Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

the same cell as Victor Leduc, the philosophy professor in the
section idéologique
. Leduc was married to Jeanne Modigliani, the daughter of the painter and a close friend of both Jacqueline and Sinbad. The austere and fanatical Leduc had renounced all wealth, so Jeanne, desperate to leave their squalid little apartment, needed a deposit to move to a slightly better one and borrowed the money secretly from Sinbad. But when Leduc discovered that she had borrowed from an American capitalist, he became hysterical with fear that the party might find out. Sinbad and Jacqueline had to swear never to say anything to anybody, and Leduc went round begging money from party comrades to pay them back.
    At the time of Tito’s break with Stalin, Sinbad and Jacqueline went to dinner with Victor and Jeanne. Several leading French Communist intellectuals were there, as well as the Hungarian cultural attaché, the writer Zoltÿn Szabó. The conversation inevitably locked on to the subject of Tito, arch-criminal and traitor. Someone, forgetting that Sinbad Vail was not a party member, asked him what he thought. Sinbad, exasperated by the grotesque conversation, said that he still considered Tito a great man. A shocked and frightened silence fell. Eventually, it was broken by a low, rumbling laugh from the Hungarian: he had never seen anything so funny as the terrified faces of these French intellectuals.
    Sartre at this time was involved in the only formal political venture of his life. In the autumn of 1947, he joined the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, a party founded by Georges Altman and David Roussetto create a movement independent of the United States or the Soviet Union.
    The Kremlin already had its eye on the ‘Trotskyist and
provocateur
’ Rousset. The French Communist Party underlined the danger of Sartre’s contribution. ‘There are two ideological dangers in France,’ Georges Soria told Kamenov, his interlocutor in the Kremlin. ‘The first is the militant fascismof Malraux with his false heroism – the ideology of Gaullism – and the second is the philosophy of decadence expounded by Sartre which now acts openly against Communism by talking of a “Third Force”. Both have their followers and an influence, especially among the young.’
    It was Andrei Zhdanov who masterminded the attacks on Sartre and his ‘bourgeois reactionary philosophy’. The most vicious campaign was triggered by Sartre’s play
Dirty Hands,
which opened in April 1948. The play depicts brutal power politics within the Communist Party of a Balkan country during the war as the Red Army advances upon it. Sartre argues from both sides of the fence with clever dialogue, and although his characters lack psychological depth, they are at least intellectual rather than political pawns. His seemingly improbable choice of Jean Cocteau to take over as director proved a good decision. The production and the acting were powerful.
    Anybody in touch with reality would have known that the Communists would be infuriated by this chilling portrait of party life; yet Sartre, as David Rousset observed, ‘lived in a bubble’. French Communists were even more furious, because Hoederer, the Communist leader assassinated by his party in the play, had been following a similar line to that of Maurice Thorez during the war. Ilya Ehrenberg told Sartre that he had nothing but contempt for him. Sartre might shrug this off, but he seems to have been genuinely dismayed when the play was used as anti-Communist propaganda. The Kremlin had
Dirty Hands
suppressed in Finland on the grounds that propaganda hostile to the Soviet Union was against the provisions of their peace treaty. But within five years, Sartre’s own position had changed to such an extent that he would consent to productions of the play only with the agreement of the local Communist Party, which of course meant suppressing it entirely.
    *
    Stalinist hatred for Sartre burst forth in an astonishing piece of stage-management in August 1948, during the Congress of Intellectuals for World Peace at Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in Soviet-occupied Poland.
    Some 500 participants were invited from forty-five countries to this typical Communist-front event, organized by Andrei Zhdanov two months after the Soviet blockade of Berlin commenced. The congress’s main objective was to protest at the American and British plan to rebuild Germany, claiming that it was a plot to make it a base once more for