Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

did not follow the party line.
    The party policy of mingling intellectuals and workers was more symbolic than real. Annie Besse, who was in charge of the
Quartier Latin
– an area where intellectual and working-class life overlapped round the Place de la Contrescarpe and the rue Mouffetard – managed to achieve a mixture in the cells. They may have sold
L’Humanité
alongside each other in the Sunday morning market of La Mouffe, but the result was bound to remain contrived.
    Cell meetings took place for Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie every week or fortnight in a bistro or café on the rue Gay-Lussac. Over glasses of cheap beer, they would ‘talk for hours at a stretch about party dialectics’. In the Latin Quarter, the Communist Party could tolerate the odd eccentric, even Michel Foucault, the most unpredictable of members, who was ‘already absorbed in his research into madness’.
    Paul Éluard, who had a real sympathy for the working-class people around him in the 18th
arrondissement,
had few illusions about the possibility of intelligentsia and proletariat mingling unselfconsciously. In 1945 Éluard had returned to live on the rue Marx Dormoy, close to his old haunts. His interest in the political life of the
quartier
was genuine. He encouraged the sons of party workers to follow further education and even wrote marching songs for the local Communist youth. Éluard, unlike some party stars, was naturally modest. JeanGager, who accompanied him to a meeting of railway workers, remembered that he never said a word throughout the proceedings, because he felt that he had nothing useful to contribute. But as they left, Éluard had turned to him: ‘Are you sure that they did not change their vocabulary in my presence?’
    ‘Yes, it’s true,’ Gager had to acknowledge. Their language had been much more formal than usual.
    The submission of intellectuals to dogma may have seemed stultifying to an outsider, but the party was clever. It knew how to flatter young writers. Maurice Thorez took Pierre Daix aside after a meeting to congratulate him on his novel
La Dernière Forteresse
. For a young Communist, this was the greatest moment of his life. Thorez’s companion Jeanette Vermeersch then featured Daix on the cover of the party’s magazine for women,
Femmes françaises
.
    The party also knew how to flatter fellow-travellers and manipulate sceptics who could still be useful. Georges Soria, one of its senior journalists, explained at his meeting in the Kremlin in September 1948 that Julien Benda, the author of
La Trahison des clercs,
was judged useful because, ‘even though he was against Marxism and Communism, he supported the party’s present policies in France’. Soria went on to explain that they had set up various magazines, ‘
Pensée
in particular, precisely to attract fellow-travellers such as Benda’.
    The first great post-war test of Communist loyalty arrived in the spring of 1948. Almost overnight, Marshal Tito, the hero and role model of Communist members of the French Resistance, was declared a traitor. The accusations against Tito even extended to ‘hiding White Russian officers who tortured and killed the mothers and fathers of Bolsheviks during the Revolution’.
    The French party leadership had a very clear idea of the situation and was only too keen to follow Moscow’s orders. Yet some party members, including Louis Teuléry, the former member of Tillon’s ministerial cabinet, did not conceal their feelings that Tito had been wronged. They paid for their views with summary expulsion. Teuléry was privately warned by a friend, ‘they’re going to accuse you of being a Trotskyist’. After he was ejected, his comrades, a number of them oldfriends from the Resistance, refused to speak to him– or their wives to his wife – for over thirty years.
    Several hundred members of the French Communist Party were expelled. The novelist Marguerite Duras also left at this time. Daix swallowed the brutal change in the party line because men he respected, such as Charles Tillon, had accepted it without a murmur. ‘You’ve got to know how to grit your teeth,’ Casanova had told him.
    The prostration of some intellectuals before the party could provide moments which were beyond satire. Just after the war, Jacqueline Ventadour (later the wife of the painter Jean Hélion) was married to Sinbad Vail, Peggy Guggenheim’s son, who founded the literary magazine
Points
. She was then a Communist and a member of