Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

hatred and suspicion. Many people saw it as a veiled indictment of the Occupation; but after the Liberation, Clouzot was banned from working in France. As soon as the decision was announced he left for Hollywood.
    *
    Robert Brasillach reached Fresnes prison a week after Benoist-Méchin, but at first neither of them knew of the other’s presence, even though they were colleagues in an alien world, with echoing sounds of footsteps, keys jangling and iron doors clanging. Benoist-Méchin described the image of shivering figures in its foggy penumbra as ‘a queue of the damned waiting to cross the River Styx’.
    In the rare moments they found for conversation, usually in the exercise space, they discussed their lawyers, their examining magistrates, but not their own prospects of acquittal, only those of others. The trials of writers and propagandists began that autumn.
    The last day of October marked the trial of a fanatical old scribbler of pamphlets, Comte Armand de Chastenet de Puységur, who described himself professionally on his visiting cards as ‘
anti-sémite, anti-maçon, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitaliste, anti-communiste, anti-démocrate et anti-républicain
’. When he heard the death sentence read out, he gave the fascist salute and shouted, ‘
Vive la France!
’ The anti-Semites of
vieille France
had forgotten nothing and forgiven nobody. When Charles Maurras, the leader of Action Française, was condemned to life imprisonment a few months later, he cried from the dock, ‘It’s the revenge of Dreyfus!’ Maurras lost his chair at the Académie Française.
    Céline, imprisoned in Denmark, was accused
in absentia
of collaboration under Article 75. His retort, predictably sarcastic, was that he had hardly sold the plans of the Maginot Line. He also sent the following diatribe from Copenhagen: ‘I never set foot in the German Embassy. I never met Otto Abetz before the war. Abetz always detested me. I met Abetz during the war two or three times for a few minutes. I always found the political activities of Abetz grotesque and disastrous and the man himself a creature of terrible vanity, a cataclysmic clown.’
    The purge of writers was not only a judicial affair. It became a matter of professional conscience, or politics. During the Occupation the Comité National des Écrivains (CNE) – the National Committee of Writers – had been established as an association of intellectual resistance. Its mouthpiece was
Les Lettres françaises,
the literary review of the Resistance, established by Jacques Decour (later executed by the Germans at the fort of Mont Valérian) and Jean Paulhan, a writer and editor atGallimard.
Les Lettres françaises
was a defiant challenge to Drieu la Rochelle’s takeover of
La Nouvelle Revue française
.
    On 9 September, two weeks after the Liberation, the first non-clandestine issue was published. It contained not only articles by Mauriac, Sartre and Paulhan, but also a ‘Manifesto of French Writers’ signed by some sixty leading intellectuals. This contained a demand for ‘the just punishment of usurpers and traitors’. The next issue had a blacklist from the CNE containing ninety-four names. An expanded list of 156 names was included in the issue of 21 October.
    Jean Paulhan – ‘
Paulhan le Juste
’, as Galtier-Boissière called him – became first uneasy about, then strongly opposed to, the calls for retribution. Like Paulhan, Galtier-Boissière distrusted and disliked the rush to accuse. ‘The Nazis,’ he wrote, ‘have left us an imprint of authoritarianism and persecution.’
    Louis Aragon, the Surrealist turned Stalinist, with his silver hair and icy looks, was the Robespierre of the intellectuals. He attempted to extend the attack to writers hated by the Communist Party. But he was not as bloodthirsty against his right-wing colleagues as has often been made out. He stood up for Drieu la Rochelle and for his former publisher, Robert Denoël.
    The trials of journalists and writers continued in December and into January 1945. This rapid rhythm was explained by Pierre-Henri Teitgen, who became de Gaulle’s next Minister of Justice: ‘these “intellectuals” had provided the prosecution case for their own trial during the Occupation. It was only necessary to reread their articles and other published work to establish, without any argument, the indictment they deserved before sending them in front of the court.’ The result was that writers were tried while the