Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Drieu’s
Nouvelle Revue française,
but the unrepentant author of
Retour de l’URSS,
the book most reviled by Stalinists at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Gide’s friend Roger Martin du Gard was disgusted with ‘the bad faith and the dishonest motives of Aragon’, and he warned Gide in Algiers to take care on his return to France. ‘Think carefully about reaching Paris: the ground is mined!’
    The party also sought to destroy the reputation of Paul Nizan, a novelist and Sartre’s oldest friend, who had been killed on the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940. Nizan had been a loyal Communist until the Nazi– Soviet pact in August 1939. When his very short and simple letter of resignation was published, the enraged party circulated malicious allegations and Maurice Thorez described him as a ‘police spy’.
    After the war Louis Aragon, as part of a renewed whispering campaign against Nizan, repeated the allegation to Sartre, a fellow member of the National Committee of Writers. Sartre prepared a statement of protest against the vilification and persuaded André Breton, Albert Camus, JeanPaulhan, Julien Benda and François Mauriac to sign as well. Sartre was powerful enough to stand up to the Communist anger directed against him, but the lies lingered on for years.
    Politics were also complicated for those in the literary establishment who had something to hide. The veteran Catholic poet Paul Claudel presented a poemto the glory of General de Gaulle, which was read at a gala for the Resistance at the Comédie-Française some ten weeks after the Liberation. But the following morning, unkind tongues reminded people that Claudel had written a strikingly similar work in 1942, dedicated to the glory of Marshal Pétain.
    Several publishers faced even more delicate problems. A week after the Liberation, the Resistance press demanded the blacklisting of publishers accused of collaboration, among them Gaston Gallimard, Bernard Grasset and Robert Denoël. Grasset was arrested and taken off to Fresnes prison, but Gallimard was left untouched. Gallimard had allowed Drieu la Rochelle to take over the
Nouvelle Revue française,
but since he had also helped Jean Paulhan launch its Resistance counterpart,
Les Lettres françaises,
he had covered himself brilliantly. ‘Not stupid, the old man!’ commented Galtier-Boissière in cynical admiration.
    Gallimard had another strong suit. His publishing house, which dominated French literature, boasted many members of the National Committee of Writers. He had been scrupulous, even generous, in the dispatch of royalty cheques during the lean Occupation years, so it would have been a very churlish writer who was not grateful. Even Aragon was about to have his next novel,
Aurélien,
published by Gallimard, having forsaken Denoël.
    It was no secret that Gaston Gallimard had cooperated with the Germans. He had respected the ‘Otto List’ (named after Otto Abetz) of works proscribed by the Germans; he had exercised self-censorship in the books he published during the Occupation; and he had attended receptions at the Deutsche Institut. Nevertheless, he found strong supporters prepared to speak up for him – among them Sartre, Camus and Malraux.
    André Malraux, author of
La Condition humaine
and
L’Espoir,
was as gifted a mythomaniac as he was a novelist. He pretended a deep knowledge of the cultures and languages of the Far East, whereas in fact hewas more interested in the trafficking of Oriental antiquities. He made hugely inflated claims for his participation in both the Spanish Civil War and the Resistance, and it is astonishing that so few people challenged them: he was awarded all the most distinguished decorations for service in the Resistance, and the British gave him the DSO, the second-highest award after the Victoria Cross. This compelling, mercurial man had been a Communist sympathizer in his youth; but from the mid-1940s, he became a committed Gaullist and formed part of the General’s closest circle.
    Malraux’s establishment in the Gaullist camp naturally put him out of sympathy with those, like Sartre, who were moving ever more aggressively to the left. Four years later, the differences between the two writers would erupt. Malraux, to obtain revenge on Sartre, was to blackmail Gaston Gallimard by threatening to expose his wartime record. Yet when questions were raised about Malraux’s exaggerated exploits, he threatened to send back all his Resistance medals – a