Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Freedom
– Sartre touched a deep, pessimistic chord in youth to a degree unimagined since Goethe’s
Werther
led to a rush of suicides among the poetic souls of Europe. Albert Camus’s renown also stemmed largely from his anti-hero Mersault in
The Outsider,
and existentialism is now remembered more as a literary movement than as a lasting body of philosophy.
    This group, which dominated the artistic life of Paris after the war, had begun to assemble in the winter before the Liberation. Sartre first met Albert Camus in 1943, when Camus dropped in on a rehearsal of Sartre’s play
The Flies
. Simone de Beauvoir then met him with Sartre at the Café de Flore and found that he had ‘a charm based on a happy mixture of nonchalance and ardour’.
    This gradually expanding group of friends lived around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, moving from one cheap hotel to another. They congregated, more by chance than by arrangement, in their habitual cafés, usually the Flore, where Sartre and Beauvoir wrote for six hours a day, but occasionally the Deux Magots. The Brasserie Lipp oppositewas out of favour for a time, its Alsatian specialities having attracted too many German officers. Sometimes they joined Picasso and Dora Maar at Le Catalan in the rue des Grands Augustins, which was almost an extension of Picasso’s studio.
    Those who gathered around Sartre became loosely known as
la famille Sartre,
in the same way that young writers and actors who gathered round Jacques Prévert were known as
la bande Prévert
. Prévert was famous as a scriptwriter; between 1936 and 1946, he worked on a series of scripts for the film-maker Marcel Carné – among which were
Les Visiteurs du soir
and
Les Enfants du Paradis
. But he never had much success with his poetry until 1945, when Gallimard published
Paroles
. Prévert’s limpid, irreverent, light-hearted verses hit post-war Paris like a breath of fresh air. They were set to music and sung in the street, and within a few years Gallimard had sold over 100,000 copies. Paul Boubal, the
patron
of the Flore, felt that Prévert and his friends had sown the seeds of the Saint-Germain phenomenon (at least in his own café); but Simone de Beauvoir rather disapproved of
la bande Prévert,
because they were politically uncommitted.
    While waiting for the Liberation, Simone de Beauvoir gave badly cooked little dinners in her ‘toothpaste-pink’ hotel room, with at least half the guests sitting on the edge of the bed. Sartre talked of founding a magazine with Beauvoir, Camus and Merleau-Ponty, and this took shape in the autumn of 1945 when the first issue of
Les Temps modernes
was published.
    Despite the bleakness of his philosophy, Sartre could be very engaging. One who knew himwell at that time described him as ‘overflowing with charm, I have seldom known anyone as amusing, as sympathetic and as generous’. He was always the first to support a good cause and help struggling artists. He organized a benefit evening for the artist Antonin Artaud, as well as giving himmoney. Very often, not wanting to hurt the pride of those he helped, he arranged for funds to be given in a roundabout way: financial help for the novelist Violette Leduc was always channelled through Gallimard, and paid as ‘royalties’ on her own work.
    Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre was far more emotionally taxing than she ever dared admit. Sartre had nicknamed her ‘Castor’,the French for beaver. (Others referred to her as Notre Dame de Sartre, or La Grande Sartreuse.) At moments she could still look beautiful, but her seriousness and suppressed anxiety about Sartre had started to mould her face into that of an old maid. He had always dominated her, making her put up with his compulsive philandering – what she termed ‘
désordres amoureux
’. She remarked to a friend that ‘Sartre had a rather diabolical side to him: he conquered young girls by explaining their souls to them.’
    In spite of the parties and the drinking, most members of
la famille Sartre
seemed to be finishing books to be published after the Liberation. The upstairs room of the Café de Flore often looked like a classroom, particularly in the winter of 1943–4: at one table, Sartre was at work on
Roads to Freedom,
Beauvoir was writing
All Men are Mortal,
Mouloudji was writing
Enrico,
and Jacques-Laurent Bost
Le Dernier des métiers
. They read each other’s manuscripts, and usually gave them the attention that work from a friend