Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

actually met Heidegger. Young Communist students, swollen with the importance of their historical mission, were far from impressed. In the eyes of the party, Heidegger was a Nazi and existentialism was decadent.
    Lycées as well as university faculties in Paris were very politicized, a situation which had grown far worse during the Occupation, when right-wing students had been recruited by the Milice to spy on their classmates. Now the Communists attempted to exert a political and intellectual hegemony. Their first target was Catholic students, but by manipulating issues anyone even on the left who did not demonstrate a strong commitment to
progressisme
as defined by the Communist Partywas ‘objectively’ a fascist. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie made an appalling gaffe when he confessed in front of a Communist that he had been impressed by Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West
. Every area of art came in for a relentless Marxist-Leninist critique. To admit that you enjoyed Alain-Fournier’s
Le Grand Meaulnes
demonstrated a pathetic and
dépassé
sentimentality as well as reactionary tendencies.
    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had written of 1940 in
Pilote de guerre,
‘
La défaite divise
.’ The Liberation managed at first to unite the majority of the country under the banner of
progressisme,
as the opinion polls demonstrated in the massive support for the nationalization of banks and heavy industry. Simone de Beauvoir wrote of ‘Paris in the year zero’. And indeed for Communists and their fellow-travellers there was a sense of marching with history. Another sign of the times, as Galtier-Boissière pointed out, was
Vogue
– of all magazines – publishing a poem by Éluard and a portrait of Marcel Cachin, the veteran Communist.
    The death of the great poet Paul Valéry at the age of seventy-four seemed to underline the end of an era. Valéry, who had delivered the address of welcome to Pétain when he was elected to the Académie Française, died on 20 July 1945 – three days before the Marshal’s trial. He was given a state funeral: the coffin was carried through the streets of Paris, accompanied by a detachment of the Garde Républicaine marching to muffled drums. The coffin was placed just below the Trocadéro on a golden catafalque, lit by torches. Duff Cooper, who thoroughly approved of the French Republic’s respect for men of letters, reflected ruefully on the difference in his own country. ‘We have only to imagine how would be greeted the suggestion that the Brigade of Guards should march past the coffin of T. S. Eliot.’
    The reappearance of the satirical paper
Le Canard enchaîné
brought some much needed humour to the French press. It had been absent since 11 June 1940. After Vichy the appetite for irreverence was huge, and the
Canard
had no scruples about bad taste. Its cartoon on the announcement of Hitler’s death was to show the Führer in heaven pinning a Star of David on God. On the other hand, the publication had its own code of values. It refused to attack collaborators during the frenzy of the
épuration
. De Gaulle could not have been more wrongwhen he listed it as one of the magazines taken over by the Communists at the Liberation.
    Those on the right, who saw existentialismas another form of Marxism, were also mistaken. The Kremlin defined existentialism as a ‘reactionary bourgeois philosophy’. This was because existentialism was fundamentally anti-collectivist, declaring that man as an individual – not society or history – was responsible for defining his own life.
    Sartre cannot be accused of following fashions. Having remained wary of Stalinismafter the Liberation, when praise of the Soviet Union was obligatory in progressive circles, he began to support it in the early 1950s, when French writers outside the Communist Party had started to see it for what it was. His
Being and Nothingness
was first published by Gallimard in 1943. A. J. Ayer, a sceptic, thought that, apart from a few good psychological insights, the book was ‘a pretentious metaphysical thesis’. He concluded: ‘Existentialism, on this evidence, was principally an exercise in misusing the verb “to be”.’
    If Sartre had been just a philosopher, then few people outside a small intellectual circle would have heard of him. But by dramatizing his ideas and themes through novels and plays, and above all by his creation of doomed anti-heroes – Antoine Roquentin in
Nausea
and Matthieu in
The Roads to