other leading academic institutions, like the elitist École Normale Supérieure, whose recent graduates included Sartre and Brasillach, were also confronted with the choice of Communism or Fascism. The pressure to take sides was enormous. François Mitterrand, France’s socialist president from 1981 to 1995, demonstrated alongside the Croix-de-Feu while studying at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in the mid-1930s. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, who joined the Gaullists in London during the war and later became a renowned historian, recalled being a member of a leftist group at the Sorbonne without realizing that it was controlled by the Communist Party. But, himself of Jewish extraction, he was all too aware of the extreme right. He recalled that one fellow student, Philippe Ariès, who was close to L’Action Française and would also become a noted historian, once said to him: “A Jew, I can smell one!”
⁵
Democracy, it seemed, was the one option that held little appeal for the educated young.

Fueling this polarization were the country’s newspapers, which
also served as forums for well-known writers. The Communist Party published
L’Humanité
as well as the afternoon paper,
Ce Soir
, which from 1937 was edited by Aragon, by then the dominant Communist intellectual. The editorial line of both papers was defined by the party’s leader, Maurice Thorez, and was unswervingly loyal to Moscow.
Le Populaire
spoke for the socialists, with Blum himself writing many editorials. The socialists could also count on support from
Marianne
and
L’Oeuvre
, while two satirical weeklies,
Le Canard Enchaîné
and
Le Crapouillot
, were unpredictable. General information dailies like
Le Matin, Paris-Soir
and
Le Petit Parisien
had enormous circulations, while
Le Temps
usually backed the government of the day. In 1922, François Coty, a perfume magnate with Fascist sympathies, bought
Le Figaro
, the country’s oldest paper, and maintained its conservative line, but he also founded an extreme rightist paper,
L’Ami du Peuple
, and financed Fascist groups. On the far right were Maurras’s daily,
L’Action Française
, as well as
Je suis partout
, a weekly that from 1934 drew many intellectuals away from Maurras’s movement and, starting in 1937, was edited by Brasillach. The popular literary and political weeklies
Candide
and
Gringoire
, both with circulations of around a half million, also campaigned steadily against the Third Republic and parliamentary rule.

A defining moment for both the left and the right occurred on February 6, 1934, when L’Action Française, the Croix-de-Feu, the Camelots du Roi and other extreme rightist groups marched on the Chamber of Deputies in the apparent hope of occupying the building and overthrowing the government. What provoked the uprising was outrage at the so-called Stavisky affair, a crisis prompted by the mysterious death of the infamous embezzler Serge Alexandre Stavisky one month earlier. The involvement of some ministers in protecting Stavisky highlighted the corruption endemic in successive governments and led to right-wing demonstrations that resulted in Daladier succeeding Chautemps as prime minister on January 27. When Daladier fired the right-wing Paris police chief, Jean Chiappe, the extreme right was still more outraged and summoned its followers to the place de la Concorde. Daladier was ready to call in the army, but in the end mounted police of the Garde Nationale Mobile managed to block the pont de la Concorde, which leads to the Chamber of Deputies. A prolonged battle ensued, with buses set alight, shots fired, at least fifteen people killed and hundreds more
wounded. The repercussions of this confrontation were felt for years. It radicalized the right, pushing many nationalist and monarchist followers of L’Action Française toward outright Fascism. It also provoked a backlash against the extreme right, with Moscow ordering the French Communist Party to work with socialists and moderates against the growing Fascist threat. This shift permitted the election in May 1936 of the left-leaning Popular Front, with Blum as France’s first Jewish prime minister.

The Popular Front lived up to its promise to carry out major social reforms; it won the hearts of workers by introducing collective bargaining, a forty-hour work week and a paid annual vacation. Blum was the Front’s intellectual leader, but two other ministers, who both happened to be Jews, were also forceful modernizers. As minister of education and fine arts, Jean Zay not only raised the age at which a child could leave school from twelve to fourteen, he also created the new Musée d’Art Moderne and promoted physical education and sports; and Georges Mandel, the interior minister, oversaw the banning of Fascist
ligues
like the Croix-de-Feu. But like so many Third Republic governments, the Popular Front was also a fragile coalition that included Radicals and Communists as well as socialists. The traditional pacifism of the left prevented Blum from ordering full-scale rearmament in the face of the mounting German threat. At the same time, bowing to conservatives inside the coalition, he disappointed the left—and, no doubt, himself—by refusing to send arms to the besieged Republican government in Spain, which in July 1936 faced a military uprising led by General Francisco Franco.

The extreme right and conservative newspapers gave Blum no respite. They did not like his policies and they did not like being governed by a Jew. When he took office in June 1936, Xavier Vallat, a right-wing deputy who later headed Vichy’s General Commission for Jewish Questions, recognized a historic occasion. “For the first time, this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew. I dare say aloud what this country is thinking in its heart of hearts; it is preferable to have a man at the head of this country whose origins lie in its soil rather than a subtle Talmudist.”
⁶
Gringoire
picked four adjectives to describe Blum: Marxist, circumcised, Anglophile and Freemason. Maurras went further, insulting Blum as “this old Semitic camel” and threatening him with death. “It shall be necessary to eliminate Blum physically only on the day he leads us into the godless
war he dreams of against our Italian comrades-in-arms. On that day, it is true, he should not be spared.”
⁷
For this, Maurras was jailed for eight months, beginning in October 1936.

But anti-Semitism per se was not punished. In three essays published as
Le Péril juif
(The Jewish Peril), the writer Marcel Jouhandeau added to the chorus by complaining that Jews now controlled the government as well as banking, the press, publishing, music and education. “M. Blum is not one of ours and, what is the toughest, M. Blum is master of my country and no European can ever know what an Asiatic is thinking,” he offered. After barely one year as prime minister, Blum was forced to step down. He returned to the post for three weeks in March 1938, but six months later, the Popular Front collapsed. With this, a good part of the left joined much of the right in believing that the Third Republic was beyond salvation, that only some radical new kind of regime could lead France out of the morass.

Beyond the political limelight, both Berlin and Moscow were working at winning over France’s opinion makers. On the German side, an important player was Otto Abetz, a former art teacher who later served as Hitler’s ambassador to occupied France. In the 1920s, he took the initiative of forming a Franco-German cultural exchange group called the Sohlberg Circle. Already fluent in French, on one of his many trips to France he met the newspaper editor Jean Luchaire, whose secretary, Suzanne de Bruyker, he married in 1932. Two years later, the Sohlberg Circle was formalized as the France-Germany Committee, with Abetz, still only thirty-one, as the German representative.

Tall, blond and sociable, Abetz used the post to befriend conservative French writers and journalists, among them Drieu La Rochelle, Brasillach and Jacques Benoist-Méchin. Initially, the committee even drew moderates eager to improve relations with Germany, among them Blum, who resigned his membership only in 1937—the same year Abetz joined the Nazi Party. Potential allies of the Nazis were invited to Germany to admire the achievements of the Third Reich, some even to attend the Nazi Party’s mass gatherings in Nuremberg. After watching Hitler preside over a flag ceremony in 1937, Brasillach was so struck by its near-religious ritual that he compared it to the Eucharist. “Anyone who fails to see the consecration of the flags as analogous to the consecration of bread is unlikely to understand anything about Hitlerism,” he wrote in
Je suis partout.
⁸
Thanks to
Abetz, Jouvenel was able to interview Hitler for
Paris-Match
in 1936, extracting from the Führer a reassuring invitation to the French: “Let us be friends.” Less publicly, Abetz was also subsidizing right-wing newspapers. It was almost as if he were rehearsing the occupation: his intellectual friends of the 1930s would all become prominent collaborators after 1940.

Still, Abetz had little need to import Hitler’s hatred of Jews. Fed by L’Action Française and other Fascist groups, French anti-Semitism was given a fresh boost and a grotesque form of literary legitimacy by none other than Céline, who had gained enormous celebrity with
Voyage au bout de la nuit
. He had followed up in 1936 with another book of equal brilliance,
Mort à crédit
(Death on the Installment Plan), a kind of prequel to
Voyage
that opens with his alter ego, Dr. Ferdinand Bardamu, practicing medicine among poor Parisians and then flashes back to his childhood and adolescence. And once again it was the author’s voice—raging, pessimistic, cynical, humorous, anti-heroic, desperate—that gave the book its immense punch. Then, quite suddenly, Céline turned this voice into a blunderbuss of anti-Semitism. As a doctor treating shopworkers, prostitutes, single mothers and the like, he had a genuine empathy for the underprivileged (and a deep distaste for the bourgeoisie). He also considered himself a man of the left—until he visited the Soviet Union in 1936. Upon his return, he published
Mea Culpa
, a twenty-seven-page pamphlet denouncing Communism. And it was then that he embraced the far right.

The following year, Céline published another “pamphlet,” in reality a long essay, called
Bagatelles pour un massacre
(Trifles for a Massacre), in which he showed his new face. Echoing his horror at World War I, he accused Jews, Communists and Freemasons of driving France toward another war—another “massacre”—with Germany. His main target, though, were Jews, who were, he wrote, all-powerful in finance, politics and the arts, “vermicular, persuasive, more invasive than ever” but, above all, warmongers. “It’s the Jews of London, Washington and Moscow who are blocking a Franco-German alliance,” he said. And he went on: “I don’t want to go to war for Hitler, I insist, but I don’t want to wage war against him for the Jews.” His conclusion: “Rather a dozen Hitlers to an all-powerful Blum.”
⁹
Gide, for one, was incredulous, noting in his journal, “Surely it’s a joke. And if it’s not a joke, Céline must be completely mad.”
¹⁰
But Céline knew exactly what he was doing, writing to a friend, “I have
just published an abominably anti-Semitic book, I am sending it to you. I am enemy no. 1 of the Jews.”
¹¹
After
Bagatelles pour un massacre
sold eighty thousand copies, he followed up in 1938 with another anti-Semitic diatribe,
L’École de cadavres
(School of Corpses), which sold almost as well.