Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

loyally indeed that they managed to swing the jury of the Prix de la Pléiade to give Genet the prize that year, even though he was not strictly eligible.
    The
famille Sartre
was less well disposed towards André Breton, who, since his return to France, had with Marcel Duchamp started to organize a second international exhibition of Surrealism in Paris at the new Galerie Maeght. He planned to build a staircase with each step modelledas the cover of a book whose title was linked to the Tarot pack. There would be a ‘
salle de superstitions
’ and another roombeyond with a dozen octagonal cells, each dedicated to a sign of the zodiac and containing a voodoo altar. The last room would be a kitchen serving ‘a surrealist meal, above all distinguished by a new taste’.
    Breton and his Surrealist friends completed the preparatory work for the exhibition during the first week of July. When Madame Maeght, the owner of the gallery, saw what they had done, she screamed: ‘We’re ruined!’ But the exhibition attracted huge crowds and, instead, the Galerie Maeght was made. Soon the Maeghts were exhibiting Braque, Miró and Chagall; and, most important of all, they obtained a monopoly on Giacometti’s work by paying for all his casting. *
    The exhibition included works by Max Ernst, Miró and Tanguy, but Breton was forced to conclude that the Surrealist movement as a whole showed little sign of life, except perhaps in Romania and Czechoslovakia. He took comfort, however, from the controversy which the exhibition had provoked over three months. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said, ‘to be so reviled at our age.’
    Since the Communist ministers left Ramadier’s government in May, a dangerous air of unreality had affected the party leadership. Thorez and his colleagues continued to speak and act as though their removal from government was simply a temporary setback. They had been partially seduced by the trappings and self-importance of ministerial rank, but an equally important influence was a gut instinct that
tripartisme
must be resumed: only by working from within could the party come to power. But the real problem lay elsewhere. The lack of firm direction from Moscow had allowed them to lapse into a false sense of security. Even Thorez and Duclos, with all their experience of the Kremlin’s capricious logic, had half-forgotten what Stalin’s absolute priority – the Soviet Union before everything – could do to subordinate foreign parties. They were soon to be brutally awakened.
    In September 1947 nine European Communist parties received invitations from Warsaw to send delegations to a secret meeting. The real organizer of this conference was Andrei Zhdanov, who had ruthlessly directed the defence of Leningrad against the Germans. On 22 September, the delegations arrived at a huge hunting lodge at Sklarska Poreba in south-west Poland. Only two of them, the French and the Italians, came from outside the Soviet bloc. They included neither Thorez, nor the Italian Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti. Jacques Duclos, who was accompanied by Étienne Fajon, arrived in affable, even self-satisfied form. As a veteran of international Communist conferences, he seems to have been confident that he would acquit himself satisfactorily.
    Zhdanov put this secret meeting in its international context, from the dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943. He made no mention of the Comintern’s successor organization, the International Section of the Soviet Central Committee Secretariat. Clearly it was more convenient, in view of the abrupt change of party line about to be revealed, to pretend that there had been virtually no further contact between Moscow and its satellite parties. Zhdanov nevertheless argued that ‘such a separation between parties is bad and harmful and, basically, is not natural’. In other words the
laisser-aller
of the immediate post-war period had come to an end.
    It is astonishing that Jacques Duclos, a veteran of the Comintern, did not perceive the full implications of Zhdanov’s speech. When called upon to speak, his account of the French Communist Party’s activities since the Liberation was complacent in the extreme. Zhdanov left the ritual humiliation of the French Communist Party to the Yugoslav delegation of Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas. Duclos was horrified at the depth of the trap into which he had fallen. His only chance was to grovel without hesitation.
    The point of the conference was already