Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

protests in his favour.
    Brasillach’s mother, whose husband had been killed in the First World War, begged Mauriac to save her son’s life. Mauriac threw himself into the task. He redoubled his arguments for clemency in the
Le Figaro
and organized a petition asking de Gaulle to reprieve Brasillach. Among the fifty-nine signatories were a few genuine resistants, many neutrals, and a number of writers and artists who were already under a cloud.
    Those who signed included Jean Anouilh, Claudel, Valéry, Colette, Cocteau and, most surprisingly, Albert Camus. Camus had spent a sleepless night debating whether or not to sign. He abhorred everything Brasillach stood for yet signed as a moral stand against the death penalty. Jean Cocteau signed because he felt that writers were being made the scapegoats for other leading collaborationists, especially industrialists, who, it could be argued, had killed many more people byhelping the German war machine. (Among those who refused to sign were Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who believed in authorial responsibility, and Picasso, who said he was following the will of the Communist Party.)
    On 3 February 1945 at midday François Mauriac was received by de Gaulle at the rue Saint-Dominique with great courtesy; but that, as he realized, was not a reliable indication of the General’s thinking. Isorni received a much clearer idea that night at de Gaulle’s private residence in the Bois de Boulogne, where he was taken in an official car, through heavily guarded barriers. De Gaulle, despite all Isorni’s arguments, decided to reject the appeal.
    Isorni believed that de Gaulle did not want to be attacked by the Communists for softness. There is also a phrase in Gaston Palewski’s memoirs which revealed his influence: ‘Personally, I regret that I did not insist on a reprieve for Robert Brasillach.’
    Brasillach was executed on 6 February. It was the eleventh anniversary of the right-wing riot and the attempt to storm the National Assembly across the Pont de la Concorde, an event which led, two years later, to the Popular Front government. On 20 April 1945, as the Red Army fought towards the centre of Berlin, Brasillach’s coffin was moved to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise.
    His friend Jacques Benoist-Méchin did not face trial for over two and a half years. The delay undoubtedly saved him. He was condemned to death on 6 June 1947, but his sentence was quickly commuted to forced labour for life. He was freed in 1954, having acquired a fascination with the world of Islam through prison reading. This extraordinary man amassed such a knowledge of his subject that de Gaulle, after he became President in 1958, used him discreetly as a special adviser on Arab matters.
    Céline, finally tried
in absentia
in 1950, received a sentence that would have been unimaginably light five years before – a year in prison and a heavy fine.
    The
épuration
only increased political tensions in the world of letters and the arts. According to that redoubtable chaplain of the FFI, Father Bruckberger, he and Camus resigned from the National Committee of Writers because of the increasing Communist grip exerted by Aragonand Elsa Triolet. Mauriac, who did not resign, later buttonholed Camus in an attempt to persuade him to return.
    ‘Why did you resign?’ he asked.
    ‘It’s for me to ask you why you didn’t resign,’ Camus replied. ‘And I’ll tell you why you didn’t: because you were afraid.’
    ‘You’re quite right,’ Mauriac admitted.
    Mauriac was too honest to have any illusions. At a dinner with Pastor Boegner, he described the National Front – a Communist-dominated organization of which he was a member – as ‘the screen behind which Communism carries out its business. I know because I’m part of it.’
    Jean Paulhan raged the most against the takeover of
Les Lettres françaises
. He openly scorned the more-resistant-than-thou fellow-travellers and the National Committee of Writers, which Aragon and Triolet wanted to turn into a writers’ union closely allied to the Communist Party.
    Aragon’s plan, no doubt elaborated at party headquarters, was the classic Stalinist tactic of extending the purge to include critics of the Communist Party. On 25 November, in
Les Lettres françaises,
he launched an attack on André Gide, comparing him to Hérold-Paquis, the fascist propagandist from Radio-Paris. His real target was not the Gide who had, for a short period, written for