Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [177]
Thorez’s remarks after the Prague coup, tantamount to an admission that Communists would support the Red Army in the event of war, put them back into an ideological ghetto comparable to their position in 1939 after the Nazi–Soviet pact. Most of the admiration for the Soviet Union which had existed in France in 1944 and 1945 had turned into distrust, even fear, by the end of the decade. The group in French society which most conspicuously failed to follow this change was the progressiste intelligentsia, their resolve strengthened by anti-American rhetoric. If the Communist Party could no longer present itself as the standard-bearer of French patriotism, it could still portray itself as the defender of French culture against a transatlantic invasion.
Shortly after Communist ministers had left government, Thorez called for the establishment of a Front littéraire. The party, with political power slipping from its grasp, wanted to secure the commanding heights of art and thought. This determination redoubled after it lost so many working-class members as a result of the disastrous strikes in 1947 and 1948. Laurent Casanova, the cultural commissar, called on writers to formulate new values. A commission of intellectuals met weekly under his direction. They included Annie Besse (later the historian Annie Kriegel) and Victor Leduc, the son of a Russian revolutionary. Leduc, an academic and a fanatic, became a member of the section idéologique – the Communist Party’s equivalent of the Holy Office.
Intellectuals were managed through an appeal to idealism and moral blackmail. To let the party down in the slightest way was portrayed as a betrayal of the hopes of ‘all progressive mankind’. Often little pressure was needed, because most Communist intellectuals longed to be accepted by the working class, and only engagement in its international movement could absolve themof bourgeois guilt.
After his return from the United States, André Breton observed that: ‘The ignoble word of “engagement”, which has become current since the war, exudes a servility horrifying for poetry and art.’ Engagement meant eradicating the truth at the whim of the party. Paul Éluard confessed to suppressing a poem he had written about the bombing of Hiroshima after Aragon told him that it did not follow the party line.
The party policy of mingling intellectuals and workers was more symbolic than real. Annie Besse, who was in charge of the Quartier Latin – an area where intellectual and working-class life overlapped round the Place de la Contrescarpe and the rue Mouffetard – managed to achieve a mixture in the cells. They may have sold L’Humanité alongside each other in the Sunday morning market of La Mouffe, but the result was bound to remain contrived.
Cell meetings took place for Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie every week or fortnight in a bistro or café on the rue Gay-Lussac. Over glasses of cheap beer, they would ‘talk for hours at a stretch about party dialectics’. In the Latin Quarter, the Communist Party could tolerate the odd eccentric, even Michel Foucault, the most unpredictable of members, who was ‘already absorbed in his research into madness’.
Paul Éluard, who had a real sympathy for the working-class people around him in the 18th arrondissement, had few illusions about the possibility of intelligentsia and proletariat mingling unselfconsciously. In 1945 Éluard had returned to live on the rue Marx Dormoy, close to his old haunts. His interest in the political life of the quartier was genuine. He encouraged the sons of party workers to follow further education and even wrote marching songs for the local Communist youth. Éluard, unlike some party stars, was naturally modest. Jean Gager, who accompanied him to a meeting of railway workers, remembered that he never said a word throughout the proceedings, because he felt that he had nothing useful to contribute. But as they left, Éluard had turned to him: ‘Are you sure that they did not change their vocabulary in my presence?’
‘Yes, it’s true,