Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

warm. She had long suspected Camus’s political ambivalence, ever since November 1945 during the ministerial crisis. Camus had defended de Gaulle’s position. Camus, unlike Koestler at this time, was no Gaullist, but in Beauvoir’s eyes he had revealed his true anti-Communist colours.
    Sartre and Castor also began to fall out with Raymond Aron in the autumn of 1946. Sartre’s play about the Resistance,
Men without Shadows,
opened at around the same time as Jean-Louis Barrault was producing
Les Nuits de la colère,
Salacrou’s play on the same subject (about which Sartre allegedly remarked that the author knew his
collabos
better than his
résistants
). On the first night of
Men without Shadows,
the torture scenes – though off-stage – became too much for Raymond Aron’s wife, who was not well. Aron took her home. Simone de Beauvoir, even more than Sartre, refused to accept his wife’s illness as a valid excuse for leaving.
    Whatever Beauvoir’s stand on such issues, one must not forget thatSartre was still regarded with deep distrust, even enmity, by the Communists. On encountering Sartre at a literary lunch soon afterwards, Ilya Ehrenburg strongly criticized him for depicting members of the Resistance as ‘cowards and schemers’. Sartre retorted that Ehrenburg clearly had not read the play in its entirety. His previous plays had also been attacked on political grounds. In
The Respectful Prostitute,
for example, he had failed to present the black victim as ‘a true fighter’. And his next major play,
Dirty Hands,
was to bring down upon him virtually every insult in the (admittedly rather limited) dictionary of Stalinist obloquy.
    Over the next few years, with the onset of the Cold War, Sartre began to shift his position on politics and artistic expression. ‘The Communists are right,’ he later wrote in a compromise formula which was strikingly short on philosophical rigour. ‘I was not wrong. For people who are crushed and exhausted, hope is always necessary. They had all too many occasions to despair. But one should also strive to work without illusions.’

22
    The Fashionable World
    During the Occupation, even Communists had regarded Parisian fashion as a weapon of resistance. Lise Deharme, the Surrealist hostess, wrote in
Les Lettres françaises
: ‘Yes, true Parisiennes were supremely elegant during the four years; they had the elegance of racehorses. With a tear in the eye but a smile on the lips, beautiful, perfectly made-up, discreet and insolent, they exasperated the Germans. The beauty of their hair, of their complexion… their slimness as opposed to the fat ugliness of those overgrown trouts packaged in grey [the German servicewomen], yes, that provoked them. These Parisiennes were part of the Resistance.’
    Haute couture
had emerged from the war in much the same shape as the elegant Parisian women: slimmed to the point of emaciation, but still defiantly maintaining the standards of French taste and craftsmanship. Yet if the Germans had had their way, the French fashion industry would not have survived at all. In August 1940, they warned Lucien Lelong, head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, that all the great French designers, plus the skilled workers of their
ateliers,
would be transferred to Berlin. With their knowledge and expertise, Berlin and Vienna would become the centres of fashion in the New Europe, while Paris dwindled into insignificance.
    ‘You can impose what you will by force,’ wrote Lelong in response, ‘but Paris’s
haute couture
is not transferable, either
en bloc
or bit by bit. It exists in Paris or it does not exist at all.’ This was not merely spirited talk. The industry employed some 13,000 skilled artisans. The fabrics and trimmings they worked with were the product of highly specializedworkshops that had developed in France over generations; it would be impossible to transfer an industry so widely spread and so deeply rooted. The Germans were forced to agree, but they were still determined to break the power of Paris fashion. The industry was forbidden to export its goods. Each major fashion house could produce only forty models in each collection instead of 150 and was subjected to the severest rationing of cloth. Many folded during the Occupation, but the industry did not die because there was still a demand for its work. It is often supposed that the principal customers for luxury clothes were the occupiers themselves; yet the ration cards known