Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

opened up. Journalists, writers, budding film-makers discussed, planned, made decisions with passion, as if their future depended only on themselves… I was old. I was thirty-six.’
    ‘Oh wonders!’ wrote Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, of his first sight of the Boulevard Saint-Michel after the war. ‘I was struck by theextraordinary concentration of young people, the highest in France to the square kilometre, in a nation which appeared to be a country of old people.’
    Parisian youth had not been docile during the Occupation. Their response to the Pétainist slogan of ‘Work, Nation, Family’ had taken the form of ‘resistance, black market, surprise-party’. Many had acted as messengers or deliverers of tracts and underground newspapers; others dealt on the edges of the black market. Being forbidden, such activities acquired their own mystique of revolt. And ‘surprise-parties’ represented their revolt against a regime which they saw as boy-scouting in jackboots.
    Some of them were
zazous
– a shamelessly unheroic and anarchic movement of disdain for Vichy, the Germans and all military values everywhere.
Zazous,
with their long greasy hair, have sometimes been described as the first beatniks, but the boys’ fashion for long jackets with high collars and the girls’ for very short skirts made them look more like teddy boys in the 1950s; while the anti-virile ethos of the boys had more in common with the hippies of the 1960s. To avoid military service,
zazous
used to crush three aspirins into a cigarette which they smoked an hour before their army medical examination. But
zazous
also ran a risk every time they appeared in public. If a gang of fascist youths from the Parti Populaire Français spotted a
zazou,
they would beat him up or, if a girl, torment her mercilessly.
    Most
zazous
were children of the wealthy middle class. They organized their ‘surprise-parties’ – also known as ‘pot-lucks’, since American terms were all the rage – in the apartments of parents temporarily absent, with friends and gatecrashers bringing food and drink. These parties were essentially a response to Vichy’s ban on jazz and dancing, so if you owned some Duke Ellington or Glenn Miller records the word spread. Because of the curfew, the parties often went on all night. After the Liberation, the real
zazou
fashion died out, but the word remained a termof abuse, employed by the puritan left and right.
    The Liberation changed everything for the young, or the ‘J3 s’ as they were often called, after the name of the ration category for fifteen- to twenty-one-year-olds. There was no more curfew, so they savoured the freedom of the streets at night, even if that meant freezing on street corners outside jazz clubs in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Staying up allnight retained the thrill of the illicit. A lack of food produced a continual light-headed, sometimes vertiginous sensation. They ignored the last métro at eleven – many did not even have the fare – so they slept in doorways and walked home at dawn. The luckiest had roller-skates, on which they crossed half of Paris.
    Clothes – best of all genuine American clothes – could be bought for almost nothing in the flea-market of Saint-Ouen, where clothes sent by the Jewish community in New York to help fellow Jews were on sale. So by giving each other crew-cuts imitated from the GIs, and dressing themselves up in second-hand check shirts with trousers cut so short they came halfway down the shin, with vilely striped socks and tennis shoes, the ex-
zazous
created a new style.
    Students seemed to live off nervous energy and ideas. The greatest hunger was for reading material, yet there was so little time and so much to read – Aragon, Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir, as well as Apollinaire, Lautréamont, Gide, and now all the American novels which proliferated in translation, such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Damon Runyan, Thornton Wilder and Thomas Wolfe. Everything formerly banned must be seen – whether the plays of García Lorca or the films of Bunñuel. Philosophy student or not, you needed to be able to discuss Hegel’s master–slave paradigm, the collected works of Karl Marx, and existentialism’s less than apostolic succession from Søren Kierkegaard and the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, via Martin Heidegger, then Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
    Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s professor of philosophy, Beaufret, had an immense prestige among students: he had