Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [169]
Bernard Lucas of the Bar Vert persuaded the owners of the Tabou to lease him their cellar. It was a tunnel of a room, some fifteen metres by eight, with bare brick walls curving into a low vaulted ceiling. Lucas installed a bar, an ill-tuned piano, a gramophone and a few tables and chairs. The cellar was named Le Tabou, like the café above; and the work of making it popular and minding the bar was given to Gréco, Cazalis and Marc Doelnitz, a restless, red-haired young actor and insatiable party-goer, whose well-connected family enabled him to be equally at home on the right bank of the Seine as on the left.
Lucas had chosen well: within every group of people there is always a small nucleus of members who somehow embody its spirit. Doelnitz, Gréco and Cazalis were at the centre of Saint-Germain life, and they knew it. The Tabou opened on 17 April 1947. Within a few nights it was generating tremendous excitement, with spontaneous jam sessions and wild dancing. Boris Vian sometimes played the trumpet. By now people knew that he was the author of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, which gave the Tabou an even more subversive cachet. Filled with sweaty, exhilarated couples and thick with smoke, the Tabou was soon the only place to be after midnight in Saint-Germain. ‘To be part of the very fabric of Germano-pratin life gave one a very satisfying sense of superiority,’ wrote Doelnitz.
Barely a month after its opening, an article appeared, instigated by Cazalis, which brought the Tabou and its habitués to the shocked attention of the whole of Paris. This illustrated feature appeared on 3 May 1947 in Samedi-Soir, with the headline: ‘THIS IS HOW THE TROGLODYTES OF SAINT-GERMAIN LIVE’. The main photograph showed a tousled young man (Roger Vadim) holding a lighted candle and a young woman in trousers whose dark hair was full of cobwebs (Juliette Gréco). They were described as ‘two poor existentialists’. These young ‘existentialists’, wrote the journalist Robert Jacques, live in cellars by night and cheat their landladies by day: ‘They are drinking, dancing and loving their lives away in cellars until the atom bomb – which they all perversely long for – drops on Paris.’
Without actually saying so, Samedi-Soir had no difficulty in implying that, along with their energetic dancing, black clothes and indigent lifestyle, the existentialists were indulging in unbridled sex. Yet the life of most young Germano-pratins was surprisingly chaste. An incorrigible womanizer like Sartre certainly seemed to think so. He described jitterbugging as ‘a violent form of exercise, both light-hearted and healthy, which does themthe greatest physical good and leaves themfar too tired for lascivious thoughts’. Yet perhaps Sartre was trying to play down the whole Saint-Germain phenomenon, for which the press seemed to hold him responsible. He was blamed for contributing to juvenile crime and encouraging suicides. Attacks on Sartre became so vitriolic that Combat ran an article with the ironic headline: ‘Should Sartre be burned at the stake?’
What Sartre and his circle did object to was the article’s use of the word ‘existentialist’. From having represented a body of philosophical ideas, the term‘existentialist’ suddenly became a generic for jazz-soaked beboppers. This was partly due to Sartre’s young friends, who, when asked to describe themselves by Samedi-Soir, replied that they were ‘existentialist’.
The immediate effect of the article in Samedi-Soir was to turn the Tabou and its exotic denizens into a tourist attraction. The Tabou became even more frenetic, the gramophone was replaced by a band, and the curious and the fashionable squeezed down the narrow stairs to see the ‘existentialists’. The tourists went home deliciously shocked after one particular evening when girls in bikinis competed for the title of ‘Miss Tabou’.
The French Communist Party saw the effect of existentialismas the greatest threat to its own influence on the youth