Modern Mind

place only between the boulevard Saint-Michel in the east, the rue des Saint-Pères in the west, the
quais
along the Seine in the north, and the rue Vaugirard in the south; this was ‘la cathédrale de Sartre.’ 30 In those days, too, many writers, artists and musicians did not live in apartments but took rooms in cheap hotels – one reason why they made so much use of café life. The only late-night café in those days was Le Tabou in the rue Dauphine, frequented by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Juliette Gréco, the
diseuse
(a form of singing almost like speaking), and Albert Camus. In 1947 Bernard Lucas persuaded the owners of Le Tabou to rent him their cedar, a tubelike room in which he installed a bar, a gramophone, and a piano. Le Tabou took off immediately, and from then on, Saint-Germain and
la famille Sartre
were tourist attractions. 31
    Few tourists, however, read
Les Temps modernes,
the journal that had been started in 1945, funded by Gaston Gallimard and with Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Queneau, and Raymond Aron on the board. Simone de Beauvoir saw
Les Temps modernes
as the showpiece of what she called the ‘Sartrean ideal,’ and it was certainly intended to be the flagship of an era of intellectual change. Paris at the time was resurgent intellectually, not just in regard to philosophy and existentialism. In the theatre, Jean Anouilh’s
Antigone
and Sartre’s own
Huis clos
had appeared in 1944, Camus’s
Caligula
a year later, the same year as Giraudoux’s
Madwoman of Chaillot.
Sartre’s
Men without Shallows
appeared in 1946. Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, influenced by Luigi Pirandello, were waiting in the wings.
    Exciting as all this was, the climate of
les intellos
in Paris soon turned sour thanks to one issue that dominated everything else: Stalinism. 32 France, as we have seen, had a strong Communist Party, but after the centralisation of Yugoslavia, in the manner of the USSR, the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, and the death of its foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, many in France found it impossible to continue their membership of the PCF, or were expelled when they expressed their revulsion. A number of disastrous strikes in France also drove a wedge between French intellectuals and workers, a relationship that was in fact never as strong as the intellectuals pretended. Two things followed. In one, Sartre and his ‘famille’ joined in 1947 the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, a party created to found a movement independent of the USSR and the United States. 33 The Kremlin took this seriously, fearing that Sartre’s ‘philosophy of decadence,’ as they called existentialism, could become a ‘third force,’ especially among the young. Andrei Zhdanov, we now know, saw to it that Sartre was attacked on several fronts, in particular at a peace conference in Wroclaw, Poland, in August 1948, where Picasso too was vdified. 34 Sartre later changed his tune on Stalinist Russia, arguing that whatever wrongs had been committed had been carried out for the greater good. This tortuous form of reasoning became ever more necessary as the 1940s wore on and more and more evidence was revealed about Stalin’satrocities. But Sartre’s continuing hatred of American materialism kept him more in the Soviet camp than anywhere else. This position received a massive setback in 1947, however, with the publication of I
Chose Freedom,
by Victor Kravchenko, a Russian engineer who had defected from a Soviet trade mission to the United States in 1944. This book turned into a runaway success and was translated into a score of languages. 35 Russian-authored, it was the earliest firstperson description of Stalin’s labour camps, his persecution of the kulaks, and his forced collectivisations. 36
    In France, due to the strength of the Communist Party, no major publishing house would touch the book (echoes of Orwell’s
Animal Farm
in Britain). But when it did appear, it sold 400,000 copies and won the Prix Sainte-Beuve. The book was attacked by the Communist Party, and
Les Lettres françaises
published an article by one Sim Thomas, allegedly a former OSS officer, who claimed that the book had been authored by American intelligence agents rather than Kravchenko, who was a compulsive liar and an alcoholic. 37 Kravchenko, who by then had settled in the United States, sued for libel. The trial was held in January 1949 amid massive publicity.
Les Lettres françaises
had obtained